Roger Bennett: Drama. There was a telenovela's worth of drama on that US squad in those final critical six months before the World Cup, yet, the team had qualified for the tournament, but they'd done so later than anyone had expected.

Coach Steve Sampson, he feared for his job. The US was actively, constantly, occasionally rather brazenly courting his replacement.

A little desperately, he began benching the star players, Alexi Lalas and Marcelo Balboa, and of course, the previously untouchable team captain, John Harkes, ditched, which widened the wedge between himself and his experienced veterans.

During this period, there was one other bit of drama. It unfolded on stage at a packed stadium in Marseille in front of a TV audience of half a billion people. I'm speaking, of course, of the draw.

Bob Lee: You've got a one in three shot of opening against the team that we have kind of pegged as--

Roger Bennett: The World Cup draw. It's like one of those Powerball drawings that you see on your local TV stations, only instead of lottery numbers, someone's drawing little plastic balls that contain the names of each of the countries, and those little plastic balls determine the matchups for the World Cup's first round, the Group Stage.

Bob Lee: The United States now waiting breathlessly to see when they'll be drawn.

Roger Bennett: Did you cover the draw on air?

Bob Lee: Yes, I was there.

Roger Bennett: That's Bob Lee, ESPN anchor.

Joseph "Sepp" Blatter: [French language]

Bob Lee: Next, Germany's group will be drawn so the US really does not want their number to come up here at all. What happened?

Joseph "Sepp" Blatter: [French language]

Bob Lee: Ooh, there you go, USA. So, Les États-Unis, the United States in Group F against Germany.

Roger Bennett: Germany, the reigning European champions, three-time World Cup title winners, the single most consistently ruthless organized team in world football. Think Darth Vader in cleats, and one that was far better than your Mexicos, Costa Ricas, or the other regional rivals that the US had toiled against over the past three years.

Joseph "Sepp" Blatter: [French language]

Bob Lee: Yugoslavia.

Hank Steinbrecher: The next one is Yugoslavia.

Bob Lee: It is a nightmare draw unfolding for the US National Team.

Hank Steinbrecher: Which is a great team.

Bob Lee: A very strong Yugoslavian team.

Hank Steinbrecher: We are currently bombing them.

Roger Bennett: US Soccer's secretary-general, Hank Steinbrecher.

Hank Steinbrecher: I'm thinking, "This is going to be a whirlwind of warfare."

Roger Bennett: Then it was down to the last ball.

Bob Lee: Joe Blatter holds in his hand the US final team.

Joseph "Sepp" Blatter: [French language]

Speaker 3: Iran.

Bob Lee: Well.

Joseph "Sepp" Blatter: Islamic Republic of Iran.

Bob Lee: Well, well.

Hank Steinbrecher: Oh my gosh. Are they kidding? Iran? Can you imagine?

Roger Bennett: There it was. The good news was the US now knew who they'd face in the first round of the World Cup. The bad news was that it was Germany, Yugoslavia, and then Iran.

Jeremy Schaap: One of the countries they'd fought two world wars against-

Roger Bennett: Jeremy Schaap of ESPN.

Jeremy Schaap: -one of the countries they had had the hostage crisis with, and the other country we were basically at war with as well.

Roger Bennett: A rather worried Hank Steinbrecher.

Hank Steinbrecher: Like the worst draw in the world. Gulp. Can you pick a worse draw than that?

Roger Bennett: I think Alan Rothenberg said at the time, "The only way it could've been worse was if there was Iraqi referees for every game."

Hank Steinbrecher: [laughs] That's true.

[pause 00:03:56]

[music]

Roger Bennett: I'm Roger Bennett. This is American Fiasco, a show about how three years of hard work, international travel, and swaggering self confidence can all be erased by three little plastic balls. The ball that was the most problematic was the one that contained the name Germany.

It led coach Steve Sampson to tinker obsessively with lineups. He also made the team start playing in a new, rare, deeply complex formation called the three-six-one. We'll talk more about that later, but for now, know it relies on speed and on buy-in from players, two things that were in short supply on this squad.

Steve, who went looking for a different kind of player?

David Regis: Yes?

Roger Bennett: This is Roger Bennett.

David Regis: Oh, how you doing?

Roger Bennett: Thank you for-

Roger Bennett: This is David Regis. He actually pronounces it "Ray-Jees". You can hear a lot of people butcher his surname on this podcast, but it's "Regis" as he's become best remembered in US soccer history.

Roger Bennett: Where are you living right now?

David Regis: Luxembourg. I live Luxembourg.

