When it comes to Generation Zero, the late 1980s, and the contemporaneous making of soccer in America, there is no getting around the mullet. Oft mocked but never ignored, this seminal coiffure was everywhere during this period. National team defender and three-time World Cupper Marcelo Balboa summed it up best, when we spoke to me in 2018: “We wanted to leave something behind, a legacy — and I think it was the mullet. We tore it up on the mullet [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]