Will women’s pro soccer gain much in way of benefits from World Cup win?

The part of the world that cares much about professional soccer in this country will actually be paying attention to the Chicago Red Stars, if indirectly.

Chicago's new fabulous femme athlete?

For Chicago’s club in the National Women’s Soccer League has four of its players who were part of the team that represented the United States in the Women’s World Cup tourney this year.

OF COURSE, THE next time the team takes to the pitch, there will be even greater attention. Because they’re scheduled on Sunday to play the Houston Dash – the team for which Carli Lloyd plays for.

I’m sure the Red Stars are miffed that this particular match is being played in Houston. There’s no chance of a record-setting crowd for the Red Stars consisting of people who are curious to see what all the fuss is about.

The Dash won’t make their lone Chicago appearance for this season until Sept. 6 – their final regular-season match of the year. By which time, it’s likely that the public attention (some 26.7 million U.S. viewers Sunday on television, including the Spanish-language broadcasts) has passed, and the “Lloyd” name won’t be considered as big a deal.

Although it’s possible that every team in the women’s league will gain a bit of a plus. We’re likely for each team to go out of its way to let us know which of the U.S. team members are actually a part of their own ball clubs.

THE RED STARS (a reference to the Chicago city flag) were quick to put out a statement (picked up on by the Associated Press) letting us know of Shannon Boxx, Julie Johnston, Lori Chalupny and Christen Press.

The same Press who gained her own bit of fame in recent weeks from those Coppertone television ads where she “shows off” by heading a beach ball into the pool.

She may well become the glamour girl, of sorts, of the Chicago sports scene. Unless someone from the Chicago Sky (women’s professional basketball) manages to do something to catch on.

I may come off as a bit sarcastic here. It’s just that I’m fully aware of how fleeting “fame” can be, and how quickly it will be before the Women’s World Cup and the U.S. victory will become just a footnote in the public culture eye.

Lloyd coming to Chicago Sept. 5

SO WHAT ARE the chances that much of anything will happen for the Chicago professional soccer scene as a result of Sunday night’s victory?

I’d be willing to guess that most people in Chicago don’t have a clue where the Red Stars play; even if they were interested in checking out a match or two.

While the Chicago Fire men’s professional team has rose to the point of having its own stadium – and a fairly nice structure at that – in suburban Bridgeview, the Red Stars use the athletic facilities at Benedictine University in suburban Lisle.

I’m not knocking the facilities there. But they’re worthy of a small-school athletic department, not a professional sports team that purports to represent the city of Chicago in its respective league.

WHICH THEY HOPE to move up from someday, just as the Chicago Bandits professional softball team used to play in Lisle until they eventually got better facilities in suburban Rosemont.

Although the small, suburban image will stick in the minds of fans who try to check out the league. After seeing the women’s national team win a World Cup in front of a crowd in excess of 50,000 people, will they take seriously a team that draws a couple thousand people (at best)?

To the point where they will wind up missing out on the quality of play on the pitch. Which is their loss more than anything else.

Particularly for those people who are interested in finding a diversion from the knuckleheaded budgetary activity our political people have been engaging in – and will continue to in coming weeks.

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What should we think if World Cup final gets better ratings than Miss USA?

That’s a very real possibility, what with the fact that the Women’s World Cup championship match scheduled for this Sunday will be on the Fox television network, whereas the Donald Trump-owned pageant has been relegated to Reelz (channel 507 on my local line-up).

The show will come to an end Sunday for another four years

I wonder how many people don’t have a clue where to find the channel (I didn’t until I looked it up, and figured out it was one of those channels I usually fly right by while trying to find something worthwhile to watch).

BUT THAT IS the reality, where the women’s national teams from the United States and Japan will play against each other this Sunday, and Trump will give us a girlie show (in the name of scholarship) on July 12.

The Miss USA pageant lost its spot on the NBC network because of the fact that Trump engaged in stupid comments about Mexico – as though someone as gauche as he has any right thinking himself superior to anything on Planet Earth!

That caused NBC, whose holdings also include the Spanish-language Telemundo network, to drop the program, and also for the Univision network that would have carried the pageant into Latin American countries to drop it as well.

There also are a lot of business entities, including the one-time Marshal Field’s now known as Macy’s, who are refusing to be connected to Trump anymore. No more “Trump, the Cologne,” or any other products with his brand name.

HIS GARISH BEHAVIOR for all these decades has always been embarrassing. But now, his tacky mouth may wind up harming him.

Miss USA winds up on a channel people will have to hunt for

Which makes me think, “It’s about time!” The reason I haven’t felt compelled to write anything trashing Trump for his latest Mexico rant is that it doesn’t strike me as being any more stupid than anything else he has ever said or done. I never paid any attention to him, then or now.

