‘The Big Bounce’: Tales from the 1984 Olympics, which set American soccer on a new trajectory

The following is an excerpt from “The Big Bounce: The Surge That Shaped the Future of U.S. Soccer” by Alan Rothenberg. Before becoming the CEO and chairman of the USA-hosted 1994 FIFA World Cup and U.S. Soccer’s president, Rothenberg served as the Soccer Commissioner of the 1984 Olympics.

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Back then there were only hard tickets, not yet electronic tickets. I was always optimistic we’d get a strong turnout, but in the battle for media attention, soccer at that time was perpetually an also-ran—and the truth was, we really didn’t know what kind of turnout to expect. There weren’t many advance sales. 

Going into the first game at the Rose Bowl, Italy against Egypt on July 29, we obviously weren’t going to print up 103,300 tickets and assume a sellout. You could have a lot of unused tickets in that scenario, taking up a lot of space and demanding a lot of time. We printed up about 30,000 tickets and hoped they’d all move.

The afternoon of the match, which started at 7:30 pm, we could see a lot of fans streaming into the stadium. We were flooded. People were coming. I was wondering what was going to happen if we ran out of tickets. We wanted to avoid a riot.

If we started telling people they couldn’t come inside and would have to go home, we’d have had a riot on our hands. So, we hurried down into the bowels of the Rose Bowl and found old rolls of tickets, like what you used to see at old movie theaters. It was time to improvise. They would do. I’m sure some ticket-takers made a fortune that day, because they were getting cash, and we had no record of what they were selling. Official attendance for the game, which Italy won 1–0, was 37,430, though I’m sure the actual number on hand was easily 50,000 or more.

For our second game at the Rose Bowl, Brazil against Saudi Arabia on July 30, we came up with a new plan. About an hour before the gates were going to open before the 7:30 pm start, we helicoptered in our full batch of tickets. That surprised everyone. Brazil won 3–1 and the crowd was 40,799.

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The deeper we got into the Olympic tournament, the better we were feeling about all our work organizing. Our big attendance numbers were one of the surprise stories of the Olympics, and we knew the crowd for the gold-medal game at the Rose Bowl would be tremendous. …

… Before the Final match, there was a bomb scare. A nightmare! Now keep in mind, 1984 was 17 years before 9/11 changed everything about how we went about security precautions. It was, I guess you could say, a more innocent time, though it’s worth remembering that no one who lived through it would ever forget the horror of the Munich Olympics in 1972, when terrorists infiltrated the Olympic Village and killed 11 Israeli athletes. In 1977, theaters across the U.S. showed a John Frankenheimer film called Black Sunday, based on a Thomas Harris novel. In the movie, terrorists are on the verge of exploding a bomb loaded with a quarter-million steel projectiles in the carriage of the Goodyear Blimp as it flies over a packed stadium a lot like the Rose Bowl. It was just a movie, but it made you think.

We had a full house at the Rose Bowl for the Olympic Final in 1984, more than 100,000 people, much like in the movie, though of course at the time I couldn’t think about that. It was my job to decide what to do. Order an evacuation? Ride it out? Figure out a third option? I try to stay cool in a crisis situation and listen to everyone, then weigh my options and make a choice and move on. That day was no different.

I was in the Rose Bowl press box, surrounded by top-notch law-enforcement people, FBI, state police, Pasadena police, and Los Angeles County sheriffs. They carefully briefed me on the sweep of the Rose Bowl and surrounding areas that had been conducted.

“Sir, we’ve come up with nothing,” I was told. “We see no evidence of any explosive devices. But you’re the commissioner. It’s your call.”

Yes, it was my call, and it weighed heavily. I carefully ­ considered the options. Based on the reports from law enforcement, I was fairly certain it was a hoax. I shuddered at the notion of giving the word to announce over the loudspeakers: “Don’t panic, but please exit in an orderly fashion!” The vomitories at the Rose Bowl were long and narrow. Thousands of people could have been trampled. Hundreds could have died and many more seriously injured. Panic was just what we would have had.  

“Let’s play,” I said.

And we did—and thankfully no bombs went off. After the game, we let loose with a massive fireworks show, one I’d had to make happen with a little low-key skullduggery.

As I mentioned before, Peter Ueberroth [President of the United States Olympic Committee] was really running a tight ship, even though by that time it was clear the Olympics would be financially successful. He had a strict limitation: you couldn’t have a purchase order of more than $10,000 without approval from headquarters. There was also another rule that no individual sport was to put on any kind of closing ceremony, because he didn’t want to detract from the Olympic Closing Ceremony itself and its over-the-top fireworks show orchestrated by maestro Tommy Walker, who was on the team that had helped Walt Disney develop the Disneyland theme park in Southern California leading up to its July 1955 opening.

My attitude was: damn it! Soccer at that point was always forgotten and overlooked. I felt we’d been dissed. And we’d had such an amazing success, blowing past anybody’s wildest expectations of how many tickets we’d sell for our games. We ended up selling more tickets than any other sport including track and field, which even I didn’t expect. Nobody expected that. 

We were news. The Los Angeles Times posed the question on the morning of August 14: “What was the most popular sport at the Olympics?” Funny you should ask. Just the question we wanted out there. “If you judge by attendance, it was soccer. In the Final at the Rose Bowl, 101,799 fans saw France beat Brazil 2–0, a record attendance at a soccer match in the U.S. In all, the Olympic soccer tournaments games drew 1,421,627 spectators. Track and field was the next most popular event, with 1,129,465. Total attendance, not including the last day: 5,652.111. It would go down in the books as the record, 5,797,923 in total attendance, including the opening and closing ceremonies, easily surpassing the previous Olympic attendance record of 4.4 million set at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. …

Soccer had earned a celebration, and as the commissioner I was going to give us one. So, I signed ten $9,999 purchase orders to pay for a $100,000 fireworks display. It was magnificent and ended with the FIFA logo interlocked with the Olympic logo, all in multi-colors. People were just sitting there with their eyes wide open and their jaws agape. Among the fans of that fireworks display were FIFA President João Havelange of Brazil and Sepp Blatter, then general secretary of FIFA, who were sitting near me. They loved seeing the FIFA logo in the fireworks display and loved the success of our tournament.

They also were in awe of “The Wave,” which first began at the Olympics. They thought I must be some kind of genius. Who was I to tell them otherwise? The FIFA hierarchy saw the mighty Rose Bowl filled with cheering fans, 100,000 strong, and for the first time ever felt confident thinking ahead to bringing world soccer’s crown jewel, the World Cup, to the United States. Havelange never forgot how impressed he was by what he saw, emphasizing later, “I sensed the enthusiasm when I was there at the Olympics in 1984.”

• “The Big Bounce: The Surge That Shaped the Future of U.S. Soccer” By Alan Rothenberg (Triumph Books) will be released on Feb. 10 and is available to preorder.