The Athletic (paywall) - ‘The Rock,’ the water-meter reader and Molson anesthesia: How Canada qualified for its first World Cup

[sstackho]

https://theathletic.com/3094730/2022/01/27/the-rock-the-water-meter-reader-and-molson-anesthesia-how-canada-qualified-for-its-first-world-cup

[Califax]

'Water-meter Reader and the Molson Anesthesia' is the name of my funk soul band. 

 

[CTD Canuck]

Great article. I've played against Pakos and he was a beast to defend.

[CTD Canuck]

‘The Rock,’ the water-meter reader and Molson anesthesia: How Canada qualified for its first World Cup

By Pablo Maurer, Matt Pentz, Joshua Kloke 25 

 

Honduras men’s national team head coach Chelato Ucles stands inside a dimly-lit gymnasium in St. John’s, Newfoundland, surrounded by a cluster of reporters. He never expected to find himself here: not in this situation; not in this small-town basketball gym on the absolute edge of the continent.

Ucles has tasted his share of glory. In 1982, he led his players to the pinnacle of sport, guiding Honduras to the World Cup for the first time and becoming the pride of an often-overlooked Central American nation. Now, on this chilly Friday in September 1985, he finds himself once again on the precipice of greatness: a victory tomorrow afternoon against Canada — a land where hockey skates are far more common than soccer cleats — will send his team to Mexico ’86.

“You have to understand that in Honduras, soccer is the most important thing in life,” Ucles explains to those in attendance. “There will be no movement in the streets during our game. If we win, there will be joy, and everyone will come running into the streets. If we lose… well, it will be very bad. They may come running into the streets, but they will probably be looking for me.”

The stress Ucles expresses is apparent. One of the reporters surrounding him later describes the signs of stress evident on his face: dark patches under his eyes, a visage that “speaks of a thousand fears.”

“The temptation,” the writer continues, “is to offer him a cigarette and a blindfold.”

Behind Ucles, players do their best to deal with the stress on their own terms. Just a day before this decisive match, the Hondurans hold their final training session in a gymnasium, hardly an ideal setting. They were driven indoors by the weather outside — a blustery, cold, rain-swept scene that looked like something out of an 1800s oil painting, or a whaling epic. This type of weather simply does not exist in Honduras.

Just down the street, Canada’s national team is running through its own training session. They are pigs in mud, slipping and sliding on the roughed-up playing surface at King George V Field. It’s a bandbox of a stadium that locals affectionately call “The Rock” — a facility framed on two sides by a pair of graveyards and on another by a penitentiary. 

Few of them honestly expect to be here, either: after having beaten the Hondurans in Tegucigalpa and defeating Costa Rica a week earlier, Canada needs only a draw to secure the country’s first trip to the World Cup. And it’s not as though Canada is completely devoid of talent. The players here consider themselves a kind of golden generation, especially the older vets who’d come up during the halcyon days of the North American Soccer League. They’d fallen only one point shy of qualifying for the World Cup in 1982, the one in which Ucles made his name.

Yet the last couple of years has been rough on the Canadians, with their federation on the brink of bankruptcy. The NASL — the only top-flight league in North America — folded just a year ago, and only a couple of players had been able to catch on in Europe. The rest play in the Major Indoor Soccer League or in various regional semi-pro circuits while working odd jobs on the side. Canada even has a handful of full-fledged amateurs on the field, something that’s almost unthinkable in modern times.

The choice of venue at first seems like proof of how little this game matters to the Canadian public, relative to the Hondurans. But it’s actually more calculated, a shrewd decision made by the Canadian federation after countless games played in Central America’s sweltering heat and humidity, at altitude and with inexplicably early start times. After decades of playing nice, the Canadians — in their own, incredibly polite way — have decided to play dirty for a change. 

Standing off to the side under an umbrella at training that day is Jim Fleming, the president of the Canadian Soccer Association. Fleming is the man who has kept the program alive during these turbulent times. He’s spent the whole year leading up to the game fundraising; a year earlier, he’d helped land a crucial partnership with Molson, the nation’s largest brewery — but that keg had been kicked; Molson cut off the tap and refused to add any more money. 

If Canada qualified for the World Cup, the federation would stand to make up to $1 million due to television revenue-sharing from FIFA alone. If Canada failed, for starters, it would owe the government of Newfoundland $250,000 for putting on this event; beyond that, Fleming preferred not to imagine. For him, the decision to play the game in St. John’s is an act of desperation as much as anything else, a willingness to do whatever it takes, to pursue every little advantage, to get his team over the line.

“Whatever (other teams can) do to us,” recalls Canada goalkeeper Tino Lettieri, “remember, we play in Canada. We can play in any type of weather we want, and you’re not going to like it. In Newfoundland, I remember seeing those guys shivering. Well, you guys are going to get what you deserve. … It was like going to Lambeau Field.”

Not quite. The Rock has a maximum capacity of 5,000 in what’s essentially a public park in one of Canada’s most remote and unique provinces. Yet somehow, this, of all places, is about to play host to the most decisive victory in the history of the Canadian men’s national soccer team. 

The view inside the Energy Room at George Pakos’ house. (Courtesy George Pakos)

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George Pakos sits in the basement of his home in Victoria, British Columbia, leaning back in an office chair in what he calls his “energy room,” gazing at one of his most treasured keepsakes: a flag that hangs on the wall.

There’s a story behind everything in this basement — every jersey, every ball, every photo — and the white flag from La Caldera is no different. During the run-up to Mexico ‘86, Pakos scaled the flagpole at the resort northwest of Mexico City where the team stayed, plucked the flag off its moorings and had it signed by the entire Canadian World Cup team. Forty years later, Pakos, perhaps Canada’s all-time most improbable soccer hero, reflects on the qualification series that changed his life, with undimmed awe and wonder in his voice.

Until the autumn of ’85, Pakos’ career path had been frustrated at every pivotal point. In 1974, when Pakos was 22, he hitchhiked around Europe with a friend, making a side trip to Munich specifically to catch a glimpse of a World Cup match. As confident as he was, it was difficult to picture himself down there on the field with the planet’s best players, even in his wildest dreams. He would go on to have a tryout with the Vancouver Whitecaps, but hurt his knee. He was a prolific goalscorer in leagues around his hometown of Victoria, but that had brought him little more than local fame. He made his living, even during the prime of his soccer career, in the quaintest of possible ways: reading water meters for the city of Victoria.

Pakos was, in many ways, the personification of the state of Canadian soccer in the mid-1980s, in the dark ages that came after the collapse of the NASL. His example was extreme, but he was far from the only player scrambling to make ends meet while trying to keep grander dreams alive. 

