Word: minutemen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Coach Hubert Vogelsinger resigned and the Minutemen began to lose consistently. Attendance dropped to a low of 150, and the team vacated its, "permanent home," which had greeted it with open arms and North Quincy High cheerleaders, to play out the script in that soggy minor league ball park in Pawtucket...
...rain and the curtain come down, we are left to ask, "So what?" It's sentimental, but why dig up the Minutemen from obscurity? Because the parallel drawn between John Sterge and Charlie Finaly is not so absurd. The Minutemen demise provides a textbook example of what may be the Appomattox of professional sports...
...fate of the Minutemen cannot be explained away as easily as some owners might wish. It is not just another hard luck expansion team. The Minutemen's problems "were not the city of Boston" nor "the game of soccer," as Vogelsinger said when he resigned. Boston is a top breeding ground for United States soccer, with youth soccer leagues outdrawing little league baseball in many towns...
Sterge, like most owners of professional teams, saw the Minutemen as an investment, but he did not possess a mattressfull of green bills. The thought that the Minutemen would one day be profitable, a false hope for most owners, must have lingered in his mind. This attitude is at the root of the mass garage sale and the team's downfall...
...effect of this outlook in that first Pele game--a pinnacle for Boston professional soccer, but the beginning of the end. Taking advantage of Pele's appeal, the Minutemen oversold the stadium by several thousand people. As a result, often frenzied fans flooded to the edge of the playing field and mobbed Pele, injuring him slightly. After that, fans, players and the game of soccer would no longer head Sterge's list of priorities...