Watching a soccer match with Juli Veee is like watching a basketball game with Bill Walton.
There’s no telling what he might say.
“Did I tell you about the time I gave Bill Walton my Sockers jersey?” the 74-year-old former San Diego Sockers star was saying Saturday afternoon, as he watched club soccer’s best team in the world, Real Madrid of Spain, at Churchill’s Pub in San Marcos.
Walton, the local basketball great, attended Sockers matches at the old Sports Arena in the 1980s when he played for the NBA’s San Diego Clippers. After a big victory by the home team, the 6-foot-11 redhead showed up in the locker room and asked Veee for his jersey. Figuring Walton wanted them for his children, Veee gave him two of the blue-and-gold jerseys.
“When I saw Bill later, he told me he gave my jerseys to some Deadheads,” Veee says, referring to fans of the Grateful Dead. “Can you believe it? Deadheads.”
We’re watching Real Madrid against ’s Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League Final. Oddsmakers have made the Spanish team a heavy favorite.
With us are Veee’s wife, Lynn, his daughter, Jennifer, his grandson, Julian, who’s an attacking midfielder who attends University City High School, and a buddy of mine who’s a longtime fan of the Dutch national team.
Making the Dutch fan comfortable, Veee will drop a few salty Dutch words on him, saying he learned them from teammates in Belgium.
Naturally, Veee pulls for Dortmund, being an underdog himself who defected from Soviet-controlled Hungary at age 18 after his youth club’s match in Italy.
He has bet five dollars on the German squad. His two Real Madrid-loving grandsons are on the other end of each bet.
It appears Veee’s crazy wager may pay off when Dortmund peppers Real Madrid’s goal throughout the first half.
Unfortunately for the Germans, their best shot bounces off a post. Veee explains that when he played outdoors in Europe and the United States, the posts were square to the field. Such a post would’ve led to a 1-0 lead for Dortmund. Nowadays, goalposts are rounded off, a safety measure. In addition, the former player says, today’s soccer balls are much livelier, lighter and not likely to become water-logged. In his era, he says it took a lot more oomph to threaten the goalkeeper from 25 to 30 yards.
Throughout the match, Veee intersperses soccer commentary with stories from his various soccer-and-life adventures.
Like the time his Belgium-club teammates decided to go on a stamina-building run through a thick forest. Not much for distance running back then, Veee lost sight of his teammates. Next came the sound of dogs. Police dogs. They were on a training session, and sounded vicious. As the barks grew closer, Veee grew terrified, cowering in the darkening forest.
“I said, “They’re going to eat me alive,’ ’’ he said. “They can climb trees.”
Unable to get the ball past Real Madrid’s goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, an agile 6-foot-6 ½ product of Bree, Belgium whom Veee describes as the world’s best goalkeeper, Dortmund takes an ominous draw into halftime.
“How long can they keep it up?” Veee asks, sounding skeptical.
By now, Veee has transitioned to American football, telling of his tryout as a kicker with the Los Angeles Rams in 1973 after he’d moved to Southern California.
Veee’s unfamiliarity with how an American football practice unfolded led a young Rams assistant coach named Dick Vermeil to chew him out. Looking on were bemused Rams hulks, wondering where the Rams found the 6-foot-1, 175-pound soccer-style kicker.
“You (expletives) rookie,” Vermeil shouted at Veee for lounging during team drills.
Not sure what “rookie” meant, the Hungarian hollered back at the future Super Bowl-winning coach, calling him a rookie, too.
For good measure, the Hungarian import mixed in a few salty English words he may or may not have understood.
“Merlin Olsen and Jack Youngblood fell down on the ground, they were laughing so hard,” Veee says.
The Rams gave Veee his exit papers. They even typed in an explanation: “Left camp on his own decision.”
A snafu with soccer officials having made him temporarily ineligible to play professionally in the United States, Veee returned to his job driving a delivery truck in North Hollywood.
It paid $2.50 an hour.
So it wasn’t surprising Saturday that as Real Madrid and Dortmund resumed their version of the beautiful game on Wembley’s famed pitch in London, Veee inveighed against soccer-developmental methods in the United States.
“American soccer development is a nightmare,” said the five-time Sockers champion, who grew up in Budapest under parents who worked at a radio-parts factory. “It’s pay to play. The poor kids can’t afford it. It’s ridiculous. Soccer should be free. This is a poor man’s game around the world.”
Real Madrid, as all the soccer experts predicted, responds well to the second-half adjustments of Carlo Ancelotti, the club’s legendary Italian-born coach.
As the second half unfolds, Dortmund struggles to maintain its offensive pressure. It’s not looking good for the Germans, even as the match remains scoreless.
Veee’s daughter ramps up the entertainment, recalling the time her Sockers-star dad appeared at her sixth-grade graduation ceremony.
His attire: jeans and a jeans jacket. OK, that was a little odd.
“He didn’t wear a shirt,” Jennifer adds, breaking up the group. Juli confirms he didn’t wear a shirt. Just the jeans jacket.
He was there. That was the important thing. “We didn’t have sixth-grade graduation in Hungary,” he says.
If his daughter’s friends weren’t dazzled by Veee’s sartorial style, Walton gave Veee’s soccer methods his stamp of approval.
“Bill told me I played like him. Because I ,” Veee recalls.
“A goal is a goal,” he adds. “It doesn’t matter who scores. Any donkey can score. Well, almost any donkey.”
Surprising none of the soccer aficionados, Madrid breaks through, scoring in the 74th minute.
Adding to Dortmund’s pain, the pinpointed header by 5-foot-8 Spaniard Dani Carvajal comes off a corner kick by Toni Kroos, who’s from .
As Veee’s 16-year-old grandson and Jennifer celebrate, Veee taps my elbow.
“That’s what soccer is,” he says. “You press, you press, you don’t finish your chances, and then one lousy chance, and the game’s over. If you don’t score, they’ll come and get you.”
Nine minutes later, Dortmund makes its first glaring defensive mistake of the match. Real Madrid’s offensive star from Brazil, Vinicius turns the defender’s bad into a 2-0 lead, although he’s fortunate that, despite his banging the ball downward into the turf, the shot finds a lower corner.
Soon, Madrid is raising its 15th Euro trophy.
“Madrid’s always better,” Veee says.“Madrid is the best in the world, and they showed it.”
Everyone agrees it was an entertaining match, one that featured also several second-half gems by Dortmund’s goalkeeper, Gregor Kobel of Switzerland. Also, Veee says he enjoyed the recent women’s Champions League Final, won by Spain’s Barcelona over ’s Lyon.
Veee informs his grandsons, one appearing via smartphone, that neither will be receiving five dollars. The bet was in Hungarian money, he says. Meaning the teens will get nothing.
He’s kidding. I think.