He thought he’d gotten his big break leading up to the 1984 Olympics, in which only amateurs were allowed. He earned a spot on the team in an open tryout and scored in multiple qualifiers. Then FIFA changed the rule just prior to the L.A. Games, allowing for pros to compete after all, bumping Pakos from the roster. The whole experience left him disillusioned, maybe even a little bitter. He told anybody who would listen that if Canada ever tried to call him in again, he’d tell national team coach Tony Waiters to “shove it where the sun don’t shine.” Only when Waiters actually did call in the early autumn of ’85, after one of his starting forwards got injured a week prior to the Honduras series, it sure didn’t take Pakos very long to swallow his pride.

“All I said was, ‘I’ll be there.’”

He hopped on a red-eye out of Vancouver the next night to link up with the team, embarking on the adventure of a lifetime. It speaks to his outsider status that along with the soccer gear he’d hastily packed, Pakos also brought along a 35mm camera to document the trip. And not just their various tourist activities — he even carried it with him onto the bench for the match itself, snapping photos of the packed stadium and of the action. Pakos’ hobby earned him some ribbing from the veteran pros on the team, who poked fun at  the wide-eyed yokel snapping away, but he didn’t much care. He was in his early 30s, finally living his dream.

In part, Pakos was so comfortable toting a camera around during Canada’s matches because he never expected to touch the playing field. But that changed in Tegucigalpa, when Waiters turned to Pakos in the second half and ordered him to sub in. “I put my camera down,” Pakos says, “and put my pads on.”

With fresh legs and a charge of adrenaline, Pakos was all over the place. In front of 45,000 jeering Honduran fans, the forward got started by clearing out a defender, sending him flying into the ad boards. Moments later, in the 58th minute, Pakos pounced onto a turnover. He smashed a 25-yard volley into the goal’s far side netting, silencing the crowd and sending his teammates into pandemonium. 

It was an enormous goal for the prospects of Canadian soccer. They could all feel it now, the path to their country’s first World Cup bid suddenly wide open in front of them. It wouldn’t come easy; Honduras was heavily favored coming in for a reason — Los Catrachos were defending champions of CONCACAF, and had never lost to the Canadians. Yet Canada was experienced, in its own way — it had been this close before, and its players were resilient for a number of reasons. 

Plus, the Canadians were built to defend a lead. Waiters was respected more than he was beloved, the type of coach multiple players refer to as “no-nonsense” and “old school.” His training sessions were fairly straightforward and rudimentary — understanding his team wasn’t the most technically adept ball-movers, he ran his players into the ground to improve their fitness and practiced countless set-piece rehearsals — but they also constructed a side that got the absolute most out of the talent they had. 

“He gave us a way of playing that I think suited us as being more athletic, more physical than most of the teams that we would play against,” Canada defender Ian Bridge says. “We were not as technically gifted as most of the Central American or Mexican teams but we were bigger, stronger, faster. That’s what our pressing game was based on; we would press, we were a fairly basic, direct team in attacking play. We didn’t apologize for that and we had the players that could play those roles.”

After Pakos’ goal hit the back of the net, they retreated into a defensive shell and trusted one another as Honduras attacked with increasing desperation.

“I had a great relationship with all of the defenders,” Lettieri says. “It was a domino effect: if I shouted, the defensemen shouted, all the way up to the forwards. Keep everything in line. Keep it tight. No mistakes.”

At long last, the final whistle came: 1-0, Canada. In the locker room afterwards, Waiters apologized to Pakos for not bringing him into the team sooner. Pakos agreed with him, then smiled, magnanimous in his first brush with glory. Around the room, the players were proud but exhausted after their long afternoon in the Central American heat. They were all too aware that the job was only half done — and yet for the decisive match, they would have their own brand of home-field advantage.

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Richardson Smith has his own memories surrounding Honduras’ visit to Canada and his experience playing for his national team during a decade-long stretch in the ’80s and ’90s. In 1985, Smith was a hopeful 22-year-old midfielder, part of a generation of Honduras players keen to build on the country’s improbable run to the ’82 World Cup.

They had reason for hope. The Honduras team that arrived in Newfoundland was well-constructed, technically sound and played some of the most attractive soccer in the region — the type of possession-oriented approach more commonly associated with a European side. 

“It was lovely,” remembers Smith, now a 58-year-old coach in San Jose, Calif. “We had all these players with varied characteristics — speed and power … the ability to combine through midfield, and then tremendous players on the wings, as well. It was a fantastic team, really well put-together, with a base of players that had played in the World Cup in Spain in 1982, and then a bunch of young players who were coming up at that moment — (Antonio) Zapata, Danilo ‘El Pollo’ Galindo and I.”

The Hondurans departed for Newfoundland on a high. The 1-0 home loss to Canada was still relatively fresh on their minds, but they’d washed much of that disappointment away by upsetting Costa Rica 3-1 a couple of weeks later, a victory that pushed them to the brink of qualification. A victory against the Canadians — a team they were entirely capable of beating — would send them to Mexico once again. 

Whatever visions they had of Mexico — stadiums like soccer cathedrals, with lush grass and thousands of sun-drenched worshippers — evaporated quickly when their team’s plane began its descent into Newfoundland. It was an alien landscape.

“I had to look at a map to see where this place was,” says Smith. “And we’re arriving there, and we look down and we see entire patches of these fields covered with ice. They were clearing chunks of ice off the field. For us, it was just truly strange. None of us had ever experienced that; many of us had never really had the opportunity to travel outside of Honduras very much. It was just shocking, honestly.”

Years later, so much of what Smith and his teammates remember about their visit to Newfoundland has little to nothing to do with the match itself. Instead, they talk about the worry creeping in. In this strange land, Chelato Ucles and his charges were left with little else to do but worry — about expectations, and consequences. Smith, who in 1996 would retire from the national team after his home was attacked by a gang of angry fans, speaks plainly about the difference in the stakes for the Canadian and Honduran players.

“For us, for the (Honduras) national team, to lose a game was practically like losing your life,” says Smith, the stress of it all still apparent all these years later. “More than anything, because we had such high hopes to get to our second World Cup — for us, when we thought about the idea of losing that game to Canada, and thought about the fact that we wouldn’t qualify for the World Cup, it was something truly catastrophic. In Honduras, they take these qualifiers very, very seriously.”

That underlying dread is easier to identify in retrospect. In the moment, they retained confidence and swagger when they stepped off the plane. They were the ones with World Cup experience, after all, and were backed by a soccer-mad nation. They played with style and panache, with none of this “lump the ball forward” nonsense that had been so enthusiastically embraced by their North American rivals. This was just Canada, after all, and hindsight works both ways — the mind game of hosting the match in such a remote locale might’ve come across as cheap and desperate, had things played out differently.

And besides, how hard could it be for a bunch of seasoned pros to win a game in a public park? 

