The Washington Post
November 14, 2004 Sunday
Final Edition

For Eskandarians, A Father-Son Game;
United’s Alecko Enjoys Same Success

by William Gildea, Washington Post Staff Writer

RAMSEY, N.J

Andranik Eskandarian drove his white 2004 Cadillac Escalade through
the streets of north Jersey, past Paramus, on the way to Hackensack
and a sports store he owns there. He is the father of Alecko
Eskandarian, the surprise leading goal scorer of D.C. United, which
plays the Kansas City Wizards today in Carson, Calif., for the
championship of Major League Soccer. The senior Eskandarian once was
a standout defender for the New York Cosmos of the now-defunct North
American Soccer League, and, growing up, Alecko used to challenge him
on the backyard soccer field of the family’s home in nearby Montvale.

“I always tell Alecko, ‘You are playing now at a good time. I don’t
play anymore,’ ” the father said good-naturedly. He turned down a
side street to avoid traffic and parked near the Main Street store
originally owned and now managed by a teammate on the Cosmos, Hubert
Birkenmeier, the former goalie. It was against Birkenmeier, one of
the NASL’s finest netminders, that the young Alecko also honed his
shooting skills.

They played inside the store.

“Alecko has a very powerful shot,” Birkenmeier said. “I know. He hit
it enough off of me.”

“We used to break stuff,” Alecko would say later. “I think we scared
away some customers.”

Birkenmeier favors the area MLS team, the MetroStars, but he roots
hardest of all for Alecko. For years, he has kept Alecko’s favorite
soccer ball tucked away in the store’s basement. As recently as a few
weeks ago, Alecko visited the store and retrieved the ball, bouncing
it on his foot for the next hour.

“Here it is,” said Birkenmeier, producing a green soccer ball. “This
is a football we will never sell.”

He told how Alecko used to kick that ball between the rows of
clothing and racks of shoes, recalling hectic encounters that might
better have taken place outdoors, on a field somewhere. Now he
watches Alecko on television, or in person at Giants Stadium when
United plays there.

“Alecko is always in the right spot to score,” Birkenmeier said
proudly. “But what I liked about him so much the last game, I never
saw him working so hard. He ran his butt off. You can see
improvement. He has still more confidence. I guess the coaching has
something to do with that, too.”

He put the green ball back in the basement, treating it like a small
boy’s favorite toy.

Alecko Eskandarian is still growing as a soccer player. At 22, he can
look forward to a future that many soccer observers foresee as
blindingly bright. For now, his skills and fame are ascendant —
never more so than eight nights ago at RFK Stadium when D.C. United
beat New England in MLS’s Eastern Conference final. He is short, 5
feet 8, and compact, 160 pounds, with broad shoulders, and powerful
legs that enable him to run fast and for as long as any game might
last.

Off the laces of his left shoe after a run from midfield against the
Revolution, he blasted a 22-yard shot that rose and ticked high off
the inside of the far post (almost faster than the eye could see) and
ricocheted into the net to start the scoring in what turned out to be
one of the most exciting games in the franchise’s nine-year history.
It was a virtuoso shot. He had reached top speed when he leaned
almost imperceptibly forward so that his head and torso were almost
above the ball, enabling him to bring the force of his entire body to
bear when he swung through with his kicking leg.

If beating his defender wasn’t enough, he had to place the shot
perfectly because the New England goalie has an extraordinary reach
and a proven ability to stretch full out in an effort to make stops.
But he couldn’t stop Eskandarian.

“He probably had an inch to score that goal,” Andranik said one day
this week at his other soccer store, Eski’s Sports, on Ramsey’s Main
Street. “I watched the tape. If it was an inch inside, the goalie
would have saved it. It was that calculated a shot, an unbelievably
calculated shot.”

The father knows much about such things. An Armenian descendant who
grew up in Tehran, he played in the 1978 World Cup for Iran before
playing for the Cosmos from 1979 through 1984. He was too late to
have been a teammate of Pele, who retired from the Cosmos in 1977,
but the roster still glittered with such international stars as Franz
Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and scoring machine Giorgio Chinaglia.

Now 53, Eskandarian still plays three times a week — for an over-40
team and an over-35 team. He weighs only five pounds more than his
155 with the Cosmos, and thus was in top condition when Alecko was
growing up and trying to score goals against him.

“As early as when he was 4 years old, he would look at the highlight
tape of all those goals by Giorgio Chinaglia [pronounced
Canal-e-ah],” his father said. “He would put the tape in and he
couldn’t even sit down and watch, he would walk and watch it, because
he was boiling inside to do it. So he would take me in the backyard
and he would put me in the goal and he would start shooting. He grew
like that.”

“That’s all I ever thought about, scoring goals,” the younger
Eskandarian said after a practice this week at RFK, before D.C.
United flew to California for the title game. “I think it’s my
personality.”

His brother Ara, three years older, who played soccer at Villanova
and now is an accountant in New York, “was shy, kind of. He didn’t
want the spotlight. He was a defender, like my father. But with me, I
wanted a lot of attention, all eyes on me. I always wanted to be
scoring goals.”

He almost always has: 154 goals in four years at Bergen Catholic High
and 50 in three seasons at the University of Virginia. After a
discouraging rookie year with D.C. United when former coach Ray
Hudson played him only sporadically, he scored a team-high 10 goals
this season, and has added two more in the playoffs. Peter Nowak, the
rookie coach who rescued Eskandarian from the bench, described him as
one of a few young players on D.C. United with exceptional potential,
“all guys still under their mothers’ wings, so to speak,” a group
that includes 15-year-old Freddy Adu.