Roger Bennett: Ah, Luxembourg. Comment allez vous. Comment allez vous.

David Regis: [French language]

Roger Bennett: Ugh, listening back to this I realize, not only am I the guy that mispronounces foreigners' surnames, I'm also the gent who yells overenthusiastically at people who don't speak English.

Back in 1997, Regis was a seasoned pro in the German Bundesliga, and he came on Sampson's radar because he was married to an American and he wanted to become a US citizen.

Regis grew up on the island of Martinique, a tiny French territory in the Caribbean.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: I come from a little village where we play soccer in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night on the beach.

Roger Bennett: Barefoot?

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: Always barefoot.

Roger Bennett: What would they use as a ball?

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: We were very lucky. We had real balls.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: Sometimes we played soccer with paper balls. It could be anything, whatever we found.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: We just wanted to run as fast as possible and be in shape.

Roger Bennett: What did we use for goals?

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: We used everything, sometimes even fruit trees.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: Where on the beach, we would put sometimes two sticks in the sand. Anything.

Roger Bennett: When he was 10 years old, Regis says he left Martinique. He left behind his parents and nine siblings. He moved to France where he eventually began a pro career and then he was bought by a German team, Karlsruhe.

Once the US drew Germany as a first-round opponent, you see the connection? Steve became fixated on Regis.

Steve Sampson: A player that understands the German national team and understands exactly how they play, understands much more intimately than any of us ever did.

Roger Bennett: What was your first impression of Steve Sampson.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: We had a very clear first pitch-

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: -about my experience and that I just had to play how I knew how to and not really think too much about it.

David Regis: [French language] [chuckles]

Interpreter: [chuckles] He asked me if I spoke English.

Roger Bennett: What did you say?

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: I told him that in sports, you don't need to speak, you just need to play.

Roger Bennett: To the rest of the team, Regis was this complete stranger, an unknown quantity who spoke no English. He began training with the team just one month before the World Cup. Here's Alexi Lalas, always the warm host.

Alexi Lalas: I think that there was [chuckles] a collective "What the hell is going on," not because he didn't have the resume but because it was so late in the game.

Jeff Agoos: I knew he was left-footed [chuckles] and he was a left-back.

Roger Bennett: That's defender Jeff Agoos, also left-footed, yes, and also a left-back. He'd been with the national team since 1988 and along with Lalas and Marcelo Balboa, he'd been a core part of the team's defense.

Jeff Agoos: You look at what you've done, your body of work and you think, "Was I not good enough or was there something else they're looking for?"

Roger Bennett: Actually, Agoos had begun to fall out of Steve's good graces six months earlier. The team's chances to qualify right then, they looked a little dodgy and in a match that should've been an easy win, Agoos made a lazy pass that virtually handed their opponents a goal. The US had to settle for a tie, and afterwards, the ESPN camera crew captured Agoos getting a slightly awkward phone call.

Jeff Agoos: Okay, thanks, Steve. I appreciate it. I'm still looking to go to France. [chuckles] Great. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Roger Bennett: Then, with the stakes even higher, next game against Mexico, the Americans had to gut out a zero-zero tie, playing with only 10 men for much of the game because one player had been kicked out of the match for a fairly needless red card.

Yes, you guessed. It was Jeff Agoos.

Jeff Agoos: My back was facing the line of receiving a ball from, I can't remember who it was, maybe Marcelo, from somebody in the back and I just felt a player coming up from behind and I put my arms up next to me, beside me, to brace for impact. I made contact with a player and I turned around and, I can't remember who it was in the Mexican team, but he's holding his head. I've actually got this--

Roger Bennett: I remember because I was watching. It was defender Pável Pardo, and he's spinning around, Agoos his right forearm, it clipped him right in the face. When you watch the game tape, it's an ugly infraction but still, it doesn't look like Agoos struck him intentionally. It's the kind of foul that normally gets a yellow card, a first warning, a caution, but instead--

Announcer: [foreign language]

Jeff Agoos: Referee gives me a red card for serious foul play and I'm off for 30 minutes.

Roger Bennett: He was suspended for the next game and fined by his own national team, US Soccer. Mostly though, he was worried he'd permanently run afoul of Steve.

Jeff Agoos: I was going to be 27 in my prime as a player and if you don't make it at that point, then you're basically, that's it. That you're on the downside of your career at 27, 28 years old and that's probably your last opportunity.

Roger Bennett: Now or never.

Jeff Agoos: Yes, now or never.

