Generation Zero

Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories
and the Making of Soccer in America

Generation Zero

Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories
and the Making of Soccer in America

July 2022

GZ: The Modern Creation Epic American Soccer Didn’t Know It Had

By |2023-02-02T15:15:57-05:00July 10th, 2022|GZ blog|

Baseball has its Knickerbockers and the 19th century National League, while basketball traces its roots back to Dr. John Naismith and his peach baskets. With Generation Zero, the new sociological/sports history from author Hal Phillips, American soccer finally has a Creation story to call its own — a modern one, befitting the extraordinary growth the game has undergone since 1970, after a full century in the wilderness. Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America (Dickinson-Moses Press, [...]

June 2022

Oft mocked but never ignored, the mullet earns another moment

By |2023-02-23T10:14:29-05:00June 30th, 2022|GZ blog|

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 [...]

By |2022-08-01T20:11:56-04:00June 25th, 2022|GZ blog|

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 [...]

May 2022

Pilgrims Progress: Riding the Development Sine Wave

By |2023-09-14T08:27:34-04:00May 24th, 2022|GZ blog|

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 |2022-08-01T19:40:50-04:00May 24th, 2022|GZ blog|

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 [...]

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