Jackie Fuhrmann with Victor Nogueira, the goalkeeper for the Chicago Sting. He is from Mozambique. I think he was Jackie’s favorite player. He was a good-looking man. He is also in the Indoor Soccer Hall of Fame which seems to only exist on the internet.
https://www.indoorsoccerhall.com/home
On March 11, 1984, while I was in Tampa, Florida for spring break, I wrote in my diary that a certain soccer team was in town yesterday and Mr. X didn’t even try to pick me up! “I guess he knows better at this point, so he doesn’t bother. At least I didn’t have to pay for the game.” Mr. X was a married soccer player from a foreign country who was 13 years older than me.
We went to an indoor soccer game after some player that we knew gave us the tickets. The visiting team won the game. After the game we went to a bar called Whiskey Joes. My diary says that I didn’t talk to any of the players.
It was towards the end of my time as someone who went to soccer games as both the New York Arrows of the MISL (Major Indoor Soccer League) and the entire NASL (North American Soccer League), which played soccer outdoors during the summer, folded after the 1984 season.
Cosmos History
Giants stadium, in the Meadowlands, opened for business in 1976 when the New York Giants football team played its first season there. The stadium was in East Rutherford, in the southern part of Bergen County, the county in New Jersey where I grew up. The New York Cosmos professional soccer team started playing there in the summer of 1977.
The Cosmos team was started by the Ertegun brothers of Atlantic Records fame along with several other executives from Warner Communications, which owned many entertainment companies and later merged with Time, Inc. to become Time Warner. The team debuted in the NASL in 1971. They were losing a lot of money from the beginning, so it wasn’t long before the founders basically signed their stakes over to Warner Communications.
A history of the Cosmos can be found on Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Cosmos_(1971–1985)
Franz Beckenbauer Farewell Game
Video of Franz Beckenbauer farewell game highlights with some weird narration.
Keeping a diary wasn’t something I did until I was a junior in high school and that was only because my English teacher had us write during class every Wednesday. So, I don’t know for sure if I went to soccer games during the summer of 1980 or not. The players I met at were all on the Cosmos roster in 1980 and 1981. My diary contains a couple of hints that perhaps I did go to at least one game before the Franz Beckenbauer Farewell Game on September 24, 1980. If not, then I went to at least one of the Cosmos fan club meetings with Terri.
Franz Beckenbauer was a very successful and famous German soccer player. The New York Cosmos lured many players from other countries to play for them, such as Pele, usually towards the end of their careers.
Video tribute to Franz Beckenbauer when he died January 7, 2024.
Meeting some soccer players
After my junior year in high school, I stopped writing any kind of diary. I didn’t start again until 1984 so I only have my old memories to go on now. I think it wasn’t until after junior year of high school that I went to more games and met some of the soccer players. Terri and I were in the same grade in school, but she was many months older than me. She was able to drive before I was.
Our high school (Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale, NJ) started a girls’ soccer team in the fall of 1980. My diary says that I considered trying out for the soccer team, but I joined the cross-country track team instead. I was already active in indoor track and spring track but that is the subject for another post.
That fall, Terri and I went trick-or-treating at Andranik Eskandarian’s house on Halloween. He was a defender for the Cosmos who came from Iran, and he lived nearby. I dressed as a runner for my costume. His wife was home, but he was in Europe because the Cosmos went on a tour where they played twelve games against teams in Europe and North Africa.
Here is link to a story about Eskandarian’s soccer store in Hackensack, New Jersey.
There were a couple of Cosmos players from Paraguay who were only two or three years older than us. Julio Cesar Romero and Roberto Cabanas. Roberto Cabanas was like the Jon Farriss (drummer for the Australian rock band INXS) of the Cosmos-the one I thought was the best-looking and the one closest to my age. Neither of the guys from Paraguay spoke much English and Terri and I had chosen to study French in high school so spending time with them was a bit awkward. We did try though. I vaguely remember going with Terri to Guttenberg, NJ where Romero lived, and we had lunch with him.
In the front row of this photo are Seninho(11), Johan Neeskens(13), Julio Cesar Romero(7), Giorgio Chinaglia(9), Ricky Davis(17), Bogie(8). In the middle row are David Brcic(21) and Hubert Birkenmeier(1). In the back row are Roberto Cabanas(19) and Eskandarian(2). Those are the players I remember meeting or who are mentioned in this post.
The Front Row bar at the Meadowlands
There was a bar on Paterson Plank Road, near Giants Stadium, that was owned by two football players who played for the Giants- Brad Van Pelt and Doug Van Horn. It was called The Front Row, and it was a place where soccer players would hang out after the games. I remember spending time there with Terri and her mother, who used to drive us places, and some other fans after games. I thought it was funny because we were still in high school. We didn’t drink though.
It was a good place to observe behavior. Most of the soccer players were attractive-in their 20s or 30s, athletic, fit, some tall, some handsome. Not all of them were single. I saw how the women who were there to pick up one of these men were dressed. One woman wore a shirt that had a see-through plastic window in front. That was most memorable. I don’t know if that always worked to get the attention of men in the bar, but I knew that dressing like that was meant to get a sexual sort of attention. I never dressed that way, ever.