[silence]

[music]

Roger Bennett: Jeff Agoos was no stranger to angst. He'd missed the World Cup once before, in heartbreaking fashion. Almost exactly four years earlier. Agoos was at the Federation's training camp in Southern California. The 1994 World Cup was so close, just weeks away, he could almost touch it, or so he thought. Until after a long training run on the beach, when you got a tap on the shoulder.

Jeff Agoos: "Bora wants to talk to you."

Roger Bennett: You mean Bora Milutinovic? The head coach of the 1994 team, Steve's predecessor.

Jeff Agoos: "Bora wants to talk to you." Those are the fateful words that everybody doesn't want to hear on the last couple of days because you knew what was going to happen. I said, "Fine. Let's talk." and Bora came over, then just said, 'We're going to release you and we're going a different way." I look back on it now, and I'm like, "Why couldn't we have done this before the run because that's going to save me about three or four miles of pain." Look, you've been in this environment for a year and a half, and you're just it's blood, sweat and tears, and the whole thing and this is everything you put your soul into. This huge event is coming in the span of 90 days and you're just being told, "You're not part of it." It's devastating.

I remember getting in my car, sweaty, sand everywhere, go back home, and I'm just, I'm tired but not physically tired, it's emotionally exhausted. I remember very distinctly, I had my gear in the corner of the room, sand all over it. Get out of the shower, I look at it, and I'm like, "If I just put this in the trash, I've got to take the trash out, I'm going to be reminded this again," and there's the fireplace. I put it in the fireplace and I just light it on fire so I don't ever have to see it again.

Roger Bennett: Ask yourself, who would find it cathartic to watch their training kit burn. The answer is a pro athlete who's dreamed of glory, sacrifice years in pursuit of those dreams, comes so close to making it real, and then have it snatched away at the very last. That's the kind of psychological wound that can break him a man, but for Jeff Agoos to suffer that trauma, and then rebound and go again, that takes a depth of tenacity, which I, a mere mortal, couch potato, soccer fan, I just can't fathom.

Meanwhile, his rival, David Regis, he was also in danger of not making the final roster, but for an entirely different reason, because just days before that final roster was due, Regis still wasn't officially an American citizen. Team officials, they were in a mad scramble to process the paperwork. Luckily for them, they brought ESPN's documentary crew along to an immigration office.

Jim Froslid: We had this cameraman that was following us through everything and this was really a piece that they wanted to capture.

Roger Bennett: Press officer, Jim Froslid.

Jim Froslid: The guy it's almost like The Wizard of Oz, where you get to the gates of Oz, and all of a sudden, they're not going to let you in. There was an INS official that basically said, "You got to come back next week."

Roger Bennett: That would have meant, that if he couldn't get it in a week, he wouldn't be on the squad?

Jim Froslid: Wouldn't be on the squad. I remember the cameraman, he was a big guy. He has this camera and he basically, he's telling the INS official, "You want to tell that to ESPN, right now?" He's got this camera going, the lights going and the guy just froze and the next thing you know, he goes into the back room and one thing leads to another and, "Yep, we actually have a spot for you in this test so you can take it now."

Roger Bennett: Regis passed this citizenship exam, thanks to an assist from the worldwide leader, ESPN. A couple of days later, he found himself starting at left-back against Kuwait and one of the last tune-up games before the World Cup.

Roger Bennett: Did David Regis earned it?

Marcelo Balboa: He didn't have to, Steve Sampson gave him that spot.

Roger Bennett: Marcelo Balboa. You were like, what the fuck?

Marcelo Balboa: Quite a bit, yes. Quite a bit because, again, Agoos has been the starter, you can't say that Agoos was horrible, you know what I mean? He made a few mistakes, we all make mistakes, you know what I mean? In through qualifying, it happens, but to see him going from a starter to sitting on the bench and not even getting a sniff, not even close to getting a sniff was difficult. I don't think anybody thought Regis was going to make that World Cup roster.

Roger Bennett: In that ESPN documentary, the one about the lead up to the World Cup, a devastated Agoos. He voiced his frustration in real time.

Jeff Agoos: I went through eight years to get here. This has been difficult to swallow, that a guy can come in literally three weeks before the World Cup team has to be chosen, whereas other guys like myself have worked hard and long to get to where we are right now and it just feels like you're brushed aside.

David Regis: [foreign language]

Interpreter: That's how it is.

David Regis: [foreign language]

Interpreter: With high-level sports, we're always in competition with someone.

Roger Bennett: David Regis, a man who came from a truly dog-eat-dog soccer culture. Some would say a real soccer culture, Germany. He knew that pro sports had no place for sentimentalism, but wait for it. As if this whole thing was not awkward enough already, someone sadistically had to sign Agoos to room with Regis, the very man who was trying to replace him.