Waiting for kickoff at King George V Field. (Peter Robinson – PA Images via Getty Images)

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St. John’s is the easternmost city in North America, meaning that at dawn on Sept. 14, 1985 — match day — the sun’s rays touched down here before on any other city on the continent. Signal Hill, backed right up against the Atlantic Ocean, lit up first; the downtown row-houses, known as Jellybean Row due to the variety of their bright colors, looked brilliant in the morning light. At some point in there, the sky over The Rock turned from dark to orange to blue. After raining the previous day, conditions were a bit less awful than anticipated — 14 degrees celsius, a bit overcast. One can only imagine the chagrin of the Canadian organizers.

There was a real buzz around the sleepy city of approximately 100,000 ahead of the biggest sporting event in its history, the excitement having gradually built since the Canadian team arrived a few days prior. 

“People were watching training, people were at the hotel,” Canada midfielder David Norman says. “People wanted to see us, and they wanted us to know that they were behind us and that this would be a real treat for them and a real moment in their sporting history.”

Even within a nation as broad and as diverse as Canada, Newfoundlanders have always had a certain reputation as a world apart. They’re geographically isolated, Canada’s right foot kicking out into the Atlantic. They even have their own time zone: Newfoundland Time is half-an-hour ahead of Atlantic Standard, the province and its environs perpetually 30 minutes out of step with the rest of the country. 

“If you talk to someone from Newfoundland, it’s like they’re from Scotland or something,” Pakos says. “They’ve got their own little accent going on over there. They’re just a bunch of characters. They’re a different breed. Like on the west coast here, we’re a little more open. They’re a little bit tighter, smaller communities, lots of fishing villages.” 

Bizarre as it seemed, the selection of St. John’s wasn’t the result of Canadian federation officials throwing darts at a map through a strong crossbreeze. There was the “two can play that game” revenge factor for the years of lunchtime kickoffs in Central America, sure. 

Six months before this encounter, Tony Waiters was in a meeting room, trying to hash out the schedule for the final round of qualifying with representatives from Honduras and Costa Rica. Canada and Costa Rica both had financial and logistical issues that prevented them from keeping their national teams together throughout the year, so they favored playing these qualifiers in the fall, which would give them more time to prepare. Honduras, on the other hand, had no such problem: its government was fully funding the national team, paying the salaries of every player and coach. In the end, a compromise was reached — but Waiters wasn’t happy. Just before the meeting ended, he turned to the Honduras federation’s representative and offered a parting blow: you’ll be traveling 8,000 miles to play us.

The logistical nightmare of getting to St. John’s from Honduras was also, shall we say, a happy accident; a large group of Honduran traveling fans ended up buying flights to Saint John, New Brunswick, some 1,800 miles away, and ended up marooned there and unable to change course in time for the game. Combine that with the limited capacity of King George V Stadium and the locals’ fierce sense of community, and this would be as partisan a crowd as the Canadian national team had ever played in front of.

The Canadians would need all the support they could get: with Mexico granted an automatic berth to the World Cup as hosts, only one other team from CONCACAF would qualify for the tournament. Win or tie, and the Canadians would be crowned champions of the region and handed a berth to the tournament. Lose, and they’d remain home to mope for another four years.

“It was unlike what we would have had in any other city, at least in any other major market,” defender Bob Lenarduzzi says. “I think there would have been interest, and we probably would have put a larger chunk of people in the stadium. But (in St. John’s), this was almost theirs. And you just got the feeling that they were welcoming the opportunity to be a part of it.”

The sensation was confirmed the day of the match, when the players arrived at a stadium already starting to fill with hundreds of locals who greeted the team bus and cheered them into the home locker room.  

“As the game got closer, they were louder and louder,” Pakos said. “It was awesome. Awesome. Even though it was only a small crowd, they made the noise of 10,000 people.”

Not only does footage of this full match somehow still exist, but also a Good Samaritan named Rick A. uploaded it to YouTube last May. And even if you don’t have an hour and 57 minutes to spare on a 36-year-old soccer match, it’s worth clicking through for a few moments just to get a sense for the scene Pakos describes. It’s almost incomprehensible, given how much the sport and the business of soccer has progressed in North America in the decades since. It’s one thing to hear King George V described as a glorified high-school stadium, it’s another to see the national broadcast pan around the makeshift bleachers and the standing-room-only crowd pushed tight against every sideline. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh1AoX4GMRI&t=272s

 

“The field was tiny, man,” remembers Smith, the Honduran midfielder. “It was a stadium that, well, it just wasn’t the type of stadium you see games played in nowadays. I remember that from the field to the stands, there were maybe (10 feet.) It was tiny. The fans were extremely involved. They obviously supported Canada rabidly, but to be honest they were even cheering for us at times. In that time soccer wasn’t really commercialized, popularized in Canada, so at times they were even cheering for us. But no doubt — Canada really took advantage of that crowd and that stadium and the field in it.”

Pakos, who in the aftermath of his goal in Tegucigalpa had been declared Canada’s most famous water-meter reader, was this time named to the starting lineup. It took him just 15 minutes to add to his legend. Canada won a corner kick, one of those set pieces Waiters so relentlessly drilled them on. A cross was played in from the left, then headed down by Bridge. Pakos, ever the opportunist, was in the right place at the right time to finish from close range. 

Pakos threw his arms into the air, jumped into the chest of teammate Randy Samuel and went completely limp, as if his body was struggling to process the enormity of what happened. The crowd went wild, a sea of frantically waving Canadian flags. Somewhere in that mass of humanity stood Fleming, cheering wildly, his exhilaration combined with more than a little bit of relief.

Needing only a draw to qualify, again Canada played to its strengths. Formidable with a lead, it slowed the game down and relied on its hard-won discipline. The layout of King George V Stadium provided yet another advantage. 

“This was back in the day when you basically just played with one ball,” Bridge says. “I remember lumping the ball over the stands a few times into the parking lot just for time-wasting, because we’d gotten an early lead. Towards the end of the first half I quite enjoyed kicking it into the parking lot.”

There were still some scares and twists to come. Bridge tweaked his knee right before halftime and was forced to spend the second half as a bystander. He couldn’t stand the tension on the sidelines so he stayed in the locker room, nursing a handful of beers in the shower — “I think I might’ve used up all of the hot water,” he jokes. He gulped them down quicker after Honduras tied the score at 1-1 in the 49th minute. There was still plenty of time for it all to go south, but Igor Vrablich settled the nerves by restoring Canada’s lead in the 61st.

The second goal seemed to break Honduras’ spirit. From there on out, the celebration was on, building to a crescendo at the final whistle, at which point thousands of fans sprinted onto the field to revel with their new heroes. Waiters was mobbed by his assistant coaches; Samuels joined his teammate Paul James in a lap of honor, snagging a Canadian flag from a fan. Even the Hondurans, despondent in defeat, were helped from the pitch by the locals. Honduran forward Porfirio Betancourt, who had scored Honduras’ equalizer early in the second half, was embraced and comforted by a pair of young fans.