This is me in high school after a New York Arrows indoor soccer game. I’m on the far left. The man is George Katakilidis, one of the players. The other girls are Rena, and Linda, I think. My diary mentions them, but I don’t remember them. They didn’t live in our town. The Arrows played in Nassau Coliseum out on Long Island but my diary mentions a game in Madison Square Garden so I don’t know where this was taken. I’m wearing what I typically wore in high school when I only owned two pairs of jeans and they were identical. They were cast-offs as were most of my clothes back then. I didn’t get contact lenses until I went to college so I always wore those eyeglasses except when I was running.
Married man leaves bad impression
My first encounter with Mr. X happened at the Front Row bar when I was a senior in high school. I think I was standing on the dance floor when I talked to him, but I don’t remember why I was talking to him or what about. The only part I remember was when he asked me how old I was. I told him I was seventeen. He said, “Seventeen? What a beautiful age.” Just imagine it sounding icky because it came across as gross and inappropriate. I don’t think he specifically mentioned sex at all, but it was meant as a sexual comment.
Perhaps things got a little more serious the next time because he figured I was over eighteen by then? Who knows? Some men will target the younger girls while others are more cautious and only prey on the ones over 18. When we went to see Mr. X’s team sometime after I graduated from high school, we were in a hotel bar with some of the players. Mr. X was there, and I did look at him because he was good-looking but I was not flirting. So, it was a shock when a bit later, one of the other players came up to me and told me that Mr. X was waiting for me in his room. That was crazy to me, and I was embarrassed. I didn’t go. Later, Mr. X came back down and lured one of my friends by promising to give her a jersey or something. So, she left with him to get it, and he tried to kiss her.
None of that kept us away. We still wanted to support the teams and be friendly with the players because we could get free tickets and afford to go to more games that way. Plus, most of them were okay to be around and we would have fun. If we took precautions and avoided certain situations with certain players, then the assaults were kept to a minimum. This kind of behavior from men was so common and so normalized that we just put up with it and excused it if they were drinking alcohol. When I was 18 some 32-year-old soccer player put his hand over my mouth and then kissed the back of his hand. Stuff like that just got laughed off.
This is a photo of me, Dee, Frankie, Jess, and Frankie’s mother Fran. Taken on some road trip to go to an indoor soccer game when I was a freshman in college. I wore contact lenses.
Visiting Tampa, Florida
Before I went back for the spring semester of my sophomore year of college, in December of 1983, I took a trip to Florida where Terri was going to college. Jackie was also visiting. We stayed at Jen’s house. Jen babysat for one of the soccer players on the team in Tampa, so we hung out with her at his house. She knew all the players and we saw several of them during our time there. There isn’t anything in my diary about any of them bothering me which was not always the case. I think this photo of Jackie and Tatu of the Tampa Bay Rowdies might be from this time. Tatu is from Brazil and he too is in the Indoor Soccer Hall of Fame.
You can read more about Tatu on his Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatu_(footballer)
A bit of harrassment
On August 15, 1984, I wrote in my diary that I went to a soccer game because I was bored and that it was a big mistake. This was just a few days after we were finished going to INXS concerts for the summer. Terri was friends with a player on the opposing team, but she told me that she wasn’t going to go out of her way for him. He ended up keeping us out until 6am and I wrote that I almost died when I was at work four hours later.
We went to the Front Row bar after the game and Terri spoke to this guy while we were there. Then he, his teammate, Terri, Jess, and I all went to a restaurant in Clifton, NJ called Bogie 8. It had been recently opened by one of the captains of the New York Cosmos, Vladimir Bogicevic. His nickname was Bogie and the number on his jersey was 8 and hence the name. I didn’t enjoy it.
After leaving the restaurant, we went back to the hotel where the players were staying. We took two more players besides the two we were with back to the hotel with us. Those two players were in the backseat of the car with me. One of them attacked me. He started kissing my shoulder and asking me for a kiss. I didn’t kiss the guy. The two of them said I looked like Julianne McNamara.
Julianne McNamara was a famous American gymnast at that time. She was on the US Olympic gymnastics team.
We got rid of those two players once we reached the hotel. According to my diary, “I made it there relatively unscathed.” Jess went home from there. I had come with Terri so I couldn’t go home if I wanted to. The four of us went out to a diner.
New Jersey is well-known for its diners. There were loads of diners in New Jersey in the 1980s. Many were open 24 hours a day. Most served breakfast at all times of the day.
I thought it was funny that Terri kept talking about Timmy Farriss of INXS in front of her friend. Timmy was Terri’s favorite member of the band and we had just spent a lot of time with them.
The four of us went out to the parking lot and played some soccer. There must have been a soccer ball in the car. I walked away with the guy who was from Brazil so Terri and her friend could be alone for a few minutes. We sat down in the parking lot in the middle of the night and waited. It was kind of awkward. We did our best to have a conversation. It was one of those times when I wished I had stayed at home in the end or that I had my own car so I could leave.