WASHINGTON — Belief is such a powerful thing, Mike Eruzione was saying recently, and no American athlete on the planet can testify to that better than he can.
Eruzione was a grinder, a ham-and-egger, the son of a pizza shop bartender and sewage plant worker from Winthrop, Mass. He learned hockey while wearing his sister’s skates on a frozen golf course. He played for the Toledo Goaldiggers before he was named captain of the college boys on a 1980 U.S. Olympic team, so uninspiring that its coach, Herb Brooks, threatened to cut Eruzione before the Winter Games of Lake Placid started.
You know the rest of the story. Eruzione delivered the greatest sports upset in U.S. history by beating the Soviet Union’s Big Red Machine with a third-period goal in the Olympic semifinals en route to a gold-medal triumph over Finland. Forty-five years later, Eruzione had a compelling question to ask by phone:
“Why can’t we win the World Cup?”
Why can’t the United States produce a Meadowlands Miracle to bookend his Miracle on Ice?
“We had a team of leaders in our locker room in Lake Placid, and 20 of our best players, and I’m sure the same can be said of our World Cup team,” Eruzione said. “If they weren’t great soccer players, they wouldn’t be where they are, and if they weren’t great leaders, they wouldn’t be where they are. And I hate to say it, but if you think you are going to lose, you will lose. You have to have a mindset of believing that you can win.
“Why are you playing if you don’t think you can win?”
Friday marked the first day American players, coaches and fans need to start thinking an awful lot about that. The World Cup draw was held at the Kennedy Center, and wouldn’t you know it, the Americans were treated to some delicious home cooking. They didn’t land in the Group of Death.
They landed in the Group of Life.
In other words, Paraguay and Australia are not exactly the 1998 New York Yankees and the ’96 Chicago Bulls. The U.S. beat them both recently, and even if the Americans can’t handle the most likely fourth and final group team, Turkey, they will advance if they take care of their other business.
“I think they’ve got strength all over the park,” Australia coach Tony Popovic said of the co-hosts, Mexico, Canada and the U.S.
We will find out next summer if the U.S. men are strong enough to defy the forbidding odds and reach MetLife Stadium to compete in their first World Cup final. The American women have won the whole thing four times. It’s high time the men got on the board.
Attitudes have to change between now and next June. As a country, we are wired to believe that with the requisite hard work, discipline and confidence, we can win at pretty much everything.
Everything except men’s soccer.
The World Cup is the impossible dream in the United States. We can watch it. We can host it. We can celebrate it.
But we sure as hell can’t win it.
On one hand, that’s a strange way to approach the grandest event in the world’s most popular sport. The U.S., in March Madness terms, has made it to a few Sweet 16s and an Elite Eight over the last eight World Cups. If a college basketball program had that resume, a national championship would not be considered out of the question.
On the other hand, The Athletic’s Paul Tenorio pointed out that the Americans have a 1-12-7 World Cup record against European opponents since 1990.
That’s. Not. Good.
This time around, the U.S. team is led by arguably its finest all-time player, Christian Pulisic, and quality supplemental pieces sure to be inspired by the home crowds. The Americans are ranked 14th in the world by FIFA, meaning they are again Sweet 16 material, in position to be dangerous if they get hot in the early rounds.
PULISIC PUTS THE USMNT ON TOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸@USMNT pic.twitter.com/nkcQ5DDU0i
— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) November 29, 2022
“Maybe it’s our turn in soccer,” said the 71-year-old Eruzione, who started semi-following the game after his cousin married legendary Italian and New York Cosmos striker Giorgio Chinaglia.
“We’re clearly better now than we were 25 years ago, when soccer wasn’t as big a sport in this country as it is now. Our players are way better than they were years ago, so why can’t we win it? I still think the greatest athletes in the world live in the United States.”
One of them, Tom Brady, among the celebrities picking nations out of World Cup pots Friday, stands as a living testament to long-shot possibilities. Brady was not supposed to be a major college starter, never mind an NFL starter. He was a seventh-stringer at Michigan and the 199th pick of the 2000 NFL Draft who became a seven-time Super Bowl champion and the league’s undisputed GOAT.
In real football, Leicester City pulled off the mother of all sports miracles by winning the Premier League in 2016. If Leicester City could do that over nine months, why can’t the United States do this over five weeks?
“This is going to be an unbelievable opportunity that they have to seize,” two-time World Cup champion Carli Lloyd said of her countrymen.
Mauricio Pochettino, big-bucks coach, needs to play the role of Brooks, who told his young men, “You were born to be a player. You were meant to be here. This moment is yours.”
That moment opened up Friday. While declining to confirm that he was happy with the Charmin-soft draw (he looked and sounded happy), Pochettino discussed being optimistic about his players’ capacity to compete.
The U.S. coach felt the weight of what the draw represents. “Now we start to live the World Cup,” Pochettino said. “We need to start to create that very important energy and synergy in between the team and the fans.”
In a different time and place in the United States, that synergy between nation and national team was never so strong. When the young Americans played the dominant Russians in 1980, the Cold War was at full boil. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, American hostages had been taken in Iran and an oil crisis had been slowing down a country in desperate need of a morale boost.
“So I don’t know if it can be the same way again,” Eruzione said, “from an aspect of what it meant to the country and people looking for something. I hope we’re never in that position again.
“But we are divided now, and people could use something to make the country come together. … We live in the greatest country in the world, and I wish people would figure it out. Maybe the World Cup can prove why this country is so great, and that we can accomplish great things together.”
A grandfather of seven and a director of special outreach at his alma mater, Boston University, Eruzione has only watched his dusty VHS tape of the Soviet Union game once — about 15 years ago. The Olympic hero never wanted to live in the past, and besides, he said, “I know what happened.”
He still gets mail about it every day, still hears from war veterans about what that game meant to them and still honors countless requests from underdog teams in need of hope. Eruzione wishes that an American soccer player gets to live that life.
Next year’s World Cup will not amount to 104 Super Bowls in one month, as FIFA president Gianni Infantino keeps putting it. But it will be the biggest sporting event ever on American soil. And if the U.S. wins it in the New York market on July 19, 2026, that Meadowlands Miracle would replace the Miracle on Ice as the most spectacular upset in American sports history.
“It will be great for our country if we can pull it off,” Eruzione said.
The Americans can’t put a ceiling on their ambitions for this one. It’s time to dream the impossible dream.
