No Simple Feet : Moore Has Endured Just About Everything to Keep Soccer Career Alive and Kicking

CHULA VISTA — He doesn’t have Eric Wynalda’s knack for the breakaway, the explosive speed of Roy Lassiter or the size and strength of Brian McBride, so maybe Joe-Max Moore doesn’t make opposing sweepers shake in their boots like some of the other scoring threats on the U.S. national soccer team.

But make no mistake, Moore has ways of getting the ball in the net.

He had 25 goals and 14 assists in 1989 at Mission Viejo High and led UCLA in scoring as a sophomore and junior. He signed with the national team, forgoing his senior year, and set the national team’s single-season record with eight goals in 1993. He led FC Saarbruecken in the German Second Division with 13 goals in 1994-95 and last year scored a team-high 11 goals in only 14 games for the New England Revolution . . . after joining the team in midseason.

Then there’s Dec. 5, 1993, the day Moore became the first player since 1934 to score four goals in a full international, a day he actually scored five times. Television replays clearly showed his header off a corner kick slipping through a hole in the bottom corner of the net.

Still, it’s a relatively quiet barrage--even in a sport where every score is a cause for delight and exaltation--and maybe that’s because you can’t calculate Moore’s finest attribute with a stopwatch, scale or tape measure. Apparently, he wills the ball past the keeper because he simply can’t bear losing.

“As far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as over the top when it comes to competitiveness in a game or even a scrimmage,” said U.S. goalkeeper Brad Friedel, who played with Moore at UCLA. “And Joe will play as hard as he can every time, whether it’s against an under-10 club team or AC Milan.

“But with Joe, it doesn’t matter if it’s a board game in the hotel lobby. He’ll do anything, at any cost, to win. He’d kill you over a game of tiddlywinks.”

Moore knows about winning. He led Mission Viejo High to the Southern Section 3-A title in 1989 and scored during UCLA’s penalty-shot victory over Alexi Lalas’ Rutgers team in the 1990 NCAA championship game. And he has recently learned much more than he cares to about losing. The Revolution was the only team in the five-team Eastern Conference that failed to make the MLS playoffs last season.

But nowhere did he pick up the art of accepting defeat graciously or even gracefully. He curses, frets and writhes. And the agony that envelopes him lingers.

“In 1991, the Olympic team was at Indiana University and we went bowling,” said defender Mike Burns, Moore’s teammate on the Revolution and the national team. “Brad [Friedel] and I beat Joe-Max and Rhett Harty [now with the New York/New Jersey Metro-Stars] and Joe was so [angry], it was really hilarious. He was ranting and whining about this stupid bowling match, so I took the score sheet, circled the winners and put it up on a door where the whole team would see it.

“It was bowling for Pete’s sake, but he just can’t let it go. Just the other day, he asked me again for a rematch.”

Burns won’t be meeting Moore in the local alley, though. He wouldn’t want to give this particular sore spot any chance of healing. Tweaking Moore has become the national pastime for the national team.

“Some guys know how to hide their disappointment, but with Joe, it’s just so easy to wind him up,” Friedel said, grinning. “We’re fooling around playing head-tennis before a workout and if he loses, he’s [angry] for the whole day. And you just can’t help but keep reminding him about it.”

Moore, however, performs better when he’s mad, so he soaks up these rations of grief like an F-16 in midair refueling and then unleashes the energy in a frenzy of activity on the soccer field.

“Every player has to maximize his strengths and nobody does it better than Joe,” Burns said. “He will never accept anything but 110% effort from himself and he knows he has to play that way to succeed.”

While his teammates chat and laugh over lunch in the Arco Olympic Training Center cafeteria here, Moore cultivates the me-against-the-world philosophy that will fire him up for the next challenge: securing his status as a starter for the final round of qualifying for World Cup ’98.

And it’s not exactly a 10-yard shot at an open net.

Moore scored four goals during the national team’s 16-game international season, three of them game-winners. He scored in the 1-0 World Cup qualifying match victory over Trinidad and Tobago. But when Wynalda received his second yellow card in a loss against Costa Rica and was forced to sit out the rematch--a virtual must-win situation for the U.S. team--Coach Steve Sampson replaced both his forwards, moving Lassiter and McBride into the starting roles.

Both scored and the United States won, 2-1.

