The Sports Life

Basketball - It's a Vision Thing for Nash in Soccer and in Basketball

It was easy to tell who the sports fans were in Central Park on Tuesday afternoon. They were the ones doing double takes, pulling out their camera phones and snapping photographs of two top professional athletes who were nudging soccer balls around in the grass.

Steve Nash, a two-time most valuable player in the N.B.A., and Claudio Reyna, once a mainstay on the United States national soccer team, were warming up for what was supposed to be a pickup soccer game in the Sheep Meadow between one of Nash's recreational-league teams and several players for the Red Bulls, Reyna's professional squad in Major League Soccer. Nash spends most of the year running the point for the Phoenix Suns, but in the off-season, he can be found playing soccer in rec leagues in New York.

"It's better for me than just running lines," he said. "I don't want to play a lot of basketball until September's over or I'll burn myself out. I just shoot, work out and play soccer."

But not in the Sheep Meadow. The 15-acre patch of grass is for passive recreation only, park officials said as they shut down the game Tuesday between Nash's team and the Red Bulls players before it started. Employees of the Central Park Conservancy established that the group did not have a permit, then asked the soccer players to remove their cleats - "there is a reason the turf is in such nice shape," one of them said.

That prompted vigorous but futile protests from Nash's team, Promotion Factory, which is composed almost entirely of Italian transplants.

"Soccer is not loved," shouted one player from Nash's team, winning a round of laughing cheers from his teammates.

"They are always trying to contain it," said another, insisting that the incident illustrated why soccer was not more popular in the United States.

To appease the park officials, the match was moved to a nearby patch of dirt. But concern about the potential for injury on such the surface led a Red Bulls official to forbid the players from participating. Reyna and his teammates stood by and watched as Nash's team split into two groups and played on their own.

Standing on the sideline with his children, Reyna, who was captain of the United States national team in last summer's World Cup, said Nash was an excellent soccer player.

"He's got the vision like on the court," Reyna said. "When you have vision in soccer, you can connect the pass. It's the same idea. You can see that from playing basketball, and also from growing up playing soccer, he understands the game."

Soccer was Nash's first love - he said his first word as an infant was goal. His father played professionally in South Africa and England, his sister was the captain of her university team, and his younger brother, Martin, has played on Canada's national team.

"I think my dad, more than anything, gave me the passion," Nash said later, in a telephone interview Tuesday night. "I remember sitting on the steps waiting for him to come home, and we'd be playing in the backyard before he even had his tie off."

Nash's other recreational team plays in an eight-a-side league at Pier 40, in a league populated by college friends trying to stay in touch and desk-job dreamers trying to stay in shape. Nash's team wears T-shirts adorned with the name Phebe's, a bar and grill on the Bowery where they sometimes adjourn for postgame camaraderie.

"At Pier 40, it's better because everyone's there for our league," Nash said. "There's not a lot of people around. I can just be one of the guys."

At a game there in June, the Phebe's team beat a group of Cornell graduates, 8-4. Jeremy Freyer, the opposing squad's goalkeeper in that match, said he initially was not aware that one of the N.B.A.'s biggest stars was in the game.

"I didn't even realize it was him until it was the second half and he scored a couple goals on me," Freyer said. "It made me feel a little better."

Nash travels to Europe occasionally to attend soccer matches; he said he followed the English Premier League the closest - particularly his favorite team, Tottenham Hotspur.

"The atmosphere is electrifying," Nash said of England's top league. "The pace is great, with the fans singing along. They demand a passionate performance. The fans are right on top of the players. Anyone who's ever had a chance to go to a premiership knows there's nothing like it."

Certainly not Central Park, where the only fans who watched Nash's entire pickup game were his wife, Alejandra, and his twin daughters.

By the end, Alejandra seemed excited to leave. As Nash grinned and shook hands with his teammates, she said, "The one time I come to one of these games, it's just three hours of eating dust."

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