How the largest American soccer film archive came to live in a guestroom in Austin, Texas

Can I blow my own horn here? This is an article about me in The Athletic...

https://theathletic.com/663755/2018...-came-to-live-in-a-guestroom-in-austin-texas/

 

There have got to be a few people who started before me.

 

Thanks. The dogs are great. Spunky the Monkey is on my lap right now.

 

Moderators, is it OK to post the text of the article? If not, just remove this...

How the largest American soccer film archive came to live in a guestroom in Austin, Texas
By Pablo Maurer

Until the new National Soccer Hall of Fame opened to the public earlier this month in Frisco, Texas, the largest collections of our national soccer history were hidden away in a few unlikely locations. There was the warehouse in North Carolina that protected artifacts from the previous hall of fame for nearly a decade, and a couple of storage units in New Jersey where much of the history of the New York Cosmos sat in darkness.

And then there is Dave Brett Wasser’s house. In a room he calls the “Tomb of Soccer History” at his home in Austin, Texas, Wasser has spent the better part of three decades collecting, archiving, and converting videotapes. What he has built is the largest repository of American soccer footage anywhere on earth.

I first learned about Wasser a few years ago. I was working on a story about Team America, a club in the old North American Soccer League, and I was struggling to find footage of the team in action. “Oh, there’s a guy for that,” an ex-NASL player told me. “You need to see Dave Wasser.”

I was directed to his website. A few weeks later, my Team America tapes arrived in the mail. And a few years after that, when I found myself in Austin for a concert, I arranged to visit Wasser, 51, and see his collection.

I’d envisioned my trip to his self-described “tomb” as being half “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and half “Wayne’s World.” I’d step into a wood-paneled basement, the beam from my headlamp illuminating a mountain of dusty old VHS cassettes. The tomb’s keeper, I assumed, would not have left the house in years. “The tapes,” he’d say, “are the only family I have now.”

What I found couldn’t have been more different. Wasser’s “tomb” is a side room in his home, a stylish duplex on the south side of Austin. The walls are covered with pop art, and three little dogs—Rutherford B. Hayes, Spunky the Monkey, and Lexington—have the run of the place.

Like many people his age, Wasser’s obsession with soccer started with the New York Cosmos in the late 1970s. It started on Channel 9, with Jim Karvellas calling the action as Pelé, Giorgio Chinaglia, and Franz Beckenbauer flitted across his tiny TV screen.

Wasser—and much of America—lost interest in soccer sometime in the early ’80s. But when the U.S. qualified for the World Cup in 1990, nostalgia set in.

“I was just curious whether anyone had recorded the games I watched on TV in the ’70s,” Wasser says. “I was kind of skeptical. I thought, ‘Well, VCRs were expensive back then.’ My family didn’t have one until the early ’80s. I didn’t record a single game.”

But others did, it turned out, and Wasser decided to try to find them. When the NASL folded in 1985, the people who were running the league had no idea what to do with the collection of game footage they had amassed. Those videos—on three-quarter-inch U-Matic cassettes—ended up in the hands of former players, coaches, team administrators, the wives of players, and fans of the old league. One man in Illinois had recorded games with a devotion that bordered on the religious. Wasser tracked him down and bought his collection.

“In a lot of cases, I’d call these coaches and players and they’d have these stacks of tapes, but wouldn’t have a machine that could play them,” Wasser says. “I did, so I said, ‘Send them to me and I’ll convert them and send them back to you along with the copies.’ That’s how I built up my collection.”
Some of the tapes didn’t make it. U-Matic—a format replaced by VHS—is highly sensitive to temperature and humidity. Wasser scored a cache of U-Matic tapes from a former executive of the Atlanta Chiefs only to discover they were unplayable after decades in an attic.

For years, Wasser lusted after the holy grail of American soccer tapes—the film collection of the New York Cosmos. When the club folded in 1985, owner Peppe Pinton took control of the archive and, to his credit, kept the tapes professionally archived for decades. But a few years ago, under new ownership, the club shipped a big chunk of its film across the country to be professionally digitized. When the plane reached cruising altitude, Wasser speculates, the cold temperature destroyed the tapes—a well-intentioned move gone wrong.

“I had gone to their offices and said, ‘Give me the tapes, I’ll do it for free,’” Wasser laments. “They couldn’t because they were ‘too valuable.’ So they ended up ruining all of them.”

The only other significant collection of NASL footage is owned by the National Soccer Hall of Fame. When the HOF needed footage to use as part of a display about the NASL at its new facility in, they came to Wasser. His archive far outshines theirs.

Wasser’s job got easier in 1998, when he started a website for his archive. People began to come looking for him, for a change. Other collectors and fans had tapes that they would trade for something in his collection, and Wasser’s library grew to include U.S. national team games, World Cup matches, MLS, and WUSA (Women’s United Soccer Association).

His national team collection is large and full of rarities. He tracked town a 1973 friendly between Poland and the U.S. through a Polish broadcaster, and he recently turned up a World Cup qualifier from 1980, between the U.S. and Canada, that he believes to be the oldest-known English-language broadcast of a U.S. game in existence.

“Everybody sort of assumes the U.S. federation just recorded every game they ever played in,” Wasser says. “Well, they didn’t. As recently as 10 years ago, they still weren’t recording every game they played in. Now they are. Half of their archive came from me.”