So Trump’s program (he owns the pageant) will not draw the kind of television attention it usually gets. Although I suspect enough people will hunt for the program next weekend that it will be rhetorically spun into some sort of “historic” event – for the Reelz network, at least.

Instead, the big event may turn out to be the Women’s World Cup – which has been ongoing for the past month and comes to its conclusion this weekend.

Mexico won't participate this year

THAT GERMANY VS. England matchup that I’m sure some people were desperately hoping would be the championship final will wind up being the consolation match on Saturday.

Instead, we’re going to get that rematch of the 2011 Women’s World Cup, when a 2-2 tie turned into a Japan victory on a shootout. The U.S. revenge comes Sunday? Or will the ideologues be ranting on Monday about the “shame” of losing to Japan in anything?

This may wind up getting decent television ratings because it reflects the reality of the U.S. sporting mentality – U.S. fans will watch soccer if they feel the U.S. team has a good chance of winning the whole thing and dominating everyone they play.

Anything else is considered downright dull. As though the U.S. men’s basketball Olympic Team is the way all sports are intended to be. They’ll watch if they think the United States will get its first Women’s World Cup victory since 1999.

IF ANYTHING, IT will be interesting to see just how much better soccer does than the pageant in the ratings. Although I can already hear the rants claiming that any ratings won’t reflect the reality that some people want to perceive.

What really is more intriguing:  90-plus minutes of the “beautiful game” or learning who will represent the United States at the Miss Universe pageant come early next year?

Considering how Mexico and other Latin American nations are considering not even participating (and the number of pageant winners that usually come from Latin America), could this become the Miss Universe equivalent of the 1984 Summer Olympics – remember all the Soviet bloc nations that dropped out; weakening the overall competition level?

Chastain's moment lives on

Why do I suspect that the upcoming star or personality of Sunday’s Women's World Cup match (remember Brandi Chastain from 1999?) will have longer staying power in our society’s collective memory than whichever bathing suit-clad woman wins the Miss USA pageant the following week?

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Did U.S. victory over Brazil leave its taint on champion match against Japan?

There’s no doubt about it.

MORGAN: Coulda been the hero



The United States’ women’s national soccer team played a match historic in character last week when it managed to beat Brazil.

COMING FROM BEHIND and tying up a match in stoppage time (that excess minute or two that gets added onto soccer games to account for any delays during the game), then managing to win that quarter-final match with penalty kicks.

A lot of drama. Certainly a moment that won’t soon be forgotten – even by those crackpots who want to complain about the fact that soccer is becoming a part of the sports scene in this country, no matter how much they want to claim it isn’t.

But in watching the U.S. team taking on Japan in the finals on Sunday, I couldn’t help but feel a letdown; and not just because it would be impossible to script on-field activity that could top the match against Brazil.

It just struck me that I was watching a batch of footballers who were convinced that this match was destined to go into overtime, through the two 15-minute periods of such play, then be decided by penalty kicks.

AT LEAST THAT’S how I explain the fact that the U.S. team managed to blow several chances to score in the first half of the match, then twice gave up the lead (once in the second half, and another in overtime).

They figured that destiny would take them to penalty kicks, and that would be where they would prevail.

Which is to say that I was rather disgusted on Sunday when the World Cup champion match went through overtime with a 2-2 tie, and ultimately got decided by those penalty kicks.

Which happens to be the point where Japan’s national women’s team prevailed. Their goaltender, Ayumi Kaihori, was diving all over the place to block shots – showing an athleticism one usually doesn’t see from goaltenders in the women’s version of soccer.

THE END RESULT is that the United States team lost a match to Japan that it should have won. EXCEPT that it made the mistake of assuming that the match’s “big” moment would come later.

Instead, it didn’t.

Which is probably a nice life’s lesson. Take opportunities when they come. They may not return when you think you’ll be ready.

The final “stats” for Sunday’s match show a U.S. team that had twice as many shots made and corner kicks than did Japan, although Japan had possession of the ball for 53 percent of the match.

YET GOING INTO the penalty kicks, it was merely a 2-2 tie.

It was particularly nauseating considering that the crowd on hand in Frankfurt (where the finals were played) had a large U.S. contingent. Each U.S. goal caused the stadium’s nearly 50,000 crowd to be filled with the “U-S-A” chant that crops up all too often at sports events.

That moment when U.S. fans were convinced that victory was at hand and that it was time to relax.

Instead, Japan’s teams managed to respond with game-tying goals each time – which suddenly shut everybody up.

