The North American Soccer League breathed its last in October 1984. Earlier that year, during the Super Bowl, Apple ushered in the age of personal computing with its famously Orwellian commercial spot. Thirty-eight years down the road, these two streams — one sporting, the other technical — have crossed once again. On June 14, 2022, Major League Soccer — the spawn of NASL — announced it will exclusively stream every MLS match live, via a dedicated app on the Apple [...]
Pilgrims Progress: Riding the Development Sine Wave
In the summer of 1978, my U-14 club team undertook a two-week tour of England and Holland. On some abstract level, halfway through the Carter Administration, my teammates and I on the Wellesley (Mass.) Pilgrims — a squad whose core members played together from ages 8 to 18 — had already begun to recognize our status as American soccer pioneers. Our overseas tour only confirmed this trailblazing cred. We would eventually learn that Generation Zero, the first truly native-born cohort [...]
The Big Chill, Classic Rock and the Boomerfication of America
By the time I headed off to college in August 1982 — which is to say, by the time the lead-edge of Generation X (those born between 1961 and 1981) had finished high school and headed off to college — the "classic rock" radio format already dominated the FM dial. We children of the Seventies did not recognize in this musical phenomenon any overt Baby Boomer-centrism. Not at first. It took another pop cultural marker, The Big Chill, to crystalize [...]