The last time Lothar Pospich, Manfred Norstadt and Eberhard Herz lifted the U.S. Open Cup trophy together, there were just a few thousand people in the quiet stands at Wrigley Field, a largely abandoned minor league baseball stadium in South L.A.
That was 1964, when the tournament, the oldest national soccer competition in the country, was played by largely amateur teams representing mostly ethnic clubs and neighborhoods. The players were immigrants or the sons of immigrants, playing a game that was considered a national pastime in the old country but little more than a waste of time in the new one.
“It was not like now,” said Pospich, 91. “America was in the beginning stages to play soccer.”
Sixty years later the U.S. Open Cup is back in Los Angeles, giving Pospich, Norstadt and Herz, former teammates on the L.A. Kickers, a chance to hoist the trophy once again Wednesday. They have been asked to accompany the tournament trophy onto the field at BMO Stadium — less than two miles from where Wrigley Field, which was demolished in 1969, once stood — before this year’s final between LAFC and Sporting Kansas City.
And this time the stands are expected to be loud and full with more 22,000 people.
“I have to make it one more time,” said Herz, 90. “This may be the last time, I guess.”
The tribute is fitting because Herz, Norstadt and Pospich helped build the foundation upon which soccer, ranked by a Gallup Poll as the fourth-most-popular spot in this country, now rests.
“Soccer was not highly rated at that,” Norstadt said. “But the Kickers, they were a level higher than every other team in the United States. We had some good players on that team.”
Herz and teammates Al Zerhusen and Helmut Bicek played for the U.S. national team; Zerhusen would go to be inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame. But those stars mostly shone in anonymity with the Kickers, who played regular weekend double- and triple-headers before “crowds” of family and friends at Daniels Field in San Pedro and Jackie Robinson Stadium on the Westside.
“But we brought up the soccer,” Pospich said. And that changed everything.
When the three German-born players last lifted the trophy, the U.S. was an international soccer backwater, 26 years from its next World Cup appearance.
In 21 months, the country will play host to that tournament for the second time.
When Herz, Norstadt and Pospich last lifted the Cup, the launch of MLS was 28 years away….