Just for the Kicks

With short, precise kicks, the five forwards tied up the goalie with a network of passes, then finished him off with low, whistling boots. When the intracity mismatch in St. Louis, Mo. was over last week, the Kutis Undertakers had routed the Jadrans, 13-0, and the experts were guessing that Tom Kutis had again dug up the best soccer team in the nation.

Last year the amateur Kutis Undertakers were good enough to win both the national amateur and open titles. This year, lively as ever, they have won all 16 of their regular season games. Short, mild Tom Kutis, a St. Louis undertaker who gets his mind off his work by sponsoring athletic teams, could not be happier about his boys. "I'm 55," says Kutis, "and association with these younger fellows has kept me feeling a whole lot younger."

Home-Town Boys. The Kutis Funeral Home first became a soccer patron 15 years ago when some boys asked it to sponsor their team. Fearing mayhem, Kutis and his father gloomily agreed, saw their stark pessimism confirmed when a boy broke his leg before even a ghoul was scored. They dropped the team, but five years ago Tom Kutis decided to try again. He built his championship team exclusively from home-town St. Louis boys, although at times he has hired a European coach. "We don't import players," says Kutis. "St. Louis boys fit in better with our aggressive, open game." Luckily for Kutis, St. Louis is one of the strongest American centers for a game that is Europe's No. 1 sport, has leagues in both the parochial and public school systems.

To feed talent into his championship club, Kutis has a farm system of three teams (one for adults, one for teenagers, one for youngsters from seven to ten). Branching out, ex-Amateur Infielder Kutis also sponsors 41 bowling teams, six baseball teams, two girls' softball teams, and one girls' basketball team. In all it costs him $15,000 a year.

To Kutis the championship soccer team alone is worth the price, even though none of his Undertakers undertake. Best of the lot is Center Forward Bob Rooney, 27, a beat-pounding St. Louis cop. who was a crack high school football player and for five seasons a baseball farm hand for the Cardinals. Soccer, says Rooney, gives him the biggest boot: "It's the speed and the pretty pass work and the extra little amount of roughness. I'm talking about really topnotch teams, though. Most people in this country see sandlot games that just look like a lot of people kicking each other."

Local Equivalent. With Rooney directing the attack, the Kutis Undertakers have held their own against such jonker-teering German clubs as Augsburg and Nuernberg. "We've been told that we're the equivalent of a first-division professional team in Europe," Kutis reports.

In his soccer teams Kutis has found some of the glamour he longed for when he got a job with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and bucked to become a reporter. But after he finally got his chance to cover a story, he quit because reporting "didn't really have the glamour it seemed to have," turned to his father's undertaking business instead. Conveniently, what's good for Kutis' morale is good for his pocketbook; his soccer team puts his best foot forward. "You can't advertise much in this business, you know," he says. "But I'm sure the community knows Kutis."

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