The CONCACAF Championship trophy, first hoisted by captain Bruce Wilson, was passed around from teammate to teammate. It landed in the hands of Lettieri, the “Bird Man,” given that moniker for his love of tropical birds (and his habit of tying a stuffed one to the goal netting behind him). It was lifted by Carl Valentine, who in his first international appearance for Canada had battled a brutal case of the flu and ended up assisting on both Canadian goals. It landed in the hands of Bridge, the team’s rock on the backline, and Lenarduzzi, his fellow defender, who had been waiting for this moment since his debut with the national team in 1973. 

And finally, it reached the hands of Canada’s most famous meter-reader, Georgie Pakos. He gripped the trophy tight, kissed it and thrust it aloft, much to the glee of the partisan crowd.

The party truly got going when the players reached the locker room, and it continued onto the team bus, where Fleming finally broke down and revealed how much all of this meant both to him and to the federation.

“He was so elated,” Bridge says, “almost to the point of just … he wanted to hug all of the guys. I remember him getting on the bus after the game, he was beside himself. I didn’t know the pressure he was under at the time. You never hear about that as a player — but the more I’ve learned about it, the more you realize the federation was stretched kind of thin and didn’t have a whole lot of funding.”

Those worries were behind all of them now. Having finally reached such a milestone, the players were given permission to cut loose, with what felt like the entire city of St. John’s more than happy to oblige.

“We were basically given the keys to the city,” says Wilson. “We were told by the CSA, ‘Go out, have fun. Remember, you are representing your country.’ But everyone looked after us.” 

This was long before social media and smartphones, and most of the players tell the story of that night with sly smiles that suggest that the full truth has been lost to time. They vaguely remember ending up at the mayor’s house — or was it some other local dignitary — after the pubs closed, a detail that would be so outlandish to be ridiculous pretty much everywhere else, but it makes sense given where they were.

“We were the heroes of St. John’s,” Pakos says, “partying and drinking. I didn’t mind a pint back then. That night … the (locals) love a pint, too.”

Waiters being Waiters, despite the encouragement to enjoy themselves, the players were expected to report onto the bus — an old, beat-up school bus — for the airport at 8 a.m. The collection of players who filed into that vehicle looked very much the worse for wear. Amidst the headaches and bleary eyes, Fleming hopped aboard. The night before, the Canadian team had awarded him the match ball. Now, he’d deflated it, and was wearing it as a sombrero of sorts.

Bridge, bum knee and all, boarded soon after. By then, his anesthesia of choice — Molson — had worn off. 

“I didn’t feel my knee that night,” he says, “but I sure did the next day.”

Fans celebrate at The Rock. (Peter Robinson – PA Images via Getty Images)

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In 1986, Canada’s plucky bunch took the stage at arguably the greatest World Cup ever played: the tournament of Maradona at the Azteca and the Hand of God. Predictably enough, they didn’t go far — three losses in group-stage play, no goals scored. For so many of the players on that team, though, that tournament was less about advancing and more about soaking it all in, and celebrating having come that far. David Norman, the squad’s dependable defensive midfielder, spent the last five minutes of Canada’s opener against France shadowing French legend Michel Platini, well out of position. He wanted his jersey. And he got it. 

George Pakos got Platini’s captain’s armband, another relic on the wall in his “energy room.” Pakos, and the rest of the Canadians, returned home to relative anonymity.

“I think if I was an Italian, or a Brazilian, or a Brit, it would’ve changed my life much more than as a Canadian,” says Bridge. “After the World Cup in ‘86, I went back to Switzerland, and people were much more impressed in Switzerland that I’d played in the World Cup than they’d have been if I’d gone into downtown Victoria and told people.”

“Well, for me personally, I’m not a big poser or anything like that,” says Pakos. “I’ve just got a lot of good friends. I could’ve been the other way and been a snob and all that. But at the end of the day, I was an amateur working for the city of Victoria. It changed me, I would say, to be a bit of a (local) legend. I’ve been so fortunate. I’ve been in the Greater Victoria Sports Hall of Fame. I just got inducted into the BC Soccer Hall of Fame in 2020. But I just look at that as accolades, and I never bring that up with any of my friends.”

Pakos knew his days playing for the national team were likely over after the tournament. At 34, he was already in the twilight of his career. But for Bridge and others, the future seemed bright. Bridge thought he’d play in another pair of World Cups — Italia ’90, and of course the ’94 World Cup just over the border in the United States. 

But that was never to be. Down on funding and lacking a true top-flight, professional league, the Canadian program floundered, failing to even advance to the final round of CONCACAF qualifying in 1990. Four years later, more heartbreak: Canada failed to qualify for the ’94 cup in a penalty shootout loss to Australia, their opponents in a two-game qualification playoff, winning in Edmonton but losing on penalties in Sydney. For decades, they’ve barely flirted with success. That may well change in 2022, as a team of young Canadian stars — a new golden generation filled with players who compete in Europe’s top leagues, standouts like Alphonso Davies and Jonathan David — currently leads CONCACAF World Cup qualifying, ahead of the U.S. and Mexico. 

For a generation afterwards, many Canada national team members wished the CSA would’ve employed the same attitude they had in 1985, choosing to host games in the same kind of hostile environments they were subject to in Central America.

For Honduras, the devastation was swift and immediate. Richardson Smith returned home with his teammates and faced the hostility he knew was coming: being followed in the streets by angry fans, the taunts, the heckles. Honduras’ entire program pretty much fell apart. That experienced core, who had guided them to glory in 1982, retired, leaving a collection of fresh-faced youngsters as heirs apparent. It didn’t really work out that way.

“It was a group that would never have another chance,” says Smith. “After that loss to Canada, we were sort of left without an identity. All of us who were left over, those of us who were tasked with leading the next generation of football in Honduras, we weren’t capable of it. We weren’t experienced enough to lead a new group through the next qualification cycle.” 

Smith’s disappointment, and pain, is apparent in his voice.

“We lost a lot of games.”

Los Catrachos would finally emerge from decades away from the World Cup when they qualified in 2010, and they’ve remained perennially competitive ever since, with the exception of this current go-around. Toward the end of our conversation, Smith marvels at what’s become of the Canadian team. They used to just lump the ball forward, he says; now, they’re a technically gifted side with players playing at the very highest levels. 

George Pakos has been paying close attention to Canada’s recent exploits, as well. He and a few friends will wander down to a pub in Victoria and take in Thursday night’s match against Honduras. Pakos will probably get recognized by a couple of old-timers, eager to hear him tell war stories about getting pelted with rocks during away games and roaming the frozen tundra at home. One of them might even break out into song in what was a popular chant at Canada games during Pakos’ glory days, sung to the tune of “Guantanamera.” 

After all these years, Pakos belts it out without hesitation when asked.

