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Two For The Road Nick Garcia led Indiana to its second straight NCAA title and then turned pro
Before the championship was even decided, some observers at
Charlotte's Ericsson Stadium were calling it the most
transcendent play in the 41 years of the NCAA men's soccer
tournament. As Indiana protected a 1-0 lead with 20 minutes left
in last Sunday's final, Santa Clara's Anthony Chimienti lashed a
shot that had already beaten goalkeeper T.J. Hannig when
Hoosiers sweeper Nick Garcia suddenly transformed himself into a
pair of ER lifesaving shock paddles. Throwing his body headlong
toward the back of his own goal (Garcia would end up stuck in
the net like a tuna caught at sea), he somehow nodded the ball
upward in the opposite direction, off the crossbar, and it
caromed harmlessly out of danger. Shock paddles attached...CLEAR!
"I thought it had skimmed off my head and gone in," Garcia said,
admitting that he didn't know what had transpired in the
scramble. Duly saved, Indiana held on for the win and its second
straight national title, a trophy it owed mainly to Garcia, the
cocksure All-America sweeper whose back-line dominance raised an
interesting question: Could the best college player in America
be a defender who didn't score a goal all season?
Well, yes. Never mind Garcia's goal line theatrics. Anyone who
thinks soccer players can't use their hands hasn't watched him
direct the Hoosiers with the panache of a latter-day Arthur
Fiedler. Garcia's hands are constantly in motion. He'll thrust
them downward to calm his team before an opposing corner kick.
He'll jerk them upward to plead for the ball in transition.
He'll flap them forward to keep the back line even as it
advances upfield. In fact, watching Garcia choreograph Indiana's
offside trap calls to mind the scene from The Full Monty in
which Robert Carlyle teaches line-dancing by invoking Arsenal's
offside trap. "Nick is a puppeteer out there," says Indiana
coach Jerry Yeagley, "whether he's behind the team, in front of
the team, anywhere."
Or everywhere. Free to roam where he pleases, Garcia splits
defenses with unexpected length-of-the-field runs and still
makes game-saving stops in front of his own goal. Surely he's
the only athlete in the country whose coach compares him in one
breath to Jim Henson and in another to a world-famous
firefighter--"He's our Red Adair"--yet both descriptions fit. In
Indiana's 3-2 four-overtime win over UCLA in the semis, Garcia
cleared a sure Bruins goal off the line with a lunging
leftfooted jab only five seconds from the end of the second OT.
A junior who has discouraged professional interest from Major
League Soccer and Europe since high school, Garcia has been a
throwback in today's college game. In the three years since MLS
instituted Project-40, a program that encourages top young
players to skip college and go pro in return for future tuition
money, the upper reaches of college soccer have been decimated.
Thirty-eight players have taken the Project-40 plunge, or 12.7 a
year--compared with the 16 college underclassmen and high school
seniors drafted by the NBA last year. "Indiana is a unique
situation in which there's a professional environment and you
can get quality training day in and day out," Garcia said before
Sunday's game.
Nevertheless, Garcia surprised nobody when he announced after
the final that he would give up his last year of eligibility to
turn pro--in MLS or Europe. "Indiana can only give me so much,"
he said, "and it's in my best interest to go forward and play
with better players, at a higher level."
With that, Garcia took the next step in a soccer journey that
began in his hometown of Plano, Texas. Nick was only five when
he started practicing with the 17- and 18-year-old boys on a
club team coached by his father, Phil. "They'd knock him down,
pick him up and dust him off, and then off he'd go," Phil
recalls. "He never cried, either. That was when he learned not
to have any fear."
Garcia was a national player of the year at Dallas's Bishop
Lynch High and has been a mainstay of the U.S. junior squads in
international play, serving as a co-captain at last spring's
Under-20 World Cup in Nigeria and emerging as a top candidate
for the U.S. team at the 2000 Olympics and, perhaps, the 2002
World Cup. He is widely considered to be one of the toughest
young players in the country, as he showed with his goal line
clear on Sunday--and, unfortunately, his head-butt of Santa
Clara's Kyle Smith after Smith crashed into Hannig in the box.
Still, Garcia will have to change a few habits when he starts
his pro career. On road trips this year he took along a Beanie
Baby monkey named Bongo, and one wonders if hard-bitten German
or Belgian footballers will find stuffed animals amusing. Then
again, it's a measure of Garcia's talent that weaning himself
from kiddie toys may be his biggest professional challenge.
COLOR PHOTO: GEORGE TIEDEMANN
Can the best college player in America be a defender who didn't
score a goal all season?
