Once In A Lifetime

Dir: Paul Crowder & John Dower, 2006, USA, 97 mins
Cast: Matt Dillon (narrator), Pelé, Giorgio Chinaglia, Jay Emmet, Shep Messing, Carlos Alberto, Franz Beckenbauer, Werner Roth

In 1970s England, football was a far cry from the glamorous game of today. Crowd violence, dilapidated stadiums and very bad haircuts were de rigueur. In that drab context, memories of the Technicolor, star-laden North American Soccer League that burst briefly into life in the late ‘70s seem like fragments of a dream. And given the league’s rapid dissolution into nothingness by 1985, they might as well have been.

In 1971 the New York Cosmopolitans were a rag-tag park team drawing single figure crowds. Six years later their line-up boasted some of the greatest players in the world and they were packing out the 80,000 capacity Giants stadium. This remarkable transition was almost solely the achievement of Steve Ross, head of Warner Communications and passionate sports fan. Not long before buying the Cosmos, however, football was a game he had barely even heard of, let alone seen played. Rather, he alighted on a football team as the vessel for his enthusiasms through the urgings of the Erteguns, the Turkish brothers who founded Atlantic Records in the 1940s.

Or so some say. Claims vary as to who had the original idea of bringing football to America, and Jay Emmet, a Warner executive and Ross’s partner in the Cosmos project, wisely notes to the documentary makers that their film “is going to be like Rashomon” in its profusion of alternate takes on the same events. And it is: the radically differing accounts of the genesis, blossoming and collapse of the NASL and the Cosmos make for a compelling story, complete with heroes, villains, tragedy and farce. But two key players are absent: Steve Ross, who died in 1992, and Pele, for whom the ring of a cash register accompanying his name in the closing credits suggests the price wasn’t right.

That Pelé should have declined to participate for financial reasons is perhaps detrimental to the film as a historical document, but wholly appropriate in narrative terms. His three-year contract with the Cosmos, signed following his supposed retirement in 1974, netted him somewhere between (that Rashomon effect again) $2.7 and $5 million dollars. This at a time when America’s biggest baseball star was earning $200,000 a year. As if that wasn’t remarkable enough, Pelé’s desertion of Brazil was nearly blocked by the government until none other than Henry Kissinger made a call to Brazil’s foreign minister.

Pelé’s arrival in America was a phenomenon, and he carried football in his wake: serious sports commentators spoke of it supplanting baseball as the national pastime; the Cosmos moved from a venue where dirt patches were painted green for the benefit of the television cameras to first Yankee and then Giants stadium; Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Best, Banks and Marsh signed for NASL teams; celebrities flocked (or were dragged by Ross) to games; Studio 54 became a footballers’ playground. Like China White, only not terminally naff.

Once In A Lifetime, as befits the mirrorball hedonism of 1970s New York, is a glittering confection. The film makers have a canny eye for library footage, while Matt Dillon’s laconic narration balances the exuberant editing and throbbing funk and disco soundtrack. Even better, in the menacing bulk of Italian striker Giorgio Chinaglia, Cosmos star and, according to several accounts, Machiavellian usurper of power, they have a pantomime villain of captivating brilliance. Glowering like Tony Soprano with a sore head, Chinaglia refers lovingly to himself in the third person and badmouths everyone else. Larger than life and fatally compromised, he’s the embodiment of the phenomenon that Once In A Lifetime so stylishly chronicles.

Chris Power