WHAT I’M CURIOUS to see is how this affects Alex Morgan. The 22-year-old who is the youngest member of the women’s national team was the one who scored what should have been the game-winning goal in the 69^th minute of the actual soccer match.

Then in overtime, she set up the ball that Abby Wambach used her head to knock into the goal for what was briefly a 2-1 lead. Albeit, a lead that should have held.

Considering that she was a reserve player for the national team who only got into the match in the second half because of another player’s injury, Morgan could have been that “scrub” who rises to the occasion and given a U.S. sporting victory.

It’s too bad that Morgan couldn’t somehow have managed to be one of the U.S. players who made a penalty kick. Perhaps she had enough of the golden touch that she would have scored – instead of missing like most of the U.S. women did. Perhaps she'll be an integral part of some future national team that will actually win a World Cup tourney.

IF IT SEEMS like I’m taking this loss hard, keep in mind that what’s really bothering me is that I spent an afternoon (albeit out of the summer heat) parked in front of my brother’s television set watching this sometimes lackadaisical play, instead of doing something more worthwhile (although those of you who watched the Chicago Cubs' 7-5 loss to the Florida Marlins are more pathetic than I). I expect that by the time I wake up Monday, this will be long accepted.

LePEILBET: Local star

Particularly since we’re not going to have to endure the hype about a U.S. championship team. Nobody’s going to be getting any endorsement deals from having played Sunday.

And we’re definitely not going to be getting endless accounts of the life of Amy Lepeilbet – who is our local angle.

The defender for the U.S. women’s national team is a native of suburban Crystal Lake.

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Chicago's newest athletes are "Red Stars"

A part of me is inclined to think that Chicago’s newest professional sports franchise is guilty of either altering the city’s flag, or of grossly overestimating its significance in the city’s history.

How else to view the nickname, “Red Stars?” That’s the new Chicago franchise that will play in the Women’s Professional Soccer league beginning in 2009.

TEAM MANAGEMENT ANNOUNCED the nickname last week following a two-month-long contest by which potential fans were asked to choose a team moniker. “Red Stars” beat out nicknames such as the “Massacre,” the “Riot,” the “1871” and my personal favorite, the “Stinking Onions.”

The nickname alludes to the Chicago city flag, that non-descript banner of blue and white stripes with four red stars. Each of those stars is meant to signify a significant event in the city’s history – the original settlement at Fort Dearborn, the fire of 1871 and the World’s Fairs held in Chicago in 1893 and 1933.

In the logo designed for the team, the flag has five stars, and team officials explain that the fifth star is meant to signify the creation of the Red Stars as a women’s professional sports team.

In a sense, they are saying this team is as significant as the Great Chicago Fire (the inspiration for the nickname of the men’s professional sports team) or the first European settlement at the site where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.

THAT MIGHT BE pompous and arrogant. I have to wonder if any pennant or banner designed for the team could be construed as desecration of the city’s flag (is that a crime?) It might come back to haunt the team if they or their league flounders financially.

But I will give it credit for at least reflecting something about the city’s history, instead of some generic, cutesy nickname that sounds more like it was meant to inspire a fuzzy purple mascot to roam the stands and amuse the kiddies.

Team officials even went so far as to designate special meanings for each of the six points on the flag logo’s fifth star – entertainment (top point), service, success, community, teamwork and leadership.

Those meanings are kind of self-serving and cheesy, but it goes in accordance with the real Chicago flag, where each of the points on the four stars has attached to it a special meaning that city founders would like to think reflect the unique character of Chicago – such as justice, civic pride and religion.

I’M NOT GOING to run through the list of all 24 meanings, but needless to say, they are the image that Chicagoans would like to say they are about, and that ought to be the goal of all Chicago residents in their lives. (For those who really care to know, read the Chicago Public Library’s explanation of the city flag at http://www.chipublib.org/cplbooksmovies/cplarchive/symbols/flag.php, or click on the Chicago flag image to the side of this weblog for a lengthy analysis written by the weblog Chicago History.)

To me, that implies that someone involved with the team took the trouble to understand the history of the city and to know that the stars on the flag are not just stars, but an attempt to tell Chicago’s story.

It is a more logical nickname than the trend of late among athletic teams of naming themselves after weather-related characteristics.

The Miami Heat. The Dallas Tornado. The San Jose Earthquakes. Heck, one of the nicknames considered by this Chicago team followed that trend.

WE COULD VERY easily have been stuck with a team nicknamed the Chicago Wind.

So now, let’s look forward. It would be interesting if this new team could somehow beat the trend of other women’s athletic teams that have tried to do business in Chicago.