“There’s only one Georgie Pakos…. There’s only one Georgie Pakos…”

[red card]

2 hours ago, CTD Canuck said:

‘The Rock,’ the water-meter reader and Molson anesthesia: How Canada qualified for its first World Cup

 

By Pablo Maurer, Matt Pentz, Joshua Kloke 25 

 

Honduras men’s national team head coach Chelato Ucles stands inside a dimly-lit gymnasium in St. John’s, Newfoundland, surrounded by a cluster of reporters. He never expected to find himself here: not in this situation; not in this small-town basketball gym on the absolute edge of the continent.

Ucles has tasted his share of glory. In 1982, he led his players to the pinnacle of sport, guiding Honduras to the World Cup for the first time and becoming the pride of an often-overlooked Central American nation. Now, on this chilly Friday in September 1985, he finds himself once again on the precipice of greatness: a victory tomorrow afternoon against Canada — a land where hockey skates are far more common than soccer cleats — will send his team to Mexico ’86.

“You have to understand that in Honduras, soccer is the most important thing in life,” Ucles explains to those in attendance. “There will be no movement in the streets during our game. If we win, there will be joy, and everyone will come running into the streets. If we lose… well, it will be very bad. They may come running into the streets, but they will probably be looking for me.”

The stress Ucles expresses is apparent. One of the reporters surrounding him later describes the signs of stress evident on his face: dark patches under his eyes, a visage that “speaks of a thousand fears.”

“The temptation,” the writer continues, “is to offer him a cigarette and a blindfold.”

Behind Ucles, players do their best to deal with the stress on their own terms. Just a day before this decisive match, the Hondurans hold their final training session in a gymnasium, hardly an ideal setting. They were driven indoors by the weather outside — a blustery, cold, rain-swept scene that looked like something out of an 1800s oil painting, or a whaling epic. This type of weather simply does not exist in Honduras.

Just down the street, Canada’s national team is running through its own training session. They are pigs in mud, slipping and sliding on the roughed-up playing surface at King George V Field. It’s a bandbox of a stadium that locals affectionately call “The Rock” — a facility framed on two sides by a pair of graveyards and on another by a penitentiary. 

Few of them honestly expect to be here, either: after having beaten the Hondurans in Tegucigalpa and defeating Costa Rica a week earlier, Canada needs only a draw to secure the country’s first trip to the World Cup. And it’s not as though Canada is completely devoid of talent. The players here consider themselves a kind of golden generation, especially the older vets who’d come up during the halcyon days of the North American Soccer League. They’d fallen only one point shy of qualifying for the World Cup in 1982, the one in which Ucles made his name.

Yet the last couple of years has been rough on the Canadians, with their federation on the brink of bankruptcy. The NASL — the only top-flight league in North America — folded just a year ago, and only a couple of players had been able to catch on in Europe. The rest play in the Major Indoor Soccer League or in various regional semi-pro circuits while working odd jobs on the side. Canada even has a handful of full-fledged amateurs on the field, something that’s almost unthinkable in modern times.

The choice of venue at first seems like proof of how little this game matters to the Canadian public, relative to the Hondurans. But it’s actually more calculated, a shrewd decision made by the Canadian federation after countless games played in Central America’s sweltering heat and humidity, at altitude and with inexplicably early start times. After decades of playing nice, the Canadians — in their own, incredibly polite way — have decided to play dirty for a change. 

Standing off to the side under an umbrella at training that day is Jim Fleming, the president of the Canadian Soccer Association. Fleming is the man who has kept the program alive during these turbulent times. He’s spent the whole year leading up to the game fundraising; a year earlier, he’d helped land a crucial partnership with Molson, the nation’s largest brewery — but that keg had been kicked; Molson cut off the tap and refused to add any more money. 

If Canada qualified for the World Cup, the federation would stand to make up to $1 million due to television revenue-sharing from FIFA alone. If Canada failed, for starters, it would owe the government of Newfoundland $250,000 for putting on this event; beyond that, Fleming preferred not to imagine. For him, the decision to play the game in St. John’s is an act of desperation as much as anything else, a willingness to do whatever it takes, to pursue every little advantage, to get his team over the line.

“Whatever (other teams can) do to us,” recalls Canada goalkeeper Tino Lettieri, “remember, we play in Canada. We can play in any type of weather we want, and you’re not going to like it. In Newfoundland, I remember seeing those guys shivering. Well, you guys are going to get what you deserve. … It was like going to Lambeau Field.”

Not quite. The Rock has a maximum capacity of 5,000 in what’s essentially a public park in one of Canada’s most remote and unique provinces. Yet somehow, this, of all places, is about to play host to the most decisive victory in the history of the Canadian men’s national soccer team. 

 

The view inside the Energy Room at George Pakos’ house. (Courtesy George Pakos)

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George Pakos sits in the basement of his home in Victoria, British Columbia, leaning back in an office chair in what he calls his “energy room,” gazing at one of his most treasured keepsakes: a flag that hangs on the wall.

There’s a story behind everything in this basement — every jersey, every ball, every photo — and the white flag from La Caldera is no different. During the run-up to Mexico ‘86, Pakos scaled the flagpole at the resort northwest of Mexico City where the team stayed, plucked the flag off its moorings and had it signed by the entire Canadian World Cup team. Forty years later, Pakos, perhaps Canada’s all-time most improbable soccer hero, reflects on the qualification series that changed his life, with undimmed awe and wonder in his voice.

Until the autumn of ’85, Pakos’ career path had been frustrated at every pivotal point. In 1974, when Pakos was 22, he hitchhiked around Europe with a friend, making a side trip to Munich specifically to catch a glimpse of a World Cup match. As confident as he was, it was difficult to picture himself down there on the field with the planet’s best players, even in his wildest dreams. He would go on to have a tryout with the Vancouver Whitecaps, but hurt his knee. He was a prolific goalscorer in leagues around his hometown of Victoria, but that had brought him little more than local fame. He made his living, even during the prime of his soccer career, in the quaintest of possible ways: reading water meters for the city of Victoria.

Pakos was, in many ways, the personification of the state of Canadian soccer in the mid-1980s, in the dark ages that came after the collapse of the NASL. His example was extreme, but he was far from the only player scrambling to make ends meet while trying to keep grander dreams alive. 

He thought he’d gotten his big break leading up to the 1984 Olympics, in which only amateurs were allowed. He earned a spot on the team in an open tryout and scored in multiple qualifiers. Then FIFA changed the rule just prior to the L.A. Games, allowing for pros to compete after all, bumping Pakos from the roster. The whole experience left him disillusioned, maybe even a little bitter. He told anybody who would listen that if Canada ever tried to call him in again, he’d tell national team coach Tony Waiters to “shove it where the sun don’t shine.” Only when Waiters actually did call in the early autumn of ’85, after one of his starting forwards got injured a week prior to the Honduras series, it sure didn’t take Pakos very long to swallow his pride.

“All I said was, ‘I’ll be there.’”

