Please Rowdies, kick someone in the grass again

Posted Jun 20, 2010 by The Tampa Tribune

Updated Jun 20, 2010 at 06:36 PM

Years ago, when I was sports editor of The Tampa Tribune, attorney and progressive Tampa resident Jimmy Kynes telephoned me for lunch at the old Commerce Club in the Exchange Bank Building and said I needed to meet a friend of his who had come to town from Jacksonville.

I did, and Kynes’ guest told me he wanted to bring an exhibition soccer game to Tampa Stadium. At the time, I was in the business of investigating any possible new sports activity for Tampa, not then the vibrant, ambitious city it would become, and I said, fine, we will do anything we could to make it go.

I believe I told him my only previous soccer experience was as a filler player on the ATO intramural team at the University of Florida, where we had won the intramural championship by defeating Delta Tau Delta, led then by a wiry player named John Germany, who became an influential Tampa citizen for whom our library is named. The late judge, Buddy Phillips of Clearwater, was our star player.

We won and I believe that was the first bite of that sport that got my attention, and I liked it when Kynes said he was going to bring someone with him to meet me about bringing soccer to our town.

It came off and a surprising 5,000 people paid to see the exhibition. That was the start of a wonderful marriage between the Tampa area and soccer, although we never called it football as most of the world now does. The World Cup now being played in South Africa appears to have taken hold, has recaptured the world’s attention, despite the annoyance — but who cares? The vuvuzelas have become a trademark of this Cup.

Soccer in Tampa came and went but came again solidly when George Strawbridge and Beau Rogers brought the team to Tampa along with the team’s Rowdies nickname and catchy music, rising to a crescendo with a World Cup being brought to the United States in 1994. I know because in 1990 I went with Florida secretary of state Jim Smith, Rick Nafe of Tampa Stadium, Cecil Edge of Tampa Toyota, and Coach Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys (among others) to the World Cup in Italy, then to the FIFA headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland. We were there to pitch Florida as one of the venues for that marvelous event, which had been awarded to the U.S. by FIFA in 1988.

I know I personally, with those key individuals, pitched FIFA president Sepp Blatter, and all others assembled there on Florida’s behalf, with Shannon Edge and the late Joe Robbie of the Miami Dolphins as our point persons. And it worked, games were awarded to Florida, and at the time I thought with Tampa foremost to host the games. We all remember how the FIFA crowd awarded the games to Florida but made Orlando , because of Disney World, the main home base, a slight that truly hurt our committee, including a leader then, Cornelia Corbett, but we kept our full support behind the games and they were successful.

Soccer slipped in time, left again but now has returned with the new Rowdies. Steinbrenner Field has been redesigned for soccer in that baseball-oriented facility. It is not perfect, but these Rowdies of today under Perry Van Der Beck apparently are here to stay again.

They surely need all the support they can muster. Soccer is still not American football in popularity but with the youthful interest in it, soccer may make it again. All of us interested in soccer and of this great place in which we live certainly want that to happen.

This ongoing World Cup can help generate the marginal extra support sports need to make it in any place. But again, the Rowdies simply must kick somebody in the grass, like they used to do.