They failed. Usually, their whole leagues failed. The Chicago Red Stars could easily become the latest version of the Chicago Hustle. How many people besides me remember the team that used DePaul University’s old Alumni Hall in the late 1970s for its games in the Women’s Basketball League?

The Chicago Sky of the Women’s National Basketball Association has struggled to gain much of any attention (although the fact that their teams have been terrible has not helped). When it comes to the city’s athletic culture, the Matadors (those blubbery, overweight guys used as a parody of cheerleaders by the Chicago Bulls) gain more respect than any women’s team in Chicago sports history.

ONE FACTOR GOING in their favor is that this is soccer. This is a sport where the women’s game is taken seriously, due in large part to the image set in the 1990s by athletes like Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy and Brandi Chastain (when she wasn’t stripped down to a sports bra).

Unlike the U.S. national teams for men that are not the world leaders in the sport, women’s national teams from the United States are regarded as being the world power. A U.S.-based women’s professional league would be able to feed off the teams that have won women’s World Cup tournaments and would be a goal for top female athletes from around the world.

There is a certain fan base in this country that will take this version of the sport seriously.

Of course, there also is the fact that this is soccer, and some nitwits are going to want to disparage the game no matter what happens. The last attempt at a women’s pro league, the Women’s United Soccer Association, didn’t last long enough to put a team in Chicago, let alone build up anything resembling history or tradition.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: The Chicago Red Stars hope to begin play next spring. They likely will (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/newsitem_ektid2984.aspx?team=chicago) share a stadium with the Chicago Fire men’s team out in suburban Bridgeview.

Potential fans of the new women’s soccer team picked the nickname “Red Stars.” Whether many of those people spend their hard-earned dollars to buy tickets to games (http://blogs.chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/soccer_redcard/2008/06/womens-team-to.html) will determine whether the team catches on in Chicago’s sports culture.

The Boston Breakers and the Washington Freedom, along with yet-to-be-named teams in (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/) Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis, will comprise the Women’s Professional Soccer league in its inaugural season.

Do the names Rita Easterling and Janie Fincher ring a bell in your mental backlog of Chicago-related trivia? They do (http://www.wblmemories.com/index.htm) in mine.

The Stinking Onions? What are they thinking?

Perhaps this sports franchise is destined to fall into the same category of Chicago history as the Chicago Hustle, the Cougars, the Power or the original team known as the Chicago Fire.

But the franchise that is expected to represent the Second City when Women’s Professional Soccer kicks off its first season of existence next spring may wind up with one of the most unique monikers in the city’s athletic history.

THE AS-OF-yet-named Chicago team said this week it will allow its potential fans to choose a public identity for the first serious attempt at a women’s professional soccer team in this city.

For what it’s worth, fans can go to an Internet site and pick from among 10 nicknames, all of which are meant to feed off some offbeat aspect of Chicago’s history or character.

Hence, we could wind up with a ball club that carries the English translation of what the name Chicago originally meant, back in the days a couple of centuries ago when the Second City was just a strong-smelling swamp with onion plants growing wild on the banks of what is now known to be the spot where the Chicago River meets Lake Michigan.

The “Stinking Onions.” It’s almost suitable, since any Chicago ball club is going to have to carry on the tradition of periods of time when they are god-awful at their respective sport. What other nickname would suit a Chicago team better?

THE “STINKING ONIONS” – we literally smell.

I could almost go for the nickname, since most of the other suggestions are just so god-awful dull, generic or sound so cutesy like they were proposed by some marketing geek who is already dreaming of a tacky mascot and maize-colored jerseys for sale at $100 a pop.

Hence, nicknames such as the “Blues,” “Progress,” “Towers,” “Massacres,” “Red Stars” and “Wind” are ridiculous, just as bad as the old Chicago Enforcers of the XFL, the attempt by pro wrestling marketers to put together an “in your face” football league.

Just imagine this future statement – “Hi, I play for the Chicago Wind.” Ugh!

IF THAT NICKNAME is chosen, we Chicago sports fans would have to stand for a lot of abuse because we would literally have a team with a more lame nickname than the current holder of that title – the Miami Heat of the National Basketball Association.

Now perhaps taking this contest and the team nickname seriously is a bit ridiculous.

After all, just about every attempt at a professional sports league gets around to having a Chicago franchise. Chicago sports are not just limited to the tales of the White Sox, the Bears or the Blackhawks.

I personally recall the existence and demise of all the sports teams I named at the top of this commentary. The Women’s Basketball League, the World Hockey Association, the American Indoor Soccer Association and the World Football League all came and went.

THE WORLD FOOTBALL League of the early 1970s was so forgettable that their Chicago team, the Fire, was literally able to have its nickname appropriated by Chicago’s pro soccer team in the U.S.-based Major League Soccer.

