Shep Messing and the 1972 Olympic soccer adventure that turned into tragedy (Michael Lewis, 6 Oct 2015, The Guardian)
A non-conformist who spoke his mind, Messing walked to the beat of his own drum, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.
“I had no money, so I hitch-hiked from New York to St Louis,” he said. “I was not told anything by the coaches. I had scrounged up the money for a flight to get back, but I had not money for a hotel room. I was literally sleeping at the airport at the gate. I woke up and picked up a Sunday newspaper and saw that I had made the team.
“From zero to a hundred and then it’s off to qualifying. Concacaf was not really not that much different then, in terms of how difficult it is to play in Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador. Those way games were probably just as difficult as they are today. That qualifying process was long and tough. We had no expectations.”
There was no grand master plan in US soccer back then.
“It is so hard to compare eras and generations for US soccer,” Messing said. “You’re not talking about guys who were playing in a stable, professional league. This was really amateurs. So to go to play at Azteca against Mexico and to Jamaica and Trinidad and the Central American countries, we did not have that body of experience. Our experience was, in my case, Harvard-Yale or Harvard against Columbia. We had no preparation, nothing to prepare. It was brutal. But we didn’t have any pressure. We were a bunch of college bandits.”