In a couple of weeks, it will be half a century since Pelé made his debut for the New York Cosmos against the Dallas Tornado at Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island. The pitch was so embarrassingly threadbare that the club deployed a small army of volunteers to daub dirt patches with green house paint diluted with water. Alan Bodenstein was a ball boy pressed into service with a brush to try to make the place look more respectable for television cameras and the watching world. When the Brazilian eventually walked on to the field, the PELE above the number 10 on his shirt had been meticulously hand-sewn there by Bodenstein’s mother, Fay. A family affair.
By chance, soccer had wandered into their home in Massapequa a couple of years earlier. Alan returned from school one day all abuzz about wanting to play on a new youth team being started by his friend’s father. Soon the beautiful game took over all their lives. At a time when the sport was just starting to infiltrate the suburbs of Long Island, boots and balls were still difficult to source. Luckily, Gene Bodenstein, a civil engineer who grew up playing stickball on the streets of Brooklyn, was working in New York City and found he could buy what he needed for his son’s new obsession at Doss Soccer Supply Store at 90th Street and First Avenue.
That outlet was a long way from Massapequa so, eventually, Fay told him he should lug some extra gear back on the train with him each night because the soccer craze sweeping town had given her an idea. After they set up shop in the garage of their house on Richard Place, local kids needing shin guards or shorts or cleats (American for boots) came traipsing happily to their driveway. With her adding a mark-up of 50 cents or a dollar to whatever her husband had paid for the item in Manhattan, all was going well until a neighbour reported this thriving concern to the authorities.
Befitting somebody who had survived the Holocaust because Belgian nuns hid her in a filing cabinet when Nazis searched their convent, Fay Bodentstein was undeterred by this setback. Taking the business up a level and gambling that soccer was here to stay, the family rented a space near Massapequa train station. Hoping their hunch was right, they opened a mom-and-pop shop that turned into something of an institution.
“It became more than a soccer store, a place where players, coaches, parents, referees and administrators could talk and revel in the beautiful game,” wrote Michael Lewis, reporting the announcement of the impending closure of Massapequa Soccer Shop on frontrowsoccer.com. “After June 30th, that community centre and house of worship for soccer won’t be available to help anyone in a pinch or to talk about the sport. The Bodenstein family has decided to retire and close the iconic store.”
Although soccer had always prospered in immigrant enclaves in America’s major cities, the Bodensteins took a chance in the early 1970s when nobody in this country was quite sure whether the spike in interest among suburban kids and parents was more than just a passing fad. Like the hula hoop or the yo-yo. This was decades before European soccer shirts became fashionable daily wear in high-school classrooms. A different time when somebody predicting that NBC would one day broadcast every Premier League game live each week might have been laughed out of the room. Nowadays, the whole world comes here to make bank out of the game’s burgeoning popularity.
A motley selection of outfits from all across the planet gather at NFL stadiums across America this month for a bloated cash-in tournament called the Fifa World Club Cup, featuring various continental champions and Inter Messi, sorry, Miami. In July, Bournemouth, Everton, West Ham United and Manchester United play out the so-called “Premier League Series” at MetLife Stadium, Soldier Field in Chicago, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. Aston Villa have games lined up in St Louis and Louisville. Meanwhile, Roy Keane played the curmudgeon on CBS’s coverage of the Europa League debacle the other week, earning a vast sum for tolerating Micah Richards’s laughing hyena shtick.
Nobody could have envisaged the sport becoming such a lucrative money-spinner back when Massapequa Soccer Shop opened its doors. After the USA qualified for the 1990 World Cup, they put a Soccer Week magazine cover story in the window just so passersby might notice something significant had happened. Eight years later, Fay and Gene were brought to the tournament in France by Diadora. Recognition of services rendered. After both parents passed away, their daughter Helen and other son Mark took over the reins of a place they had grown up in. Now, after 52 years as part of the furniture of people’s retail lives, the children have decided to shutter for good.
Just about every sporting family on Long Island made pilgrimage to Massapequa Soccer Shop. For years, it was a Christmas ritual in our house where I would leave work early one December afternoon and drive the hour west alone to see what Santa Claus might discover in the overstocked racks there. A green Ireland Umbro tracksuit top was found among the treasures one time and handed down like an heirloom from brother to brother. It hangs in the wardrobe still. Too small to wear. Too precious to give away. Relic from another era. From a special shop.