He hopped on a red-eye out of Vancouver the next night to link up with the team, embarking on the adventure of a lifetime. It speaks to his outsider status that along with the soccer gear he’d hastily packed, Pakos also brought along a 35mm camera to document the trip. And not just their various tourist activities — he even carried it with him onto the bench for the match itself, snapping photos of the packed stadium and of the action. Pakos’ hobby earned him some ribbing from the veteran pros on the team, who poked fun at  the wide-eyed yokel snapping away, but he didn’t much care. He was in his early 30s, finally living his dream.

In part, Pakos was so comfortable toting a camera around during Canada’s matches because he never expected to touch the playing field. But that changed in Tegucigalpa, when Waiters turned to Pakos in the second half and ordered him to sub in. “I put my camera down,” Pakos says, “and put my pads on.”

With fresh legs and a charge of adrenaline, Pakos was all over the place. In front of 45,000 jeering Honduran fans, the forward got started by clearing out a defender, sending him flying into the ad boards. Moments later, in the 58th minute, Pakos pounced onto a turnover. He smashed a 25-yard volley into the goal’s far side netting, silencing the crowd and sending his teammates into pandemonium. 

It was an enormous goal for the prospects of Canadian soccer. They could all feel it now, the path to their country’s first World Cup bid suddenly wide open in front of them. It wouldn’t come easy; Honduras was heavily favored coming in for a reason — Los Catrachos were defending champions of CONCACAF, and had never lost to the Canadians. Yet Canada was experienced, in its own way — it had been this close before, and its players were resilient for a number of reasons. 

Plus, the Canadians were built to defend a lead. Waiters was respected more than he was beloved, the type of coach multiple players refer to as “no-nonsense” and “old school.” His training sessions were fairly straightforward and rudimentary — understanding his team wasn’t the most technically adept ball-movers, he ran his players into the ground to improve their fitness and practiced countless set-piece rehearsals — but they also constructed a side that got the absolute most out of the talent they had. 

“He gave us a way of playing that I think suited us as being more athletic, more physical than most of the teams that we would play against,” Canada defender Ian Bridge says. “We were not as technically gifted as most of the Central American or Mexican teams but we were bigger, stronger, faster. That’s what our pressing game was based on; we would press, we were a fairly basic, direct team in attacking play. We didn’t apologize for that and we had the players that could play those roles.”

After Pakos’ goal hit the back of the net, they retreated into a defensive shell and trusted one another as Honduras attacked with increasing desperation.

“I had a great relationship with all of the defenders,” Lettieri says. “It was a domino effect: if I shouted, the defensemen shouted, all the way up to the forwards. Keep everything in line. Keep it tight. No mistakes.”

At long last, the final whistle came: 1-0, Canada. In the locker room afterwards, Waiters apologized to Pakos for not bringing him into the team sooner. Pakos agreed with him, then smiled, magnanimous in his first brush with glory. Around the room, the players were proud but exhausted after their long afternoon in the Central American heat. They were all too aware that the job was only half done — and yet for the decisive match, they would have their own brand of home-field advantage.

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Richardson Smith has his own memories surrounding Honduras’ visit to Canada and his experience playing for his national team during a decade-long stretch in the ’80s and ’90s. In 1985, Smith was a hopeful 22-year-old midfielder, part of a generation of Honduras players keen to build on the country’s improbable run to the ’82 World Cup.

They had reason for hope. The Honduras team that arrived in Newfoundland was well-constructed, technically sound and played some of the most attractive soccer in the region — the type of possession-oriented approach more commonly associated with a European side. 

“It was lovely,” remembers Smith, now a 58-year-old coach in San Jose, Calif. “We had all these players with varied characteristics — speed and power … the ability to combine through midfield, and then tremendous players on the wings, as well. It was a fantastic team, really well put-together, with a base of players that had played in the World Cup in Spain in 1982, and then a bunch of young players who were coming up at that moment — (Antonio) Zapata, Danilo ‘El Pollo’ Galindo and I.”

The Hondurans departed for Newfoundland on a high. The 1-0 home loss to Canada was still relatively fresh on their minds, but they’d washed much of that disappointment away by upsetting Costa Rica 3-1 a couple of weeks later, a victory that pushed them to the brink of qualification. A victory against the Canadians — a team they were entirely capable of beating — would send them to Mexico once again. 

Whatever visions they had of Mexico — stadiums like soccer cathedrals, with lush grass and thousands of sun-drenched worshippers — evaporated quickly when their team’s plane began its descent into Newfoundland. It was an alien landscape.

“I had to look at a map to see where this place was,” says Smith. “And we’re arriving there, and we look down and we see entire patches of these fields covered with ice. They were clearing chunks of ice off the field. For us, it was just truly strange. None of us had ever experienced that; many of us had never really had the opportunity to travel outside of Honduras very much. It was just shocking, honestly.”

Years later, so much of what Smith and his teammates remember about their visit to Newfoundland has little to nothing to do with the match itself. Instead, they talk about the worry creeping in. In this strange land, Chelato Ucles and his charges were left with little else to do but worry — about expectations, and consequences. Smith, who in 1996 would retire from the national team after his home was attacked by a gang of angry fans, speaks plainly about the difference in the stakes for the Canadian and Honduran players.

“For us, for the (Honduras) national team, to lose a game was practically like losing your life,” says Smith, the stress of it all still apparent all these years later. “More than anything, because we had such high hopes to get to our second World Cup — for us, when we thought about the idea of losing that game to Canada, and thought about the fact that we wouldn’t qualify for the World Cup, it was something truly catastrophic. In Honduras, they take these qualifiers very, very seriously.”

That underlying dread is easier to identify in retrospect. In the moment, they retained confidence and swagger when they stepped off the plane. They were the ones with World Cup experience, after all, and were backed by a soccer-mad nation. They played with style and panache, with none of this “lump the ball forward” nonsense that had been so enthusiastically embraced by their North American rivals. This was just Canada, after all, and hindsight works both ways — the mind game of hosting the match in such a remote locale might’ve come across as cheap and desperate, had things played out differently.

And besides, how hard could it be for a bunch of seasoned pros to win a game in a public park? 

 

Waiting for kickoff at King George V Field. (Peter Robinson – PA Images via Getty Images)

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St. John’s is the easternmost city in North America, meaning that at dawn on Sept. 14, 1985 — match day — the sun’s rays touched down here before on any other city on the continent. Signal Hill, backed right up against the Atlantic Ocean, lit up first; the downtown row-houses, known as Jellybean Row due to the variety of their bright colors, looked brilliant in the morning light. At some point in there, the sky over The Rock turned from dark to orange to blue. After raining the previous day, conditions were a bit less awful than anticipated — 14 degrees celsius, a bit overcast. One can only imagine the chagrin of the Canadian organizers.