“Eski can score goals when he’s in good spots, and when he gets a
look at the goal he’s deadly,” Kevin Payne, United’s president, said.
“What gets much harder at this level compared with college is getting
in those spots and getting those looks at the goal. When he came into
the league, he didn’t really understand how hard he had to work off
the ball to give himself those opportunities. At the same time, there
wasn’t any consistency to his playing time. So he was confused. There
wasn’t as much coaching done with him, I don’t believe. This year,
Peter . . . was going to see to it that Eski was one of guys who was
going to be vitally important because Peter was convinced that he
could do it.

“Right now,” Payne added, “I would put his work rate up against any
forward in the world. And he’s just going to get better and better.”

Eskandarian’s career almost was inevitable, growing up as he did in a
household where the sport was roughly the equivalent of breathing.

When he had barely begun to walk, he chased after a soccer ball and
kicked it rather than trying to pick it up. While that was hardly
unique, his father recalled Alecko persisting in kicking a ball.
“Look what we have here,” he told his wife Anna, who also is of
Armenian descent and from Iran.

“I remember always having a ball around me,” Alecko said. “When I was
little, there was a sponge ball I would sleep with and kick around
all day long. I just loved it. And when you have an older brother,
you do what he does, and he was growing up playing soccer.

“My parents would have to kick me off the backyard field because I
would be out there till midnight doing my own thing if they let me. I
would do it for hours and hours. You know, like little kids playing
basketball, pretending to be Jordan, taking the last shot. Well, I
was in the backyard pretending to be whoever and ‘scoring’ with only
a few seconds left.”

He attended an Armenian elementary school, describing himself at the
time as prone to mischief. Because of his antics, he said, the school
had to create detention.

His father disciplined him, though. The elder Eskandarian always
coached the soccer teams his son played on — and the father was
tough.

“Very tough,” said Alecko, his dark eyes widening, “but in a positive
way. One of the many things my parents have given me is their
honesty. If I’m doing well, they’ll tell me. If I’m doing bad,
they’ll be the first ones to tell me. I remember in high school I
scored five goals in a game and we won 5-0 and my dad said, ‘You
played terrible today.’ I was like, ‘I’m sure there was someone worse
than me.’ He said, ‘No.’ ”

Oh, yes, acknowledged the father, seated in his back-room office in
Eski’s Sports, he was a strict father-coach. But, as he told it, he
believed in his son advancing “gradually” in soccer and keeping a
“humble” attitude no matter how accomplished a player he became.
“When he was in high school and people came to us and said, ‘Send him
to England to play,’ or, ‘Send him to Germany,’ I didn’t feel that
way. I wanted him to stay in the family.”

Anna called to her husband from out in the store. High up in one
corner of the room, near the shirts and shoes and opposite an oil
painting she made of him in his No. 2 Cosmos uniform, is a TV. Fox
Sports World was coming on with MLS highlights, specifically the
United-New England game. Even though he already had watched his own
complete tape of the game, Andranik stood next to Anna, enjoying
their son’s exquisite goal one more time. She, too, thrives on
soccer, and Alecko sometimes calls her “Coach.”

“They thought he was going to cross,” she said, meaning that the
defenders appeared to be looking for him to pass the ball.

“Ah, but you could see it in his face,” said Andranik, noting that
Alecko had looked toward the goal with his eyes while not moving his
head.

Moments later, she stepped toward the TV and pointed up to a player
breaking free in front of the net. Sounding much like a coach, she
said: “There was no defender. No one was covering.”

Andranik laughed at her frustration over the play.

At length, United’s players were shown celebrating the victory after
penalty kicks. “That was a nice moment,” she said with a smile.

Ironically, Andranik experienced a similar feeling at RFK in 1980,
when the NASL held its title game there and the Cosmos won.

“So I was back there watching my son, and it was a beautiful feeling
for me,” he said. “After 24 years, Alecko was holding that cup there.
For me, it’s a blessing.”

Eskandarian’s two seasons with United could not have been more
different.

In last year’s opener, he suffered a concussion when he was knocked
to the ground and landed headfirst. In this year’s opener, he scored
in a 2-1 victory over San Jose.

Last season, he wasn’t given much of a chance. This season, he was
slowed by hamstring problems after the opener and found himself back
on the bench, fearing more frustration. But on June 19, 21/2 months
into the season and with the team struggling, he was given a start
based on his hard work at practice and the team’s obvious need for a
change. He scored two goals as United beat Columbus, 3-1.

Veteran midfielder Ben Olsen put it this way: “It’s easy to say now
after he’s had this year, but I saw some stuff from this kid in
college, the goals he scored, his size, his width, his speed, his
pace, his strikes on goal, he’s got the whole package. We saw it in
practice a lot the year before. We knew that once this kid got hot,
he was going to be okay.”

At forward, he has been perfectly paired with veteran Jaime Moreno,
who led the team in points (28) and the entire league in assists (14)
during the regular season. “When you’re on the same page, it makes
everything easier,” Moreno said. “That’s how we’ve felt, that we can
go at the defenders and we can score.”

Eskandarian, as his father would have it, sounded grateful to be
playing.

“The coaches gave me the opportunity to start against Columbus,” he
said. “After that, the guys on the team kind of began looking at me
like, all right, you’re going to be a goal scorer, we’re going to
count on you every game to try to make something happen. That’s the
role I wanted.”

It will be his role today. A score of relatives who have settled in
California will be in the stands rooting for him, although the dean
of the family will have to watch on television at his home in nearby
Glendale, his health preventing him from going to the stadium. That
would be Andranik’s father, Galoost. Alecko would like to win the MLS
Cup for him. He is 92.