It wasn’t his interest in soccer that left Gregg Berhalter feeling like an athletic outlier while growing up in northern New Jersey. Although it was never the most popular sport, soccer enjoyed a relatively firm foothold there. The impressive list of U.S. national teamers hailing from the Garden State is testament.
The problem was with Berhalter’s other favorite sport, baseball. And it became an issue in the fall of 1981, as the Yankees and Dodgers met in the World Series. He was 8 years old.
“I was the only one in my class rooting for the Dodgers,” said the Bergen County, N.