“ZUNGUL-LAND” and “THE GREATEST VS THE BARBER”
#831/#830
831. NEW YORK ARROWS VS HOUSTON SUMMIT
MISL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME
MARCH 23, 1980
NASSAU COLISEUM
QUALITY OF PLAY—7.66
DRAMA—8.68
STAR POWER—7.66
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—6.73
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—5.25
LOCAL IMPACT—7.28
TOTAL: 43.46
“ZUNGUL-LAND”
If you were there, you know. The Major Indoor Soccer League, or MISL, or “Missile", was about as entertaining as sport got for a brief, wonderful spell in the 1980s. Known as “Hockey with a ball you can see,” the sport combined the Beautiful Game’s artistic esthetic with a fast playing surface, caroms off the dasher boards, rock and roll and disco on the arena soundtrack and flashing lights during play. It was a fast, physical, often rough sport, like hockey, and supremely entertaining, especially the brand played by the New York Arrows, who called the Nassau Coliseum home. The Arrows dominated the action in the early days of MISL thanks their iconic superstar, the “Lord of All Indoors,” Steve Zungul.
Born Croatian in Tito’s Yugoslavia, Slavisa Zungul was a superb outdoor soccer player, but he became a legend, at least in certain pockets of suburban New York City (including mine) thanks to his brilliance with the Arrows. The Wayne Gretzky of MISL, Steve would score 652 career goals, over 200 more than any other player. He once scored thrice in 37 seconds of play, making him the Bill Mosienko of indoor soccer (see #885, “Wee Willie’s Wonder”). His 108 goals in 1981 was the single-season record. He also had more assists than any player in league history.
According to his Arrows teammate, Goalie Shep Messing, Zungul “was the greatest indoor player to ever play…He partied, he played hard and he scored goals. He was good in the air and lightning quick with his first step…[and could] control it in a tight space. He was a champ.”
The partying referenced above was a little too hard for his Croatian outdoor side, Hajduk Split. Bad feelings between club and player festered to the point Zungul deceived his bosses. He asked for permission to accompany his supermodel girlfriend to New York for a couple of months early in 1979. Split allowed him to go, whereupon Zungul defected and joined, in a prearranged deal, the fledgling Arrows, with the idea of joining the outdoor NASL when the weather warmed. Instead, the angry Split bosses got Zungul banned by FIFA from any outdoor league the governing body recognized—which included the NASL. Zungul would fight the ban for years before at last winning his freedom—in the meantime, the Arrows were the beneficiary of his immense skill set, winning the 1979 indoor championship behind Zungul. Sure, Zungul was exponentially more talented than anyone else in MISL, but that hardly mattered to young fans like me.
The 1980 Arrows, who skipped to the Atlantic Division title, also featured Zungul’s friend and countryman Damir Sutevski, who scored 32 goals in 30 games; 18-year old sensation Branko Segota (who would wind up the second-all-time scorer in league history after Zungul); and NYC soccer legend Messing, recently of the outdoor champion Cosmos of the North American Soccer League.
8,649 fans turned up to the Coliseum, where Stanley Cup banners would soon be hung, to see the MISL championship game, held on Sunday night, March 23, 1980. The Houston Summit, winners of the league’s Central Division, would be no walkover. They had the best defense in MISL and a sturdy attack led by Finnish attacker Kai Haaskivi. They took a 1-0 lead early on, and seemed intent on goofing up the game, hoping to slow the high-flying Arrows attack with physical play.
The strategy backfired. Three times the Arrows scored with the man-advantage (yes, indoor soccer used hockey’s power play), including a goal by Zungul that tied the game. Sutevski weaved through the usually powerful Houston D to clip home the go-ahead tally. Zungul scored again in the second period, Segota scored on the power-play despite playing with an injured and heavily taped hamstring, and the Arrows took a 4-2 lead into halftime.
“They pressurized us,” malapropped Houston coach Ken Cooper, “and we showed no composure.”
