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+---- Thread: *Herbert Prohaska - backstory (/showthread.php?tid=16567)
*Herbert Prohaska - backstory - StevenOSullivan - 11-20-2019
Draft Bonus 1.5 payment
Herbert Prohaska is a fantastic kicker who is in this upcoming draft for the NSFL. In a previous life, he was born in Vienna, Austria, on August 8th 1955. He is 182 cm tall and enjoyed his youth in Vienna, a beautiful city that is bigger than you might imagine, with around 1.8 million people. Life in Vienna is a beautiful thing. The city is gorgeous, with so much history and great architecture. Everywhere you go, you see beautiful buildings, especially in the inner city, the first district, where the city’s oldest buildings are. Vienna is a city that is full of interesting history and people. Music plays a huge role in Vienna’s history, so does coffee, which the many coffee shops in the city show. When you go outside the inner city, you will find a lot of parks and green spots. The beautiful Danube flows through the city and is a great place to relax and spend some time.
Vienna, and the atmosphere of Vienna, is one of true relaxation. People prefer to relax and hang out, coffee shops are almost always full and you never feel like you are in a rush. People enjoy their life here, but you wouldn’t know it. It seems more like everyone loves to complain. The city is made for complaining, despite how great it is. Living in Vienna is a big mix of different values and things. You get things like good and affordable health care, free university, great public transport, but you also have the other side of it. Outside the inner city, a lot of people live in so called Gemeindewohnungen, which is basically public housing. There are huge blocks of buildings, with tons of small apartments for people and families. Most people live in apartments in the city and a lot of people live in public housing. While only about 1 in 10 people lived in public housing in 1934, now more than 1 in 4 people do. Public housing is by no means looked down upon. It is a great and easy way to live, affordable and you have everything you need.
Many of these Gemeindewohnungen are within big buildings that have multiple stories and entrances, spanning an entire block sometimes, with various buildings connected. Typically, there is a courtyard or some kind of green spot, often with a playground. For many young people, especially in a time of Herbert Prohaska’s youth, this was a great way to make friends and spend your time. Parents didn’t have to worry either, your kid was just downstairs, but they were able to enjoy being outside and play. While Austria is more known for skiing and winter sport success, football (soccer) is still by far the most popular sport in the country. The youth system is vastly different from that of American football, with pro (and even amateur) teams having their own youth teams. Often times, kids will start at their local club in the neighborhood, where you will once again see all the kids from your block. The good kids will later transfer to bigger clubs and end up with a chance to become a professional.
Another way for young kids to become better are cages. I know this sounds bad, but I don’t mean cages in the way you probably think. Cages are typically also within these block buildings or the courtyards and in pretty much every park. Cages usually are concrete spots with two goals and some basketball hoops, so kids can play in them. Playing cages is the true Austrian way of becoming a soccer player. Herbert Prohaska was no different, playing in cages from a young age and slowly realizing that he had the talent to be a player that can hold his own, often playing against kids older than him.
With 9 years old, Herbert Prohaska joined the team Vorwaerts XI (which means forward 11), a hint towards the fact that the club is in Simmering, Vienna’s 11th district. Simmering is well known as a worker’s district, one of the more poor areas of the city and Prohaska’s family was no different. His dad was a simple worker, who then coached a youth team at the team that his son joined. Prohaska quickly moved up the years and ranks and showed a lot of strength and was quickly scouted by a slightly bigger team in the district, Ostbahn XI, where he started his active career as a 15 year old, a very young age for anyone to join the first tea. Prohaska played there for two years and helped the team win a championship in the lower tiers of Austrian soccer, which was enough to get the attention of Austria Wien, one of the two biggest clubs in Vienna and in the highest tier of Austria. Joining this team meant he was officially turning into a pro, a huge step in his career.
3 days after his 17th birthday, Prohaska gave his debut for Austria Wien, being subbed in after just 29 minutes and helping the team to a 1-1 draw. He did well in his first few seasons there, playing in the midfield and being an anchor to the team, but he had to wait for a championship. But that ended in 1976 when he and his team won the Austrian championship. His great play was enough to bring him to the Austrian national team, where he played very successfully. The Austrian national team had gone to the World Cup four times from 1934 to 1958, doing as well as third, but they had not qualified for the tournament since then, missing three separate tournaments. In the qualifying stages to the 1978 world cup, Austria was doing well in a group against Malta, Turkey and the DDR (East Germany). However, Austria needed one more win, in Turkey to qualify for the tournament. Prohaska was not known for his goals but in that game, he played his heart out and managed to get a lucky strike to win the game for Austria and send his country to the first World Cup in 20 years.
