'going For The Big Arteries'

Southern Methodist's soccer coach, Jim Benedek, couldn't find the keys to one of the two team vans. An hour before SMU's game with the University of Texas last Saturday, he was standing in a motel parking lot in Austin, slapping his pockets.

"You've got them," he yelled to Assistant Coach Micky Ashmore.

"You drove, Jim," Ashmore hollered back.

"Oh, God, here we go again," sighed a player as he and his teammates climbed out of the van. Benedek looked at the sky and sighed, too. "Why can't this team do anything smooth?" he asked.

Smooth, no. Successful, yes. At the start of the season, the NCAA's soccer powers might have been forgiven for wondering "SM Who?" Before long, they had the answer. Ranked third nationally for a good part of the season, the Mustangs had compiled a 14-1-1 record, the best in the NCAA's powerful Midwest region, going into their final regular game last week. Along the way, they had upset second-ranked Indiana and Seattle Pacific University. Their van keys eventually turned up (they were in the other van), and Benedek's men got past Texas 3-2. So, smooth as a train wreck, the Mustangs were bound for postseason play for the first time in the five-year history of soccer at the school.

"I think they'll do very well in the playoffs," said Indiana Coach Jerry Yeagley. "They're physical but clean. When you play them you know by the bruises that you've been in a game. And that damn defensive style of theirs tears down opponents psychologically."

When Hungarian-born Jim Benedek took the reins at SMU in 1974—he had played at Ithaca College and spent four years with the North American Soccer League's Dallas Tornado—soccer was a club sport without varsity standing. Players dressed an hour before games and then helped set up portable stands on SMU's soccer pitch, the outfield of the baseball diamond.

In his first year, Benedek's Mustangs managed to knock off a couple of pretty good teams. They have improved steadily ever since. Last year, with a 14-1-1 record, they almost made the playoffs.

Most of the team comes from the Dallas area, not heretofore known as one of the hotbeds of American soccer. "This is the land of Doak Walker and Kyle Rote—I mean Kyle Rote Sr., the football player. This is Dallas Cowboy turf," says Benedek, a compact, excitable man whose Hungarian accent gets stronger as he becomes emotional. "But the Dallas Tornado started promoting youth soccer in 1970, and now there are 300,000 kids playing the game here. I only have three scholarships; how can I recruit out of town?"

Benedek's team includes three Iranians, a Scotsman and a Mexican, but 14 of the Mustangs are Big D products. And no one is more purely Texas than the team's only superstar, All-America Goalkeeper Randy Phillips. A toothpick-chewing, 6'1", rawboned redhead, Phillips had a superb .55 goals-against average and logged 10 shutouts in the 17-game season.