Renato Cila banged home a 30-footer for the Arrows a minute into the third quarter, giving the home team a 5-2 lead that seemed insurmountable. But the Summit tried to mount it. The big lead proved a disaster for the Arrows. “We settled back,” explained Messing. “We started to play defensively. It was a catastrophe.” Forward Gerry Morielli beat Messing with a long range shot, and they scored a power-play goal moments later to get right back in it at 5-4, and the crowd, once festive, was now strangled by tension. They weren’t alone. “I was scared to death,” admitted Zungul. so was this very young Arrows diehard…
As the seconds drifted past, each lasting the length of an hourglass to the Arrows players and fans, the score remained 5-4. Messing was tested with a series of difficult saves, and he kept the ball out of the net and his team in front. With about three and a half minutes to go, Houston tried to work the ball out from its own zone, and a 50-50 ball was played. Sutevski bolted in with an incredible tackle on a Summit defender, tearing his knees open on the Coliseum carpet in the process.
The Yugoslav managed to pop up and slide the ball ahead to Zungul. Under pressure Zungul got off a shot with the outside of his boot, one that ricocheted off the post to Houston goalie Mick Poole’s right and tucked into the net. Poole smacked the turf in frustration at the pinpoint precision of Zungul’s strike.
“I didn’t see it,” Zungul said after the game, saying his vision was blocked by the defender. “I heard the screaming from the crowd. It was nice to hear.”
“It was more than nice,” added Sutevski. “It totally destroyed them mentally. That was the goal we were looking for.”
Not only did the goal ice the game for the Arrows, it completed a hat trick for Zungul, giving him at least three goals in all six playoff games he had played to that point. Juli (Three ‘E’) Veee tacked on a goal that was pure icing with a minute to go, making the final 7-4, New York. The MISL championship trophy would stay on Long Island.
AFTERMATH:
The Arrows were champions again, and Zungul was league and finals MVP again, but they struggled to gain a niche in the sports-heavy NYC market. Attendance was never great, and even though the team won four straight titles (making them the contemporary, indoor soccer equivalent of their fellow Nassau Coliseum tenants, the hockey Islanders), income issues forced the team to trade Zungul—who won MVP and the scoring title each of those years, not to mention the 1981 championship-winning goal in overtime in St. Louis—to San Jose (a heartbreaking moment for your humble chronicler). That didn’t stop the bleeding, and the team folded after the 1984 season.
The Summit would relo from Houston to Baltimore after the season, turning into the Baltimore Blast. The B-Squares would make it the full length of the MISL existence, playing until 1992 when the league folded for good.
WHAT THEY SAID:
“When I was with the Cosmos and we won, I was swept along on emotion. Here I felt more responsible for winning; there was more pressure on me.”
—Shep Messing
FURTHER READING:
The Unfortunate Steve Zungul by Roger Allaway, USsoccerhistory.org
VIDEO:
(Part 1)
(Part 2)
830. CASSIUS CLAY VS BILLY DANIELS
HEAVYWEIGHT FIGHT
MAY 19, 1962
ST. NICHOLAS ARENA
QUALITY OF PLAY—5.69
DRAMA—6.12
STAR POWER—9.45
CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—6.23
HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—8.82
LOCAL IMPACT—7.16
TOTAL: 43.47
“THE GREATEST VS THE BARBER”
Before refrigeration technology improved enough to allow indoor ice skating, New York skaters were confined to iced-over lakes in Central Park or flooded vacant lots. But by the turn of the 20th Century, rinks were built to let the skating set turn laps and figure eights inside. One of the nicest rinks was constructed in part by Cornelius Vanderbilt and John J. Astor, skating enthusiasts both, at 66th and Columbus. It was called the St. Nicholas Rink.
As a skating and amateur hockey palace, the Saint Nick was well known. But it hosted other events, especially boxing, especially once the sport was legalized in New York in 1911. Fight fans referred to St. Nicholas as “The Rink,” but the likes of Toe Blake and Eddie Shore never graced its ice. However such fistic luminaries as Jack Johnson, Jess Willard, Kid Chocolate, and Rocky Graziano danced on the canvas that was draped over the rink on fight nights.