There was a real buzz around the sleepy city of approximately 100,000 ahead of the biggest sporting event in its history, the excitement having gradually built since the Canadian team arrived a few days prior. 

“People were watching training, people were at the hotel,” Canada midfielder David Norman says. “People wanted to see us, and they wanted us to know that they were behind us and that this would be a real treat for them and a real moment in their sporting history.”

Even within a nation as broad and as diverse as Canada, Newfoundlanders have always had a certain reputation as a world apart. They’re geographically isolated, Canada’s right foot kicking out into the Atlantic. They even have their own time zone: Newfoundland Time is half-an-hour ahead of Atlantic Standard, the province and its environs perpetually 30 minutes out of step with the rest of the country. 

“If you talk to someone from Newfoundland, it’s like they’re from Scotland or something,” Pakos says. “They’ve got their own little accent going on over there. They’re just a bunch of characters. They’re a different breed. Like on the west coast here, we’re a little more open. They’re a little bit tighter, smaller communities, lots of fishing villages.” 

Bizarre as it seemed, the selection of St. John’s wasn’t the result of Canadian federation officials throwing darts at a map through a strong crossbreeze. There was the “two can play that game” revenge factor for the years of lunchtime kickoffs in Central America, sure. 

Six months before this encounter, Tony Waiters was in a meeting room, trying to hash out the schedule for the final round of qualifying with representatives from Honduras and Costa Rica. Canada and Costa Rica both had financial and logistical issues that prevented them from keeping their national teams together throughout the year, so they favored playing these qualifiers in the fall, which would give them more time to prepare. Honduras, on the other hand, had no such problem: its government was fully funding the national team, paying the salaries of every player and coach. In the end, a compromise was reached — but Waiters wasn’t happy. Just before the meeting ended, he turned to the Honduras federation’s representative and offered a parting blow: you’ll be traveling 8,000 miles to play us.

The logistical nightmare of getting to St. John’s from Honduras was also, shall we say, a happy accident; a large group of Honduran traveling fans ended up buying flights to Saint John, New Brunswick, some 1,800 miles away, and ended up marooned there and unable to change course in time for the game. Combine that with the limited capacity of King George V Stadium and the locals’ fierce sense of community, and this would be as partisan a crowd as the Canadian national team had ever played in front of.

The Canadians would need all the support they could get: with Mexico granted an automatic berth to the World Cup as hosts, only one other team from CONCACAF would qualify for the tournament. Win or tie, and the Canadians would be crowned champions of the region and handed a berth to the tournament. Lose, and they’d remain home to mope for another four years.

“It was unlike what we would have had in any other city, at least in any other major market,” defender Bob Lenarduzzi says. “I think there would have been interest, and we probably would have put a larger chunk of people in the stadium. But (in St. John’s), this was almost theirs. And you just got the feeling that they were welcoming the opportunity to be a part of it.”

The sensation was confirmed the day of the match, when the players arrived at a stadium already starting to fill with hundreds of locals who greeted the team bus and cheered them into the home locker room.  

“As the game got closer, they were louder and louder,” Pakos said. “It was awesome. Awesome. Even though it was only a small crowd, they made the noise of 10,000 people.”

Not only does footage of this full match somehow still exist, but also a Good Samaritan named Rick A. uploaded it to YouTube last May. And even if you don’t have an hour and 57 minutes to spare on a 36-year-old soccer match, it’s worth clicking through for a few moments just to get a sense for the scene Pakos describes. It’s almost incomprehensible, given how much the sport and the business of soccer has progressed in North America in the decades since. It’s one thing to hear King George V described as a glorified high-school stadium, it’s another to see the national broadcast pan around the makeshift bleachers and the standing-room-only crowd pushed tight against every sideline. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh1AoX4GMRI&t=272s

 

“The field was tiny, man,” remembers Smith, the Honduran midfielder. “It was a stadium that, well, it just wasn’t the type of stadium you see games played in nowadays. I remember that from the field to the stands, there were maybe (10 feet.) It was tiny. The fans were extremely involved. They obviously supported Canada rabidly, but to be honest they were even cheering for us at times. In that time soccer wasn’t really commercialized, popularized in Canada, so at times they were even cheering for us. But no doubt — Canada really took advantage of that crowd and that stadium and the field in it.”

Pakos, who in the aftermath of his goal in Tegucigalpa had been declared Canada’s most famous water-meter reader, was this time named to the starting lineup. It took him just 15 minutes to add to his legend. Canada won a corner kick, one of those set pieces Waiters so relentlessly drilled them on. A cross was played in from the left, then headed down by Bridge. Pakos, ever the opportunist, was in the right place at the right time to finish from close range. 

Pakos threw his arms into the air, jumped into the chest of teammate Randy Samuel and went completely limp, as if his body was struggling to process the enormity of what happened. The crowd went wild, a sea of frantically waving Canadian flags. Somewhere in that mass of humanity stood Fleming, cheering wildly, his exhilaration combined with more than a little bit of relief.

Needing only a draw to qualify, again Canada played to its strengths. Formidable with a lead, it slowed the game down and relied on its hard-won discipline. The layout of King George V Stadium provided yet another advantage. 

“This was back in the day when you basically just played with one ball,” Bridge says. “I remember lumping the ball over the stands a few times into the parking lot just for time-wasting, because we’d gotten an early lead. Towards the end of the first half I quite enjoyed kicking it into the parking lot.”

There were still some scares and twists to come. Bridge tweaked his knee right before halftime and was forced to spend the second half as a bystander. He couldn’t stand the tension on the sidelines so he stayed in the locker room, nursing a handful of beers in the shower — “I think I might’ve used up all of the hot water,” he jokes. He gulped them down quicker after Honduras tied the score at 1-1 in the 49th minute. There was still plenty of time for it all to go south, but Igor Vrablich settled the nerves by restoring Canada’s lead in the 61st.

The second goal seemed to break Honduras’ spirit. From there on out, the celebration was on, building to a crescendo at the final whistle, at which point thousands of fans sprinted onto the field to revel with their new heroes. Waiters was mobbed by his assistant coaches; Samuels joined his teammate Paul James in a lap of honor, snagging a Canadian flag from a fan. Even the Hondurans, despondent in defeat, were helped from the pitch by the locals. Honduran forward Porfirio Betancourt, who had scored Honduras’ equalizer early in the second half, was embraced and comforted by a pair of young fans.

The CONCACAF Championship trophy, first hoisted by captain Bruce Wilson, was passed around from teammate to teammate. It landed in the hands of Lettieri, the “Bird Man,” given that moniker for his love of tropical birds (and his habit of tying a stuffed one to the goal netting behind him). It was lifted by Carl Valentine, who in his first international appearance for Canada had battled a brutal case of the flu and ended up assisting on both Canadian goals. It landed in the hands of Bridge, the team’s rock on the backline, and Lenarduzzi, his fellow defender, who had been waiting for this moment since his debut with the national team in 1973. 

