The Chosen One

It's 7:30 p.m., the night after Thanksgiving, and the lights are dimming inside the Convocation Center. The steady boom, boom, boom of arena-friendly techno music pulses through the building as a cloud of fog rolls across the floor.

It is five minutes before game time for the Cleveland Crunch, which lays claim to a unique distinction in Northeast Ohio: The region's most successful pro franchise of the last decade, it is also the least cherished -- a team that would even be glad to be considered among the heap of such second-tier community distractions as the Rockers.

There are many explanations for this, chief among them being the glaringly obvious: The Crunch plays soccer, a sport that ranks slightly north of jai alai and curling in the nation's jock consciousness.

Actually, as far as 95 percent of the world's population is concerned, even that description might not be accurate. For the Crunch doesn't play soccer -- not in the way those pony-tailed male models in Europe or South America do, anyway. No, the Crunch plays indoor soccer, an Americanized, bastard cousin to the flight of passion known as "the beautiful game" to the rest of the globe.

Still, whatever the sport's pedigree, no indoor team was better or more exciting than the Cleveland Crunch for much of the '90s. From 1993 through 1999, it won 160 games. It played for the National Professional Soccer League's championship five times, winning three trophies.

Those days, however, have since taken on the air of nostalgia. Last year the Crunch went 18-22 and finished last in the conference. It missed the playoffs for the first time since 1990, its first year in the league. In April, the Crunch's ownership group fired the most successful coach in team history.

The bad juju only continued this year. The team still has the ability to excite; it can put plenty of goals on the board. But it is also very young. The defense is inconsistent, and the team has the unfortunate habit of squandering leads.

By mid-December, the Crunch had won only four games and was in last place.

The Crunch's record is not the only dispiriting development. The Convocation Center can hold more than 12,000 people for soccer. But at this post-Thanksgiving game against the Harrisburg Heat, concession workers seem to outnumber paying customers, and the place has all the charm of an airplane hangar.

There are still loyal fans, of course, even some rabid, diehard souls who follow the team with ascetic devotion. They are fewer than in years past, but they still come each week, too faithful or too optimistic to give up.

As the music pumps and the fog rolls, the announcer introduces each player. The applause makes it easy to discern crowd affections. There's Otto Orf, a veteran goalkeeper and custodian of one of the world's more exceptional mullets. There's John Ball, a speedy forward. There are promising young players like Kiley Couch and Brian Hinkey, a midfielder who could pass himself off as Justin Timberlake's older brother. But most of all, the crowd has come to see a short, stocky forward in the twilight of his career.

He has been playing professionally for 16 years, but these days he looks like he should be wielding his five-iron rather than chasing a ball around a carpeted hockey rink. His hair is thinning. His body is thickening. His nose looks like it's been whacked with a canoe paddle one too many times. He is neither the strongest nor the fastest player, yet he plays with a quiet intensity that produces something rarer than gold in this game: the ability to put the ball in the back of the net, again and again and again.

He is, quite simply, the greatest goal scorer in indoor soccer history.

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Hector Marinaro has scored 1,025 goals in 461 games with the Cleveland Crunch, more than any other person who has ever played his sport. It is a figure made all the more remarkable because it doesn't even include the four years he played for other teams. And because goals are scored so much more frequently in indoor than outdoor soccer, it's safe to say he's the most prolific scorer in all of professional soccer -- anywhere in the world.

"There were unbelievable goals, goals you never dreamed possible," says Bruce Miller, who coached the Crunch for five years before he was fired last season.

Marinaro once did a bicycle kick -- maybe the coolest-looking thing you can do with a soccer ball without involving nudity or midgets -- to win a playoff game in overtime. He did another one to score in an all-star game.

In 1997, he scored 12 goals. In a single game.