1982

by Heather Johnson

Ozzy Osbourne was a Sounder fan! Well, for one day, anyway. Not long after his infamous biting-the-head-off-a-bat incident in 1982, his tour came to Seattle, and a day or two before his concert, Ozzy and his then-fiance Sharon sat amongst the peons and cheered (loudly) for the Sounders. My mother mortified me by talking to them, which turned into a surreal (for me) conversation about their wedding. It’s very hard, incidentally, to maintain any pretense of teenage rebellion when your mom refers to Ozzy as ‘a nice young man’. In retrospect, maybe she was right. He did cheer for the right team, after all. And, if memory serves, the game he went to was their first victory of the year.

  Ozzy wasn’t the only one cheering the team on that year. Although attendance was down from ’81, it was still quite respectable (12,490). Perhaps the fact that the Mariners outdrew the Sounders for the first time (13,215) should have been a warning sign to fans, but most of us were still oblivious as to the dire straits the team was headed toward.

  Despite winning the Trans-Atlantic Challenge Cup, the winningest team in the NASL in ’80 had more or less imploded in ’81, and initial indicators were that ’82 wouldn’t be much better. It proved to be a year of extremes. Not only did they lose their first four games, Ian Bridge had an emergency appendectomy in May and was lost for most of the season. Shortly thereafter, there was a GM shakeup, and John Best came back into the fold. The change was disturbing, but most fans were relieved to have Best’s steadying hand back with the Sounders. It was only after all this turmoil that the team took off, ended the year with an 18-14 record, won the EuroPac Cup, and made it to Soccer Bowl.

  After a total lack of goals in the first four games, Seattle ended the season quite the offensive team, as it were. 1982 turned out to have been a banner year for both Mark Peterson and Peter Ward. Peterson, a Tacoma native, scored 19 goals, and found himself the Sounders’ all-time leading scorer with 42 goals (in only 3 years, mind you) as well as the recipient of the North American Player of the Year Award. Ward had an extremely well-rounded year with 21 goals and 16 assists, which earned him the NASL MVP award.

Peter Ward does ballet, Mark Peterson looks on at back.

  While Peterson and Ward may have been the heroes of the regular season, and while they did score a combined 5 goals in the post-season, it was Kenny Hibbett who proved to be the team’s backbone in the playoffs. The Sounders got past Toronto relatively easily in the first round of the playoffs, but the second round against Ft. Lauderdale was much more of an ordeal. After a 2-0 loss in the first game, both the following games went to overtime, with Hibbett scoring the winning goal in each game to send the Sounders to Soccer Bowl against their arch-nemesis Cosmos. Alas, they lost 1-0, but we fans were sure that ’83 would be even better. Perhaps we should have knocked on wood.