Speaking of Sports
Miracle in Greencastle
The Little Giants victory on the road over DePauw in 1981 featured an unlikely scorer and “one really pissed-off Greek.”
by Tim Padgett ’84
In the 1982 Wabash College yearbook, there’s a photo of me playing in a varsity soccer game with this riveting caption: “Padgett saves the ball from going out of bounds.”
That about summed up my talents. If my mojo was on, I could muster a run down the right wing and send a decent cross to one of our strikers. But scoring goals? I seemed to have no more chance of putting a ball in the net than I did seeing a woman in my C&T class.
Which makes what happened on November 7, 1981—versus DePauw in Greencastle—seem all the more miraculous.
To say the Wabash Little Giants were underdogs for that soccer season finale— especially on the road—would be as obvious as pointing out that oral comps with Bert Stern was a death sentence.
DePauw had a very good soccer program. The year before, in fact, the Dannies had gone to the Division III playoffs.
Wabash had a very good…football program. And basketball—national champs that year!
But soccer was a poorly regarded sibling in 1981. The sport had been varsity at Wabash for more than a decade. But most of us were still Hoosiers whose fathers didn’t know a keeper from a corner kick. The best instruction we’d had as kids was watching a PBS program called Soccer Made in Germany on Sunday afternoons.
Our coach, former Indiana University player Bill Rost, spent much of his four years at Wabash with an understandable grimace on his face. The best headline the yearbook could summon about the 1981 team: “Inexperience and Inconsistency.”
That’s not to say we didn’t have genuine futbol talent. Our co-captain, senior midfielder Paul Jones, was a smart, darting playmaker who made the All-Mideast Soccer Team that season. Forward Dimitris “Jimmy” Liatsis, an exchange student from Greece, was a first-team all-conference selection and our leading scorer. Junior fullback Doug Beebe was one of the best fullbacks I ever watched play the game, and certainly the most graceful tackler.
And what we lacked in skill we made up for in character. Or characters. It was a hell of a fun group.
Sure, I hated losing 8-2 to Washington University. But I enjoyed partying in St. Louis that weekend with guys like Jones—who turned me on to alternative music like Captain Beefheart—rapier wit Burk McCarthy, Russian pre-med buddy Ilya Schwartzman and my mentor and fellow Bachelor editor Scott Dreher.
Still, we came into Greencastle with a dismal 3-8-2 record.
But as they say at the ’Bash: None of that matters if you beat the Dannies.
It was a frosty November day ill-suited for the effete elitists in black and gold, an advantage for us hardier roughnecks in red. Think Agincourt. Henry V’s plebeian longbows versus preening French chevaliers.
DePauw scored first. But it was the kind of goal that makes a keeper mad. Wabash goalie Kyle Foyer suddenly looked as intense as we’d seen him all season. Nothing would get past him the rest of the day.
The more immediate heroics, however, would be Hellenic.
Enter Liatsis. At that moment, a really pissed-off Greek.
Jimmy could be passionate, to say the least. But the stakes were particularly high for him that day. Not only were we playing Wabash’s mortal enemy, he also had a girlfriend in the stands. She was blonde, he recalls.
Liatsis strode into the circle and told midfielder Fred Emhardt, who was poised for the restart, “Just give me the ball.”
Emhardt didn’t hesitate. Like the rest of us, he probably saw something Homeric in Liatsis’ eyes. Achilles was on the field. A blonde Helen was watching from the ramparts. And if you were Hector, well, you were screwed.
Liatsis’ memory of the possessed run he made is about how I would describe it:
“I was in the zone. I dribbled to the right, cut to the left, then right again eluding their two forwards, then between the two midfielders and chipped the ball over two defenders and placed it in the goal.
“I remember my head was pumping blood. I will never forget the feeling, as if everybody stood still and I was alone in another dimension.”
1-1.
You could hear plates breaking on the floors of Greek restaurants in Indianapolis. And the Dannies? Not even Schnapps—hidden in the plaid skirts of their sorority girlfriends up in the stands—could help them dig out of the cold momentum grave Liatsis had just dug them.
He’d put them on their heels. And when good players like them are on their heels, average players like me are suddenly on our toes.
From back line to front, Wabash started moving the ball into space after space in ways Rost had always hoped to see us do it.
