It Should Have Been The Final

Warner Communications, Inc. owns Bugs Bunny. They also own Pel� and the New York Cosmos soccer club, and last Friday night in Tampa they learned that the Elmer Fudds of the world can come out on top. The Cosmos and their mercurial superstars, Pel� and George Chinaglia, lost to the Tampa Bay Rowdies—who have no flashy performers to match—3-1 in the North American Soccer League's quarterfinal playoff round.

Warner Communications also learned 1) It is risky business to try buying a championship by spending more than $4 million for Pel� and another half million for Chinaglia if the rest of the team cannot support them in the fashion to which they are accustomed; 2) It is unsound to have the NASL's two best teams—the Cosmos and the Rowdies, who were last year's champions—meet as early as the quarterfinals because someone misread divisional balance; 3) It is also nice to have a team song, as the Rowdies do, and even a trademarked motto with as much zing as Tampa Bay's: "Soccer is a kick in the grass."

The game to decide the winner in the league's strong Eastern Division shaped up as a confrontation of styles both on and off the field. The Rowdies are a drilled, balanced team, proponents of the English system of long touch-line kicks and quick action at the goal area. The Rowdies have no Pel�, no George Best ( Los Angeles), not even a Kyle Rote Jr. ( Dallas) to give them national prominence, and yet the defending champions, an expansion club last year, had quietly put together the best record of any of the NASL's 20 clubs, finishing the season with 18 wins, six losses.

The Cosmos, even though they wound up second to Tampa Bay in the division, had a better record (16-8) than any of the league's remaining 18 teams, mainly because of the Black Pearl, Pel�, and his newly acquired teammate, super-striker George Chinaglia, who had to be smuggled out of Italy after the season started for fear of widespread rioting when it was learned that he had signed with New York. The Cosmos' game is structured around these two and their brilliant one-to-one play in front of the opponent's goal. "Our game is like music," says Pel�'s former teammate on Santos of Brazil, Midfielder Ramon Mifflin. "It is short passes, always moving, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tick-tock, goal."

In two previous meetings this season, each style had proved effective. In Tampa last June the Rowdies beat the Cosmos 5-1 in a nationally televised game in which their strong sweepers and defensemen shut out Pel�. A month later, with Chinaglia now aboard, Pel� & Co. won 5-4 in New York.

And so Friday's game was the decider, a contest of team play by a solid, well-seasoned club against the more spectacular, and nearly as efficient, star system. The differences in styles could have been perceived the night before in Bern's Steak House, a Tampa Bay restaurant where the decor runs to red velvet and white iron filigree, and one orders filet mignon ounce by expensive ounce. In one of the main dining rooms sat Tommy Smith, the captain of the Rowdies, and his teammate, Midfielder Lenny Glover. No one rushed up to them for autographs, no flashbulbs popped.

In a back room, meanwhile, shielded from view of other diners, Pel�, his bodyguard and a few Cosmos officials dined on lobster, protected from interruptions by a thick, carved wooden screen; they had come in quietly and wanted it to stay that way.

Through a series of running jokes that seemed to involve monkeys, bricks, cigars and Irishmen, Smith and Glover talked about the problems of not being superstars in America. Said the battle-scarred Smith, a 14-year veteran of England's first division Liverpool club, "At home I had to have my phone number changed every six months, but not here. And I could never go out shopping with my wife. Even if I went out for a drive in Liverpool there could be traffic jams."

"That's because of the size of your nose," cracked Glover. "All them drivers saw that big buzzer and laughed so and they crashed." The accents at the table were deep, making conversation with the two like talking to any given half of the Beatles.

"Of course Pel�'s been great for the game in America," Smith went on, covering the offending proboscis with his hand, "and he's still one of the greatest soccer players in the world. I don't think anyone's jealous of him because he got so much money." When the playoffs are over, both Smith and Glover will return to England and earn the main part of their living by playing the regular 42-game English season over the winter. The two-season year is not uncommon among NASL players, whose U.S. contracts fall considerably short of Pel�'s.