Bunnies and Gurus
Milwaukee soccer in the 1970s followed an unwritten rule: for your team to be good, your coach’s last name had to end in ic (Serbian or Croatian), ski (Polish), or have an umlaut (German). The English showed up a little later armed with excuses about why they hadn’t played top flight football (“I had a bum knee or I would’ve played for Villa” and soccer jargon masquerading as expertise (“Hey mates, it’s time to put the bloody ball in the old onion bag”).
In Wauwatosa (Tosa), our coach with the oddly spelled name was Lazar, a Romanian Jew. After World War II, thousands of Romanian Jews emigrated to Israel. In 1956, 146,264 Jews resided in Romania; by 1977, only 24,677 remained. Lazar’s family followed the Jewish exodus and emigrated to the United States in 1966, when he was 12 years old.
As a young kid in Romania, Lazar was recruited by FC Baia Mare. He was a goalkeeper until, as he told the story, his fingers were crushed against the post when an adult player took a hard shot on him. Why a little kid was training with men, I have no idea. But Lazar’s soccer stories were like that—tragic, heroic, mythical. Were they all true? Who cares?! He captured our 11-year-old imaginations.
Lazar always wore a sharply contoured beard and mustache. He wasn’t tall but he stood tall, with perfect posture. However, he walked sort of Groucho-like, bent forward with hands clasped behind his back, head tilted downward as if in deep contemplation. He was a serious man. Soccer wasn’t a game. It was art. It was war.
Lazar coached in Tosa from ‘79 to ‘84. On Friday nights, he ran Tosa skills sessions. We learned to juggle, dribble and pass with every surface. He taught us 10 different slide tackles: the sweep, the poke, the leg-breaker, the V. The V, the venus fly trap of slide tackles, was extremely dangerous for male genitalia. As you slid in, with legs spread and eyes wide, the objective was to clamp your opponent’s legs and recover the ball without mutilating your own. The leg-breaker, Lazar warned us, was only to be used under special circumstances.
To teach heading, Lazar lined us up, then, one after one, slapped us on the forehead. “If you head the ball with this surface it will not hurt,” he asserted. To teach thigh control he whacked us on our bare thigh. Basically, soccer practice amounted to a painful lesson in physiology. For shooting practice he had us remove our shoes and socks. “If you strike the ball properly it will not hurt,” he lied. The takeaway, we concluded, was technical improvement was synonymous with reddened flesh and stinging pain.
Perhaps relating to some deep-seated revenge memory of his, supposedly, crushed fingers, he required us to stand tall without flinching and head his driven serves (concussions didn’t quite get the attention back then). In addition to soccer skills, we were learning fortitude and courage as taught in the Dummies Guide to Becoming a Mercenary.
We learned to bend a ball, drive a ball and knuckle a ball. He would strike a ball and say, “That one is called the Riser.” Back then, impressed, I’d stare skyward watching the ball soar higher and higher. Today, I’m fairly certain he just mishit the ball and invented a new term to save face. For years, though, I thought there was a shot called the Riser.
Lazar’s house was stock full of eight-millimeter videos and VHS tapes of games from around the world. He’d tell his team (my brother was on it) they were going to play like the 1950s Hungarian Tigers or the 1970s Liverpool sides. He took players to see local legends play in the SE Wisconsin Adult Major Division. In short, Lazar introduced us to and invigorated us with soccer culture. We loved it, even though we thought he was a little kooky.
Lazar was a talker – a teacher tinged with wartime general. His teams got results, even reached the Midwest Regional Finals in 1982. As we got older, though, our discerning adolescent brains started thinking some of his ideas were a bit odd or maybe just plain wrong. Did he really mean it when he said, “you step on my foot, I break your ankle,” or was that just his little allegorical soccer lesson?
At an out-of-state tournament, he brought the team into his hotel room, closed the door and turned up the heat. He instructed everyone to pay close attention as he spoke about the season, practices, upcoming games, opponents and, most important, the proper mentality one must have to compete. As he spoke – no lectured – the room got hotter and hotter. Players were dripping sweat, as if it was the 80th minute of a midday August game. Finally, he posed the age-old question every player serious about soccer needs to answer, “Do you have the guts to cut the throat of a live rabbit?”
Most of the players stared at him in stone-faced disbelief, then a few began snickering. He told the snickerers to put on their jackets and sit on the hotel room heater. “Do not sweat,” he commanded, then continued his lessons.
Thinking about Coach Lazar 35 years later, I ask myself – was he psychotic? What kind of coach/adult asks kids whether they’d mutilate an animal? What does murdering a rabbit have to do with soccer? Why a rabbit? Squash a cockroach, go for it. But a rabbit? A bunny? And what about the sweltering hot room? Sitting on a heater with a jacket on as a punishment for snickering?
Upon reflection, though, I don’t think Coach Lazar was psychotic. Odd, yes, but not crazy. I think he was a coach channeling the old country into the role of a coach in his new one. It was coaching theater and he was the star method actor – he never broke character.
Lazar died in 2007 at the young age of 52. He left behind a wife and three kids. In Wauwatosa, Wisconsin in the late 1970s and early 80s, in his unique and sometimes unsettling way, he taught a bunch of kids the skills necessary, and a few unnecessary, to play the game he loved. Perhaps, inadvertently, he offered us a glimpse into the extreme, sometimes maniacal, game of soccer as it is approached and played around the world. Lazar was our coach, our teacher, our general and our performer. He was our technical guru. If that begs the question, are you willing to slit a bunny’s throat to play the game well – well, so be it.