Jeff Agoos: It was quiet because he didn't speak a lot of English and so we just had the TV on, that was about it.

Roger Bennett: What did you and Regis watch, Judge Judy?

Jeff Agoos: [chuckles] I think we watched Friends and Seinfeld. It was harder to laugh, I'll be honest.

Roger Bennett: Even Chandler Bing wasn't funny?

Jeff Agoos: [laughs] Even Chandler Bing wasn't funny.

Roger Bennett: Listening to this, I've got to say, I'm not sure I could have handled this situation with half as much classes as Agoos did. He was an absolute mensch.

Jeff Agoos: Look, David had to take a citizenship test. I helped David study for that, helped him learn English, to try to say at least one or two sentences in English so he could pass the test.

Roger Bennett: "Jeff Agoos is a very good football player."

Jeff Agoos: [chuckles] Well, that's not what he said but that's what I tried to have him say. David was trying as much as he could to, not only make the team but integrate and assimilate into a group of Americans he'd never experienced before. He didn't really understand what it was like to be an American, grow up in the United States and we were, at the same time, teaching him about fighting and passion, and all the things that Americans are known for.

Roger Bennett: On June 2nd, just two days before the team was scheduled to depart for France, Steve Sampson finally submitted his World Cup Roster to FIFA, the sports governing body. A roster that contained the names of the 22 players who'd represent the United States of America at the 1998 World Cup. Agoos and Regis, they were both on the roster. Regis would start at left-back, but Agoos, he'd be watching from the bench.

Jeff Agoos: This was the way it was going to be. You now had to accept a different role and do everything you could to make the team better or create a problem.

Roger Bennett: When you realize you weren't starting, what did you feel?

Jeff Agoos: It was some level of devastation, to be honest, because again, I go through this whole event in '94 and coming so close and Steve knew the whole piece of it. On top of that, now, he's bringing in new players to the team, David, and a new formation, and completely turning my world upside down and, I think, the team's world upside down.

Roger Bennett: The first practice after Regis got his US passport, the players gave him a round of applause. Jim Froslid remembers they also serenaded him with the national anthem.

Jim Froslid: I don't know whose idea it was, and I'm sure not everyone wanted to do it, let's face it. I will tell you nobody had a bond with him. Nobody really, really felt, "Oh jeez, I'm so glad David's here. I'm so glad he passed his test. This is awesome. Let's sing--" We didn't know the guy.

Roger Bennett: Regis, though, he remembers it all a little differently, almost fondly. His teammates gave him a round of applause, and he celebrated like an American, with a beer.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: They also gave me an American flag.

Roger Bennett: Where's the flag now?

David Regis: [French langage]

Interpreter: It's always above my bed.

Roger Bennett: I watched your debut. Before the game, as the American national anthem played, you teared up.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: You can't even describe. It just came up in me, and I thought about my parents right away.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: I always thought of my parents that told me to be myself and never look left or right, but straight ahead and be myself.

David Regis: [French language]

Interpreter: I always said to them that I would be a soccer player, so whenever I had one of those moments, even when I signed my first contract, I thought of them immediately.

Roger Bennett: That their son who grew up on the beach, barefoot, kicking paper balls at fruit trees was now going to the World Cup.

David Regis: Oh, yes.

[music]

[French Language]

Speaker: American Fiasco is a production of WNYC Studios. Our team includes Joel Meyer, Emily Botein, Paula Szuchman, Derek John, Starlee Kine, Kegan Zema, Ernie [unintelligible 00:22:29], Eliza Lambert, Jamison York, Daniel Guillemette, Matt Boynton, Jonathan Williamson, Brad Feldman, Bea Aldrich, Jeremy Bloom, Isaac Jones, and Sarah Sandbach.

Joe Plourde is our technical director, Hannis Brown composed our original music. Our theme music is by Big Red Machine, the collaboration between Aaron Dessner of The National and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. Special thanks to Allie Pinel and David Mc Lean. This episode included audio from ESPN. For more about this story, including a timeline and more, go to fiascopodcast.com.

Roger Bennett: It's Rog. Before you go, I want to ask you a favor. I know, I know, you're doing me favors like all the time, but this one, it's important. If you love American Fiasco, please tell your friends because in this crazy small world known as podcast, it's the only tried and true way to make a pod like this one get heard. Tell your friend who loves soccer, or your friend who's soccer-curious and just about to fall in love with it during the World Cup, or your friend who just loves human disaster stories. Tell them about American Fiasco, and I, Roger Bennett, will be in your debt. Again, courage.

 

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