Watching a game with Dave Brett Wasser is not unlike like watching an episode of “Mystery Science Theatre 3000.” Today, he has dusted off a copy of a match from 1979. The Minnesota Kicks will take on the Chicago Sting.

“You like your soccer wide-open and explosive?” a voice crackles out of the television. “Well this game is your bag.”

“It’s Kenny Stern,” Wasser tells me, motioning to Chicago’s color guy, a man who appears to have walked right out of “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” (and happens to be the son of the Sting’s owner). Wasser has an anecdote about every player on the field, many of them drawn from personal interactions.

How to describe looking through celluloid at an NASL game played 40 years ago? The production quality is as bad as the turf. The game has a fitful, uneven pace, but there’s genuine talent on the field, journeymen from all reaches of the globe who handle the ball with grace.

The commentary is almost unrecognizable, full of American gusto and zeal rather than the polite patter of British accents we have come to expect. So is the vibe in the stadium. You can hear the PA announcer identify the players during the run of play, calling out their names as they knock the ball around. There are marching bands and cheerleaders. The Rowdies had the Wowdies, the Diplomats the Honeydips.

It’s naive. It’s endearing. Today, American clubs can sometimes seem to try a bit too hard. In the NASL, it’s as though they felt more determined to carve out their own, unique identity, oblivious to what was happening half a world away. The only “football clubs” in this archive are the ones that visit from overseas to take on American sides.

The match is a bit of a snoozer but shifts into overdrive toward the end. Goals pour in left and right before the game heads to a 15-minute sudden-death overtime and then a 35-yard penalty kick shootout. After a controversial call on the game-winning attempt, Sting owner Lee Stern storms the field, bumping the referee, who eventually leaves under police escort. “I talked to Lee about that game 25 years later,” Wasser quips. “He was still pissed off about it.”

Wasser recently took his site offline. He’s digitized his entire collection and much of it has ended up on YouTube. “After many years, I have decided to shut down the soccer archive at DaveBrett.com,” reads a placeholder at his old domain. “My archive has become obsolete, and it is time to move on.”
“At this point,” Wasser says, “anybody out there who’s ever (going to) come to me with a tape has probably already come to me. Maybe once every three or four years now someone will come to me with a new game, but I don’t think there’s any huge cache of footage out there that hasn’t been found.”

There are tapes he still covets. Some of the NASL’s more ephemeral teams continue to elude him, clubs like Team Hawaii or the Las Vegas Quicksilvers. And there’s the match tape from the U.S.’s historic 1980 win over Mexico; Televisa has kept it under lock and key for years, only recently releasing snippets for public consumption. They’ve rebuffed Wasser on more than one occasion.

The U-Matic machine now sits unused on his living room shelf, tucked away among books on philosophy, architecture, and, of course, soccer.

Wasser has other work to do; he runs a non-profit focused on helping investors sink their money into animal-cruelty-free corporations, which keeps him busy. You get the sense he feels a little left behind, a bit underappreciated. We’ve arrived at a place as a soccer nation where one can watch a 40-year-old U.S. national team match with the click of a mouse. The idea of sending away for old footage, of paying for it, feels almost as old as the NASL.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Wasser and a few other historians got us here by casting their nets and catching bits and pieces, evidence of the carnage as teams and entire leagues folded around them. Without Dave Brett Wasser, who is in effect one of the major links between soccer’s analog and digital ages, much of the footage we have of the modern game in this country might have disappeared long ago.

Instead it lives on indefinitely, permanently preserved and lovingly cared for in the Tomb of Soccer History.

 

There isn't a specific end goal. I would donate the whole collection to the Hall of Fame if they had a plan for doing something useful with the videos. For example, if they were willing to digitize the collection and make all the games viewable from the Hall's web site, I would give it to them. But that would cost a lot of money, and so far they haven't expressed interest in doing that.

 

I am the guest on the "Good Seats Available" podcast...

http://goodseatsstillavailable.com/...occer-video-archeology-with-dave-brett-wasser
The images are grainy, the commentary earnestly naïve, and the theme music disco-infused, but the bigger picture is clear – it’s American soccer history, in all its VHS videotape glory.

Gleaned from a simpler, pre-HD media landscape of the 1970s and early 1980s – much of it before even the mass consumer adoption of the VCR – the roughly 900 hours of TV broadcast match coverage that still survives from the pioneering North American Soccer League is a veritable time machine of pro soccer’s coming-of-age. And one man has been chiefly responsible for compiling and preserving it.

De facto soccer video anthropologist Dave Brett Wasser has spent over two decades tracking down virtually every known snippet of NASL game footage – more than 450 league and exhibition matches in all – for what is arguably the most comprehensive collection of vintage soccer Americana anywhere.

Meticulously (and sometimes just plain luckily) sourced from a myriad of former players, coaches, TV network vaults, and even garage sales – Wasser’s now-digitized trove has become the go-to source for some of the NASL’s most memorable competitive moments for today’s generation of soccer broadcast producers and documentarians. Including even the newly-rechristened National Soccer Hall of Fame in Frisco, TX.

In this revealing conversation with host Tim Hanlon, Wasser talks about: his childhood memories of local WOR-TV/New York broadcasts of Cosmos games; the impetus to rediscover them as an adult in the early 1990s lead-up to World Cup USA 1994; the people he’s met along the way of amassing his collection; and the tenuous relationship with the Hall of Fame in his quest to comprehensively digitize and permanently house the entire set of videos for current and future generations of American fans of the “beautiful game” to enjoy and learn from.