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Older is better Preki still befuddling foes with sharp brain, lethal footPosted: Tuesday August 12, 2003 11:36 AM
By Ridge Mahoney, Soccer America The glare is still there, just at it was at Tacoma and Everton and Portsmouth and Miami and with the U.S. national team. Under dark tufts burn a pair of brown eyes, scan-ning the landscape for crevices and spaces as he formulates the optimum mix of movement and touches that will expose his quarry, the goal. For all the marvel focused on his left foot and his body's resistance to age and abuse, Preki is most brilliant from the shoulders up. Somewhere between cognitive thought and animal instinct resides his primal thirst to defy time, conquer space and withstand savage kicks and sharp elbows. "The man is tremendously gifted physically and is a consummate technician, which is partially gift and a lot of hard work over the years," says his coach at Kansas City, Bob Gansler. "He sees the game and you'd expect that, but he's still got his quickness and his one-against-one ability. He's enjoying his work and he's got every right to enjoy it because he's awfully good." He's the all-time leading scorer in MLS and a bit perplexed about all the attention focused on his 40th birthday June 24. "Over the years, I've done different things to keep myself in shape and stay loose, because obviously the key factors in our game are flexibility and mobility," he says. "When you start to lose that, that's the time to start wondering when it's time to retire." He says he might have retired two years ago if the Wizards hadn't re-claimed him in the draft implemented by MLS when Miami and Tampa Bay folded. He'd left Kansas City after a championship season in 2000 miffed at being asked to take a part-time role and a big salary cut.
"I was looking at retiring from MLS, maybe playing indoor here in town with Zoran Savic [coach of the indoor Comets] or go into coaching," he says. "I didn't think I was going to be drafted. I'm glad they took me back." Gansler believes that year away from Kansas City and the Fusion's collapse blew some dark clouds out of the Preki psyche. He noticed a subtle personality change last season and says so far in 2003 the man is, if not bubbly, certainly cheerier. "There's more smiles, there's more laughter, there's more buffoonery on his part and coming back at him," says Gansler. "We got off to good start this season, which obviously helps, and we see practical jokes and some of the adolescent things maybe he hadn't done for a while." When asked why Preki left, Gansler chuckles a bit defensively. "I just felt there was no way the man is going to get any better," he says. "But if anything, he has gotten better, and, for sure, he hasn't slipped one iota." For the 2000 champions, Preki led the Wizards with 15 assists and also scored three goals. For the free-wheeling Fusion the following year, he played fewer games yet scored eight goals and racked up 14 assists. Back with the Wizards in 2002, the numbers were seven goals and 10 assists. Midway through the current season, he was on top of the league scoring list. He's been selected for his eighth All-Star Game, the only player so honored. Of the 31 goals scored by Kansas City in its first 15 games, he had bagged eight and assisted on nine. "His numbers are the same and obviously that's what you guys in the media are looking at," said former Wizards teammate Mo Johnston, the Metros' assistant coach. "But it's what he brings to his teammates that's most important. He's always in the mix and he's always making, creating and scoring some goals." Yoga is his latest concession to time's incessant advance; twice a week for 90 minutes he attends a class, and at training he dutifully goes through contortions along with teammates Jimmy Conrad and Nick Garcia. "It's a hard workout, that's all I'm going to tell you," Preki says. Gansler uses the yoga rituals as a method to lighten the rigors of training and gently prick whatever might be left of the dark Preki demeanor. "He and Jimmy have contests to see who can look weirder," says the coach. "They call it being flexible. I tell them they haven't got the ultimate stretch down, which is kissing your ass goodbye." As to when Preki might say goodbye to MLS, he isn't telling. "I am playing and playing well," he says. "I'm still enjoying my game." FREE KICKS, REVISITED. One of the team's standing jokes is how, not if, Preki will take a free kick sited in the other team's half. Whether by serve or shot, those dead balls are his, a right he fiercely retains. A left-footed bender just inside the post is expected by all, and many times he has stubbornly insisted on doing just that. "Usually he's thinking, 'How do I get it over the wall, bend it, circle it, put it in the triangle and have everybody say oooh and ahhh,'" says Gansler. "It's tough for him to shake that, but in two games he played two short ones that maybe weren't the first thing on his mind." Says Preki, "I was sharper than the other teams in those situations and they paid for it." Against Dallas July 12, Burn keeper Jeff Cassar snagged a Preki free kick bound for the top corner. Preki took note. In stoppage time of the first half with the game goalless, Burn players gathered to argue and delay the taking of a free kick on the left flank. Preki tapped the ball forward for a sprinting Eric