Some 30,000 fights were staged at the Rink, but it was one of the last that stood out, because it featured a young fighter on an express elevator to the top—Cassius Clay, later Muhammad Ali.
Clay’s first fight in NYC was in February, 1962, a fourth-round TKO of Lucian Banks. That ran his professional record to 11-0, and after a pair of easy wins down in Miami, Clay returned to the City in May to take on a heavyweight out of Queens named Billy “The Barber” Daniels. His nickname was literal—Daniels owned and cut hair at a barbershop in Brooklyn. Born in North Carolina, Daniels took up boxing in the Air Force, where he was a service champ, and brought his skills to NYC as an amateur, winning the Golden Gloves heavyweight title. After turning pro he racked up sixteen consecutive victories before being matched with the fledgling “Louisville Lip.”
Naturally, Clay, 20 years old and two years removed from his gold medal at the Rome Olympics, put his promotional flair toward selling the bout, telling reporters he would “leave the country—by jet” if he didn’t best the Barber, in “five or maybe seven rounds.” “Clay had said such things before,” wrote Howard M. Tuckner in the Times, “but always had thwarted travel agents looking for his business.”
He would do so again, but not without a fight.
Daniels’ wife, Alice, was pregnant with their second child as Billy climbed into the Saint Nick ring on Friday night May 19, 1962. She was surely horrified right after the bell, when the talent difference between the two fighters became apparent. Clay whopped Daniels with a straight right that drew a gusher of the Barber’s blood. Meanwhile, as Daniels recalled to the Wilmington (NC) StarNews in 2006, "I threw the quickest right hand I had. He pulled his head back as my hand came out, just out of reach. I said, 'Lord, people don't do nothing like this.’ Here I've got a man so fast he can duck my punch and put his autograph on it."
Clay was sticking and moving with aplomb, blowing air so hard out of his nostrils that one onlooker said it sounded “like a tire blowout.” Clay opened another cut on Daniels’ grille in the third. “Crimson masked his face in every round after that, and it took ten stitches to close the cut after the fight,” reported Tuckner. But Daniels didn’t fold, and earned Clay’s respect with some heavy right crosses, including one in the fourth that rocked the future champ back on his heels. Tuckner wrote “The ‘Future Heavyweight champion’ seemed to be hoping for the sound of a ring bell” after that.
But Clay/Ali always had a good chin, and he shook off Daniels’ best shots and continued to pepper away at the open wounds that gushed from his opponent’s face. Finally, with about 40 seconds to go in the seventh round, the bleeding got to be too much, and the fight was stopped. Clay again had won by TKO in his second fight in NYC.
Clay, now 15-0, referred to the fight as a “workout,” but Daniels had acquitted himself well, given the otherworldly talent he faced.
AFTERMATH:
Saint Nick’s hosted one more event after the Clay fight, Closing night was May 28, 1962, as Pablo Acevedo knocked down Carlos Saez twice in the first round, and the last cigar-smoking wisenheimer to see a fight at the Rink yelled to Saez, ”Get smart, kid, become a cha-cha instructor.” The property at the site is now owned by ABC Television.
Billy Daniels remained close with Cassius Clay as he became Muhammad Ali, and often trained with the Greatest through the years, even as he ran his Brooklyn barbershop and had other business endeavors. Daniels went 23-21-4 over a long career, and remained athletic, running marathons in his native North Carolina into his old age. But the boxing devil that plagues so many fighters, including Ali, aimed his pitchfork at Daniels. He suffered from dementia in his later years. He died in 2017.
WHAT THEY SAID:
“He’s a fancy dan. He’s fast and takes a good punch, but he’s not good when the going gets rough. A front runner, that’s him. He’s got a long way to go.”
—Billy Daniels on Cassius Clay after their fight.
FURTHER READING:
The Greatest: My Own Story by Muhammad Ali
VIDEO: