The World Cup Gets Hairy

— -- It started for me, a soccer playing skate punk, or is it skateboarding soccer punk, in 1994 when the World Cup came to the United States. My hair was straight and long-ish, but off the collar and tucked behind my ears so as to aggravate my Catholic high school without technically breaking their rules.

Sitting in the stands of Orlando's Orange Bowl waiting for the game to start, I flipped through my official program, suspended in the disbelief that my sporting heroes had finally come to the New World. England's David Beckham, Brazil's Ronaldo, Italy's Roberto Baggio, and Colombia's Carlos Valderrama peered back from the pages with their best championship grin. And some serious hair.

The styled perfection of Becks (or was that a mo-hawk year?), the tuft of Ronaldo, the buzz-cut-to-ponytail mullet of Baggio, and the curly orange afro that made Valderrama more famous than his skills would have allowed. Everything was perfect that day, except I badly wanted some more hair (I'd have to wait until a collegiate liberation in Vermont allowed my hair to find itself).

Here were my idols, the best players in the world, looking like glam rock stars, or in the case of Baggio, that guy you purposely avoid when entering the 7-11 in rural Florida. Soccer was and is a foreign sport, so it was all too easy for those who held authority over me to write my sport and my hair off as un-American. But I knew better. If you played soccer, you knew the wild hair was a rule, seemingly second only to don't touch the ball with your hands. It was part of the culture, and not limited to a country or continent.

American youth soccer, college, pro, and the US Men's National Team were not with out its characters then. There was Cobi Jones with his manicured dreadlocks; Marcelo Balboa did and continues to do his best Antonio Banderas impression: long and sometimes greasey; and my main man at the time, Alexi Lalas had that unruly carrot top. Lalas was tall, like me; He loved music, like me. He was a defender, like me; and he had an out of control mop of long hair... not like me. At the impressionable age of 16, all I wanted was that hair. I thought it would complete me.