Quill, who crossed to the far post for Chris Brunt to smash a shot into the roof of the net. Wizards, 1-0. Midway through the second half and five minutes after Dallas scored to cut its deficit to 3-1, Preki took a ball from Brunt and lofted it 40 yards for Quill to shoot off Cassar's shoulder and off the underside of the crossbar. Goal. Game over. "That's why I'm on the field," Preki says, "to make the quick decisions, to think fast, to create things and you know what? I'll do whatever it takes to win." As well known as his insistence to take dead balls is that burning desire for victory. In the pickup basketball games he plays every chance he gets, he chucks shamelessly from three-point range and every dribble ends with either a foul or a shot. Most of the "fouls" don't get called, of course, and many of the shots don't fall, but that's irrelevant. At the card table, fives fly and deuces dance if somebody gets stuck with a bad hand. Every golf outing with the boys is the Masters. "He wants to win every four-on-four and every one-on-one in training," says Gansler, "and the ones he doesn't win somebody cheated, somebody fouled him, and I don't recognize a foul when I see one. That's Prek. "But at the end of it, he can smile, whereas before he used to go home angry." TO EUROPE AND BACK. That old anger may have stemmed from the frustration that drove him to leave his family in Belgrade when his age, such a popular current topic, conspired against him. At the time, the Yugoslav soccer federation made it difficult for young players to move abroad. It was a common practice in many Eastern European countries, but Preki managed to make the move. Preki grew up in the youth system of Red Star Belgrade, which shared the spotlight with city rival Partizan for soccer honors and also fielded a pro basketball team. Former Arsenal defender Bob McNab, who was coaching Tacoma in the Major Indoor Soccer League, noted his amazing skill, his toughness and tenacity in tight spaces and his youth. Preki was only 22. "Financially it was a better opportunity," Preki says of the move to the MISL, in which he matched his 332 goals with 332 assists in seven seasons. "I didn't come from a well-to-do family, so I grabbed it. I don't regret it. I have a healthy and happy family, and nothing can buy that." He met his wife Trish in Seattle, and enjoyed the lush years of the MISL during which top players earned six-figure salaries. But the league began to wither, and banging into boards and skidding on Astroturf eventually rekindled his desire for top-class soccer. He left America to join Everton of the fledgling Premier League shortly after his 29th birthday. "They played him wide left, which wasn't his position," remembers Johnston, a Preki teammate for one season at Everton. "He enjoyed his spell [four goals in 46 games] over there, then went to Portsmouth and did very well." He scored five goals in 40 games for Pompey, which narrowly avoided relegation from the First Division. Word of a new outdoor league in America enticed him back to the States, and he spent the summers of 1994 and 1995 playing in the semi-pro Continental Indoor Soccer League with the San Jose Grizzlies. Despite its modest pay scale -- most players earned a few hundred dollars per month -- that CISL stint may have been most lucrative phase of Preki's life. He was also reunited with McNab, the Grizzlies' coach. Silicon Valley tycoon Milan Mandaric, who had been President and CEO of the indoor St. Louis Storm for which Preki played, sold him enough stock in Mandaric's electronic operations to ensure financial security. "We can't talk about that," says Preki. "That wouldn't be fair to Milan." Another reason for his moods may have been the deterioration of society in what was then Yugoslavia. In 1999, NATO bombings and fierce fighting cut off telephone contact with his parents and relatives for stretches of more than a week. "That was a long time ago," he says of a time he also spoke out in defense of those who share his Serbian heritage and insisted on using his given name, Predrag Radosavljevic. "Things are settled now, and the people are moving forward." Preki, too, is moving forward, playing a vital role, yet one much different than he did for the 2000 champion. "We've got a few guys who can run off the ball as well as anyone," says Gansler, "so he's more willing to play one-touch and two-touch and not every time he gets the ball it's got to be multiple, exquisite chops." But those chops and cutbacks and benders and boomers off the left foot haven't departed. They are selectively employed and well-disguised. There are more than 600 pro games' worth of wear and tear on that body, yet Preki insists he's never had a pulled muscle. Apart from a meniscus he had shaved in 1998 and a broken shoulder and broken arm he suffered in England, there haven't been any major injuries. "I can't explain to you how that happened or how it's possible," he laughs. Among those emitting the "ooohs" and "ahhhs" of which Gansler spoke are a pair of MLS assistant coaches, both 40 and happily retired. Johnston is one; Crew assistant coach Robert Warzycha, who was Preki's roommate at Everton, is another. "He's still great at 40," says Johnston. "It's great to see him still doing it, and it's fun to watch." Ridge Mahoney is a senior editor at Soccer America magazine.
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