“I was really disappointed,” Moore said. “So now I’m going to have to fight my way back in. But I’ve been doing that since I left UCLA.”

Moore was the U.S. team’s top scorer in ‘93, but he ended up on the bench when some of the top Americans returned from club teams across the globe to compete in the last World Cup. He never got a touch on the ball during the competition.

“OK, maybe they were more experienced,” he said, “but I felt like I proved myself and I sure wish I had gotten the opportunity to play.”

The United States is favored to survive the next round of qualifying--the top three teams after a home-and-home series between the United States, Mexico, Canada, El Salvador, Jamaica and Costa Rica advance--so Moore might get the chance this time.

But it probably won’t be as a forward.

Moore started in the central midfield for all three games during the recent U.S. Cup ’97 as Sampson experimented with players and formations.

“I think Joe-Max’s best position is coming from the central midfield where he’s facing the goal,” Sampson said. “We’re fortunate that we have three pure strikers in Wynalda, McBride and Lassiter and likely two of those three will rotate as starters.”

Moore played about 20 minutes in a meaningless game against Guatemala in El Salvador on Dec. 21 before taking time off during the holidays. He went to North Carolina for a week-long training camp with the Revolution before joining the national team here on Jan. 10.

“Joe-Max went through a very difficult 1996,” Sampson said. “He had two hernia operations and played essentially two seasons back to back with no rest, one at Nuremberg [the club team he played for in 1995-96] and one in New England. He had great seasons both places, but I think that took its toll toward the end of qualifying.

“But now he looks refreshed, the sharpness is back in his game. I think his batteries are recharged.”

Shortly after Moore arrived for training in Nuremberg, the team underwent a lactate test. He graded out as the squad’s fittest player. It was hardly a surprise; everybody knew the guy could run all day.

What’s more important, according to Sampson, is that Moore is also “willing to do all that running.”

“There are two sides to fitness in soccer,” Moore said, “a combination of both the mental and physical. You have to want it more than anyone else out there and be able to push yourself to the limit for 90 minutes.

“But I’ve always worked hard so I’ve been able to run more than the guy who’s marking me. And my whole career, at every level, I’ve scored lots of goals in the last five or 10 minutes of games.”

But Moore didn’t seem to operate as well in the cold of a German winter and he experienced the first serious injuries of his career.

“For more than two months, we practiced and played on ice and snow every single day,” he said. “That part was really hard and I’m sure that’s what led to me first ripping my groin and then tearing my stomach muscles. I’m a stretching fanatic, but you just couldn’t get stretched out properly.

“But it was great for my wife Martha. She’d never been to Europe and she did a lot of traveling. And I learned a new language, so it was a great experience.”

Moore also learned a new down-and-dirty language of futbol.

“The style of play in Europe is quicker and very physical,” Moore said. “You don’t have much time on the ball. You don’t have time to look around, beat a guy and make a pass. If you play like that, you’ll sit out half the season because people will be flying at you from every direction. It’s definitely a more dangerous game.”

So Moore didn’t have the ball at his feet that long in Germany, but it was quality time.

“He’s one of the few Americans who proved they could play in Europe and as a result, his ability to hold the ball under pressure, always a strength of his, has gotten even better,” Sampson said.

As a kid, Moore daydreamed of playing professional soccer in the United States. When he was 10, his father owned the North American Soccer League’s Tulsa Roughnecks. But when that league went under after the 1985 season, Moore figured he would be forced to go overseas to realize his pro soccer aspirations.

These days, Moore is back in the United States playing for decent money--he reportedly made $165,000 with the Revolution last year. He recently purchased a house in Mission Viejo, where his mother and sister, Leigh, a student at Mission Viejo High, live.

But don’t suggest that life is good. He has scored only one goal since Thanksgiving, a picturesque, bending 20-yard free kick last Wednesday night. But that came during a 4-1 loss to Denmark, the U.S. squad’s third loss in three U.S. Cup ’97 games. His level of play exceeded that of his teammates during the tournament, but there’s still no guarantee he’ll be a starter when the final round of qualifying begins March 2 in Kingston, Jamaica.

“Our performance,” Moore said after the loss to Denmark, “was inexcusable.”

So Joe-Max Moore is a little cranky at the moment, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing for U.S. soccer.

Just don’t challenge him to a game of tiddlywinks.