And finally, it reached the hands of Canada’s most famous meter-reader, Georgie Pakos. He gripped the trophy tight, kissed it and thrust it aloft, much to the glee of the partisan crowd.

The party truly got going when the players reached the locker room, and it continued onto the team bus, where Fleming finally broke down and revealed how much all of this meant both to him and to the federation.

“He was so elated,” Bridge says, “almost to the point of just … he wanted to hug all of the guys. I remember him getting on the bus after the game, he was beside himself. I didn’t know the pressure he was under at the time. You never hear about that as a player — but the more I’ve learned about it, the more you realize the federation was stretched kind of thin and didn’t have a whole lot of funding.”

Those worries were behind all of them now. Having finally reached such a milestone, the players were given permission to cut loose, with what felt like the entire city of St. John’s more than happy to oblige.

“We were basically given the keys to the city,” says Wilson. “We were told by the CSA, ‘Go out, have fun. Remember, you are representing your country.’ But everyone looked after us.” 

This was long before social media and smartphones, and most of the players tell the story of that night with sly smiles that suggest that the full truth has been lost to time. They vaguely remember ending up at the mayor’s house — or was it some other local dignitary — after the pubs closed, a detail that would be so outlandish to be ridiculous pretty much everywhere else, but it makes sense given where they were.

“We were the heroes of St. John’s,” Pakos says, “partying and drinking. I didn’t mind a pint back then. That night … the (locals) love a pint, too.”

Waiters being Waiters, despite the encouragement to enjoy themselves, the players were expected to report onto the bus — an old, beat-up school bus — for the airport at 8 a.m. The collection of players who filed into that vehicle looked very much the worse for wear. Amidst the headaches and bleary eyes, Fleming hopped aboard. The night before, the Canadian team had awarded him the match ball. Now, he’d deflated it, and was wearing it as a sombrero of sorts.

Bridge, bum knee and all, boarded soon after. By then, his anesthesia of choice — Molson — had worn off. 

“I didn’t feel my knee that night,” he says, “but I sure did the next day.”

 

Fans celebrate at The Rock. (Peter Robinson – PA Images via Getty Images)

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In 1986, Canada’s plucky bunch took the stage at arguably the greatest World Cup ever played: the tournament of Maradona at the Azteca and the Hand of God. Predictably enough, they didn’t go far — three losses in group-stage play, no goals scored. For so many of the players on that team, though, that tournament was less about advancing and more about soaking it all in, and celebrating having come that far. David Norman, the squad’s dependable defensive midfielder, spent the last five minutes of Canada’s opener against France shadowing French legend Michel Platini, well out of position. He wanted his jersey. And he got it. 

George Pakos got Platini’s captain’s armband, another relic on the wall in his “energy room.” Pakos, and the rest of the Canadians, returned home to relative anonymity.

“I think if I was an Italian, or a Brazilian, or a Brit, it would’ve changed my life much more than as a Canadian,” says Bridge. “After the World Cup in ‘86, I went back to Switzerland, and people were much more impressed in Switzerland that I’d played in the World Cup than they’d have been if I’d gone into downtown Victoria and told people.”

“Well, for me personally, I’m not a big poser or anything like that,” says Pakos. “I’ve just got a lot of good friends. I could’ve been the other way and been a snob and all that. But at the end of the day, I was an amateur working for the city of Victoria. It changed me, I would say, to be a bit of a (local) legend. I’ve been so fortunate. I’ve been in the Greater Victoria Sports Hall of Fame. I just got inducted into the BC Soccer Hall of Fame in 2020. But I just look at that as accolades, and I never bring that up with any of my friends.”

Pakos knew his days playing for the national team were likely over after the tournament. At 34, he was already in the twilight of his career. But for Bridge and others, the future seemed bright. Bridge thought he’d play in another pair of World Cups — Italia ’90, and of course the ’94 World Cup just over the border in the United States. 

But that was never to be. Down on funding and lacking a true top-flight, professional league, the Canadian program floundered, failing to even advance to the final round of CONCACAF qualifying in 1990. Four years later, more heartbreak: Canada failed to qualify for the ’94 cup in a penalty shootout loss to Australia, their opponents in a two-game qualification playoff, winning in Edmonton but losing on penalties in Sydney. For decades, they’ve barely flirted with success. That may well change in 2022, as a team of young Canadian stars — a new golden generation filled with players who compete in Europe’s top leagues, standouts like Alphonso Davies and Jonathan David — currently leads CONCACAF World Cup qualifying, ahead of the U.S. and Mexico. 

For a generation afterwards, many Canada national team members wished the CSA would’ve employed the same attitude they had in 1985, choosing to host games in the same kind of hostile environments they were subject to in Central America.

For Honduras, the devastation was swift and immediate. Richardson Smith returned home with his teammates and faced the hostility he knew was coming: being followed in the streets by angry fans, the taunts, the heckles. Honduras’ entire program pretty much fell apart. That experienced core, who had guided them to glory in 1982, retired, leaving a collection of fresh-faced youngsters as heirs apparent. It didn’t really work out that way.

“It was a group that would never have another chance,” says Smith. “After that loss to Canada, we were sort of left without an identity. All of us who were left over, those of us who were tasked with leading the next generation of football in Honduras, we weren’t capable of it. We weren’t experienced enough to lead a new group through the next qualification cycle.” 

Smith’s disappointment, and pain, is apparent in his voice.

“We lost a lot of games.”

Los Catrachos would finally emerge from decades away from the World Cup when they qualified in 2010, and they’ve remained perennially competitive ever since, with the exception of this current go-around. Toward the end of our conversation, Smith marvels at what’s become of the Canadian team. They used to just lump the ball forward, he says; now, they’re a technically gifted side with players playing at the very highest levels. 

George Pakos has been paying close attention to Canada’s recent exploits, as well. He and a few friends will wander down to a pub in Victoria and take in Thursday night’s match against Honduras. Pakos will probably get recognized by a couple of old-timers, eager to hear him tell war stories about getting pelted with rocks during away games and roaming the frozen tundra at home. One of them might even break out into song in what was a popular chant at Canada games during Pakos’ glory days, sung to the tune of “Guantanamera.” 

After all these years, Pakos belts it out without hesitation when asked.

“There’s only one Georgie Pakos…. There’s only one Georgie Pakos…”

Only post highlights of a pay-walled article next time.

We need to show there is demand for these type of articles and support people/outlets who are doing it.

[shorty]

2 hours ago, CTD Canuck said:

Great article. I've played against Pakos and he was a beast to defend.

He refs some of our games and he still is… Ba-dum, tish!

(I kid. He is a good ref. Plus even the mediocre ones we don’t complain about (much) given there’s few refs who commit to doing weekly old guy games    and we want them to continue)

 

Edited January 27, 2022 by shorty