Then, near the end of that first half, one of our fullbacks made a masterful overlap run down the right side. A midfielder deftly dropped him the ball, and he crossed it back to the forwards running into the box: Liatsis, Schwartzman, and me.
It came directly to Liatsis, and for a split second he had a shot. But since he’d just shredded the Dannies, they swarmed around him as if he were the new Ralph Lauren catalogue.
That left me open to his right. He had little choice but to push the ball my way—which under normal circumstances would have been a shame. Under normal circumstances I would have screwed around with his pass—two, three unsure and unnecessary touches—before finally doing something with it.
But these weren’t normal circumstances. As the Greek said, we were in a zone—an Iliadic zone. So I booted an uncharacteristically quick, one-touch shot toward the right side of the goal.
And the shot was…really shitty. Not the missile Liatsis would have unleashed. More like a dud grenade bouncing along the cold ground.
But I’d caught the goalie off guard. On his heels. Thinking about the Schnapps in Buffy’s skirt.
He wasn’t ready for the last awkward hop the ball took—and it rolled right beneath his gloved hands and through his legs.
2-1.
I stood there dumbfounded, like the kid in right field who has closed his eyes, stuck his glove in the air and snared the last, clinching out.
But we still had an entire half to preserve a thin, one-goal lead. And that’s when the really gutsy performances started. If we’d been playing over our heads on offense since DePauw’s goal, now we started playing World Cup-worthy defense.
Beebe—just back from a knee injury—Manny Montan, Allen Ridgeway, the whole fullback crew owned our box like minesweepers, making one brilliant tackle after another. Jones, Emhardt, and our midfielders mounted relentless attacks—and stopped DePauw's plays before they could even develop.
And if they did develop, Foyer undeveloped them. He became a vacuum cleaner.
There’s an almost trancelike moment that stands out in my memory and reflects how we were firing on all cylinders in ways we rarely had that season.
A header ball came floating precariously into our box. Foyer leapt out, snared it and shouted, “Go!” Like a migrating herd we changed direction and charged downfield as Foyer slung the ball like a jai-alai player out to a furiously galloping Schwartzman on the left wing.
By then Buffy was asking Liatsis’ girlfriend if she could have a ride to Crawfordsville.
Final score: 2-1.
It was a rare (at least in those days) Wabash victory over DePauw. Even today, Wabash’s record against the Dannies stands at 13-37-3.
And it was one of those wins that gives any struggling sports program a shot in the arm.
Despite our relative lack of IU-level skills, one of our bonds as a team was knowing that we were building something very cool at a football school. We justly lionize Classics Professor John Fischer for founding soccer at Wabash in the 1960s. But Rost, for all his frustrations, laid the foundation for a soccer culture at Wabash—things like the tactical field movement we’d watched on Soccer Made in Germany.
Still, that 1981 upset victory resonates especially proudly in Greece—a country in severe economic crisis today—or at least in Jimmy Liatsis’ household in Thessaloniki, where today he’s an accountant.
“Knowing what my country has gone through the last seven years,” says Liatsis, “nothing could mean more to me than the motto Wabash Always Fights!
“This is my biggest gain from that year at Wabash—my do-or-die effort to change things around.”
Like his hell-bent effort to change Wabash’s soccer fortunes around that November day 35 years ago. The reality that one guy can alter things that way—even if it’s just a soccer game—was perhaps the biggest gain the rest of us took from that afternoon and that season.
That, and the benefits of having a beautiful date watching you. Now if we could just find that woman so we could tell her, on behalf of Wabash men everywhere:
Efkharistó polí, korítsi! Thank you so much, young lady!
This article was written as part of the Wabash soccer 50th anniversary project led by Scott Dreher '82. Dreher’s daughter, Cassandra, created a “soccumentary” for the celebration—for more information contact Dreher: scott@dreherlawfirm.com
Pulled quotes possible:
I stood there dumbfounded, like the kid in right field who’s closed his eyes, stuck his glove in the air and snared the last, winning out.
The reality that one guy can alter things that way— even if it’s just a soccer game—was perhaps the biggest gain the rest of us took from that afternoon and that season.
captions
Wabash celebrated 50 years of soccer by dedicating the soccer field to Professor of Classics Emeritus John Fischer H’70, the founder of Wabash soccer.
The Wabash Soccer Club was formed in 1965 with Fischer as the driving force—he gathered a team, lobbied the administration, and, with help from John Ledyard, taught many players the game.