Scorecard

Professional soccer's life-or-death struggle for survival in the U.S. took a couple of jokingly dissimilar turns last week. On the one hand, there was the Chicago Sting, which wrapped up the NASL championship with a 3-2 Soccer Bowl win in Toronto that completed a two-game sweep of the hometown Blizzard. Not only did the Sting's achievement go virtually unnoticed even in Chicago , where the Cubs hogged the headlines, but also, embarrassingly enough, the Sting is now leaving the NASL to play in the Major Indoor Soccer League . That will reduce the reeling NASL, which had 26 teams just four years ago, to only five certain survivors.

On the other hand, there was the U.S. national team, which began what it hopes will be a march to a berth in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City by beating the Netherlands Antilles 4-0 in St. Louis in the final of their two-game series (the first game was a 0-0 tie) to advance to a round-robin tournament with Trinidad/ Tobago and Costa Rica . If the U.S. wins that event and a second regional round robin, it will qualify for the 24-team World Cup field.

In contrast to the languor in the NASL, the mood in St. Louis was upbeat. Buoyed by NBC -TV's same-day taped coverage of the final game (in the U.S. , the NASL championship game was shown only on local cable in Chicago ) and by the large and enthusiastic crowds that attended Olympic soccer matches in Los Angeles , folks in St. Louis , including a number of present and former NASL officials, were talking about the possibility of starting a new six-, eight- or 10-team North American league that would play real international-style soccer, not a game with Americanized NASL rules.

In other words, professional soccer in the U.S. may have been enjoying the first stirrings of rebirth even as it appeared to be dying.

PRESS DOUBLE TAKE NO. 2

From USA Today 's account on Oct. 1, 1984 of the Indianapolis Colts ' 31-17 win over the Buffalo Bills :

"Dickey, who had 72 yards, set up the Colts ' go-ahead touchdown with a 31-yard run from the Baltimore 4."

OH AND FIVE, BUT OH, MY
It falls into the category of dubious distinctions, but Long Beach State is surely the best 0-5 college football team in the land. The 49ers led Oregon (now 4-1) 17-7 in the fourth quarter before losing 28-17. They lost 23-17 to UCLA (3-2), but only after a drive for the tying, and possibly winning, touchdown stalled late in the game. Fresno State (5-1) beat them 20-17 on a field goal with 1:46 left. Arizona (4-2) defeated them 31-24 on a touchdown and PAT with 33 seconds left. And last week they were tied 17-17 with UNLV (4-1) at the half before losing 41-23. In sum, Long Beach State has lost to teams with a collective 20-7 record by an average margin of just nine points. And one of the 49ers , linebacker Kevin Junior, had the pleasure of telling a booster club that SI's Douglas S. Looney had been wrong in his preseason designation of Long Beach State vs. UCLA as the "crummiest game of the year" (1984 College & Pro Football Spectacular). Junior said Looney should have singled out UCLA 's game the following week—the Bruins' 42-3 loss to Nebraska .

WELCOME, TY ROSE
We have several fond wishes for Ty (actually Tyler Edward) Rose, the newborn—on Oct. 1, 8 pounds 11 ounces—son of Cincinnati Reds player-manager Pete Rose and his wife, Carol. As you may have heard, the Roses named the boy after Ty (actually Tyrus Raymond) Cobb , whose career record of 4,191 hits Pete is pursuing. First, we hope that next season little Ty's dad gets the 95 hits he needs to eclipse Cobb 's mark. Then we hope the lad grows up and gets 4,200-plus hits of his own. After that we'd like to see some descendant of Cobb bestow the name Pete on a son whose destiny it then will be to bang out, oh, say, 4,300 hits. The career hits record having thus passed from Ty Cobb to Pete Rose to Ty Rose to Pete Cobb, our sense of historical continuity will have been fully satisfied.

PRESS DOUBLE TAKE NO. 3