The “Stinking Onions,” if that nickname is adopted, could come and go so quick that most of us would never notice they were here.

Going through the list makes me realize how much the mentality of sports marketing has changed throughout the years.

Take the nickname “White Sox.”

IT HAS BECOME a part of Chicago culture (particularly to those of us to whom anywhere north of Roosevelt Road is “foreign” turf) and is known in baseball circles throughout the world to be representative of our beloved city.

Yet it is so early 20th Century in mentality. No self-respecting sports team would even dream of adopting that name today.

The 19th Century mentality (which is when baseball led the way in sports becoming professional enterprises with franchises becoming significant parts of their home cities’ culture) would have had teams known as “Stockings,” with the color in the team nickname set by the color of socks worn with the uniforms.

Cincinnati, which is usually credited with having the first professional baseball team in 1869, was known as the “Red Stockings,” while St. Louis once had a team known as the “Brown Stockings.” In a similar vein, the Detroit Tigers got that nickname because someone thought their orange and black striped socks resembled a tiger in appearance.

CHANGING “STOCKINGS” TO “Sox” was a 20th Century innovation, done in part because Charles Comiskey wanted to separate the identity of his American League version of white hosed athletes from the National League version that existed a couple of decades earlier (the team now known as the Chicago Cubs).

“Sox” with the “x” was short. It was punchy. It fit better into a headline.

Now, sports marketers would say the misspelling looks illiterate – something along the lines of people who spell the word “barbecue” as “bar-b-q.”

A new team would probably call itself White Sock. Singular, no “the.” Actually, they’d probably think the color white was too drab, and would prefer something more along the line of “Mauve Sock” – which would ensure that the franchise would go broke within a year.

NO SELF-RESPECTING Chicagoan is going to root for anything colored mauve.

It is someone working under that mentality who is probably rooting for the nickname, “the Towers” to win the competition.

After all, one could then include some artsy vision of the Sears Tower in the team logo. Perhaps they could even hit up the building’s owners to cough up some cash in exchange for advertising rights?

For those who want to bash soccer (real football, I call it), I don’t want to hear it. I enjoy the sport, even when women play it competitively at its highest levels. Watching the U.S. national women’s team compete in international events is entertaining, particularly since the women’s team is held in higher regard in its soccer class than the U.S. men’s team.

BESIDES, I STILL have fond memories of the old Chicago Sting, who brought two North American Soccer League championships to Chicago (1981 and 1984) and actually continued to live for a few more years as an indoor league team after their outdoor league went out of business. To me, the name “Karl Heinz Granitza” will always mean more than any of the modern-day athletes who play for the Chicago Fire.

Personally, I’m rooting for this new franchise to succeed on some level – and largely because this attempt at creating a professional soccer league in the United States had the sense to come to Chicago to begin with.

The previous league, the Women’s United Soccer Association, existed for a couple of seasons and never got around to having a Chicago team, instead preferring to have teams in places like “Carolina” and “Atlanta” to traditional sports markets like Chicago, St. Louis or Detroit.

Sports marketers ought to realize it is the traditional sports towns that are most likely to want to have and support a team in every league in existence.

A CHICAGO “STINKING Onions” is probably more important than a team in a place like Phoenix or Denver. Smaller, newer cities will sound just so minor league and give the new league a less-than-important image.

Nonetheless, when I cast my vote in this poll, I’m not going with “Stinking Onions,” even though a part of me thinks it has some unique appeal (it would put us up there with the Nippon Ham Fighters of Japan professional baseball as the most unusual sounding team nickname in pro sports).

I picked “Chicago 1871,” which means technically the team wouldn’t have a nickname Or is it that its nickname would match its official name? At the very least, it would be a counterpart team of sorts to the Chicago Fire men’s team.

That date, to those of us who have taken the tour of the Chicago Historical Society at some time during our lives and seen the charred dolls and other burnt remains, was when the Great Chicago Fire occurred – the seminal event that could have wiped this town off the face of the earth, but instead motivated it to rebuild itself into one of the pre-eminent cities of the world.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: Cast (http://www.womensprosoccer.com/form_ektekfrm1940.aspx) your vote here for Chicago’s newest pro sports franchise.

Women will finally get their chance to add a few stories to the long story of professional soccer (http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/chicago.html) in the Second City.

The Great Chicago Fire (http://www.chicagohs.org/fire/) could become the inspiration of professional soccer in Chicago for both men and women.

This artist's depiction of the Great Fire could wind up being the symbolism used by both of Chicago's professional soccer teams. Illustration provided by Library of Congress collection.