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On the right foot Back from injuries, Lagos finally fulfilling promise
Updated: Sunday October 21, 2001 1:35 PM
By Ridge Mahoney, Soccer America He's the youngest of eight children, the baby of an athletic family whose brother Gerard plays pro soccer and whose father was his coach. "Manuel always had a great flair for the game," says "Buzz" Lagos of his son, known as Manny to most everybody else. "People thought he grew up with a soccer ball at his foot, which he did. He carried a ball around with him everywhere he went." He's a veteran of the 1992 Olympic Games who had to wait nine years for a call-up to the U.S. national team, long after many of his fellow Olympians had been given their shots at the senior squad. "From '92 to '95, I never got called in to try out for the national team," says Manny Lagos, who trained with the U.S. prior to its Sept. 1 qualifier against Honduras. "This year has been a little bit of vindication for that as well." He's a right-footed player who lurks on the left side of an unbalanced 4-4-2, an attacking midfielder who doesn't line up in the middle and doesn't wear the No. 10 shirt but meets at least some of the criteria. "If you're playing against him, he makes your life a misery," says San Jose coach Frank Yallop, who swung the trade last February to bring Lagos west from Tampa Bay. "He's relentless." The premature ending of the 2001 season left Lagos with eight goals and eight assists in 26 games, which nearly duplicates his totals with Mutiny last year (8 goals, 7 assists, 27 games). Nice numbers, but nothing sensational. Yet Lagos played the most minutes of any Quake (2,310) and started all 26 games, which is an astonishing accomplishment in light of his injury-marred career. A wrist injury cut down his playing time for the Olympic team. In 1995, while playing for his father with the A-League Minnesota Thunder, he inadvertently killed a nerve in his leg by overzealous application of an ice pack after a game. "The nerve runs down from the knee to your foot," says Buzz Lagos. "It eventually grew back, but it took a long time. He played with it, but he couldn't get his left foot to do what he wanted it to do." NO FUTURE WITH FIRE. Manny tore the anterior and lateral cruciate ligaments in his left knee in 1996 and played just six games for the Metros. A patellar tendon injury in the same knee two years later limited him to just 11 minutes for the Fire, which had claimed him in the MLS expansion draft. Lagos was healthy in early 1999 but had little future in Chicago. The Fire was coming off a championship season and had a roster stacked high with attackers. Chicago traded him to Tampa Bay, but after a year and a half with the Mutiny he again requested a trade, this time for personal reasons. His wife, an attorney, didn't like Tampa and also wished to pursue her career with a law firm in a major city. Both Yallop and assistant coach Dominic Kinnear knew Lagos from their own stints in Tampa. "I knew how good he was, but you don't know how good he's going to do for you," says Yallop. "To be honest, he's been fantastic this season. "All the things you like in a player, he is. He's always dangerous, works hard, doesn't like to lose. He's got those big, long strides, and you think he's losing the ball, and he chops it back." FOREIGN LESSONS. In addition to coaching them as youths and pros, Buzz Lagos went to great lengths to instill in his sons drive and confidence and a love for the game. Manny was 11 and Gerard was 13 when they traveled to Montevideo, Uruguay, to play. On the way home the following summer, Buzz and his boys stopped off in Mexico to attend the 1983 World Youth Championship. "We saw Mexico play Australia at the Azteca in front of 110,000 people," recalls Buzz Lagos, a devoted runner and teacher who often ran to work with his sons in tow. Manny twice took a shot at European play, first at Spanish Second Division club Lleida and then at French Third Division club Clermont-Ferrand. "I was just too young, and I was homesick a lot," says Lagos. He came back to the Thunder and renewed a partnership with Tony Sanneh, with whom he had played in St. Paul on the Blackhawks Soccer Club, which had been founded by Buzz Lagos, and at Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Now Sanneh plays in Germany. Buzz, who retired from teaching in 1994, coaches Gerard with the Thunder. And Manny chops the ball back and gambols past defenders for the Quakes. "When I talk about my injuries, I like to think I'm a lot better for them," says Lagos. "I appreciate a lot more the good things that happen." Ridge Mahoney is a senior editor at Soccer America magazine.
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