In the World Cup itself, Austria played Spain, Brazil and Sweden in a tough group. We did not expect much, but surprised everyone by beating Spain 2-1. We also beat Sweden and then had a loss to Brazil, but it was enough to qualify for the 2nd round of the tournament. Here, we lost the first two games against the Netherlands and Italy. The last game was against West Germany, a game which did not matter for us anymore when it came to the results of this World Cup, we were already mathematically eliminated now. But for our hearts, this game mattered. Austria and Germany are big rivals, at least to us Austrians. We feel like the small brother, the Germans always win, we never do. This game meant a lot to us. In the game, it went back and forth until in the end, Hans Krankl, legendary Austrian striker, shot the 3-2 and Austria beat Germany for the first time in 47 years, in a game that would later be dubbed the “miracle of Cordoba” – due to where the game was played. It is still the biggest win Austria ever had in a single game, a game that is still talked about today, in 2019.
Herbert Prohaska continued to do well with Austria Wien, winning three championships in a row from 1978 to 1980. He was amazed by his own success, a small boy from a worker’s family and very small beginnings now conquering the world, playing in the world cup, three time champion. He wanted more and decided to continue his life with a bigger challenge, leaving his hometown, where he lived all his life and pursuing the dream of playing abroad. He left to legendary club Inter Milan, a famous Italian club and one of the best in the world. In his second year with the club, he managed to win the Italian cup with his team. After this, he spent one year at a different Italian club, AS Rome, where he won the Italian championship right away as well. Having proven to himself that he can have this success in a big league, not just the smaller Austrian one, he decided to go back to the city he grew up in and was missing desperately. He missed the food from his mother, the food from street vendors and missed the simple life he had in Austria. He returned to his old club, Austria Wien and stayed there for six more seasons. He ended up scoring 97 goals in 453 games for this club in his entire career, making him the third longest tenured player for the club. He also won three more championships in this time period for Austria Wien. He ended up with 83 games for the Austrian national team, currently still one of the most games of anyone for the national team.
In the real story of Herbert Prohaska, he ended up going into coaching, coaching for Austria Wien and the national team, and later joining the Austrian state television as the “John Madden” of Austrian television, an expert for soccer. But in this fictional universe, I will take this a different direction. Similar to his first goal of joining an Italian team and proving he can hang with players abroad, my goal here is to show a universe where Herbert Prohaska then decided to prove an even bigger task, joining an American Football team as a kicker and trying to win an Ultimus trophy and becoming the best kicker in the world, leaving not just his home country but his entire continent on his quest to be the best.
Soccer players turning into kickers is not the most unusual thing in the world. It happened before and will happen again. It even happened with an Austrian player once before, so this fictional universe is not so uncommon. Tony Fritsch was the first Austrian to ever play in the NFL, after having played eight seasons in the Austrian league for Rapid Vienna, the rival team of Herbert Prohaska’s team. In 1971, the Dallas Cowboys did a European tour, where they wanted to find a soccer style kicker, which had become popular at the time. Vienna was the first city they went to and Fritsch was the first player they saw and they signed him to an undrafted free agent contract, despite him speaking barely any English. In his NFL debut, he kicked the game winning field goal for the Cowboys. He even won a Super Bowl ring with the Cowboys, though he was injured at the time and did not play. He ended up playing in the NFL for 14 years, for 5 different teams and made the pro bowl once. It shows that this kind of career path would be realistic for Herbert Prohaska too, who was a much better soccer player than Fritsch was and I hope he can be a much better American Football player as well.
Prohaska would face similar difficulties to Fritsch. I don’t think Prohaska spoke English very well, but obviously my English is good enough to communicate with my teammates at least. Soccer players turned kickers may face some backlash from Americans, who could see this as a job taken away from an American or find it hard to relate to me from another country. Prohaska also suffers from what I would call “terrible decisions” when it comes to look, especially in the 70s with a crazy afro style haircut and an incredible (or not) mustache, which I think would have either made him a laughing stock or a clear and obvious case for someone the fans would rally around. I think a lot would and will depend on his success. If he can make big kicks and get on a groove, then he can be a great kicker who the fans would love, but if he misses some, the fans might turn against him and want him gone back to Austria. I hope that my NSFL team won’t be as harsh as the fans would be, but you never know.
Wherever I go in the draft, I hope to prove myself as a good kicker who can win games in a clutch way at the end of the game. I know clutchness is not a rating here but kickers are always measured by it. You have to believe in yourself and get better. Kickers aren’t the most exciting position, but I think it will be fun to tell this story and have the distinction of winning games for my team, hopefully one day get a game winning kick in an Ultimus game. That would be the dream, to become the best kicker ever and win a championship with a kick that I made.
I hope my character back story will show GMs and other people what my story is and hopefully I can check in on my player and this story I have woven more in the future. Not a lot of teams ended up contacting me yet, which makes me wonder if kicker is just not a big need right now or maybe teams just don’t expect to draft me. To the teams that did reach out, thank you! I hope some of you will be entertained by this and learn something about Austrian life and Austrian soccer history, as well as how that affects American Football history and my player going forward. While Tony Fritsch was not drafted, I know I will be and I can imagine being drafted would be a really amazing feeling for someone coming from a different country and knowing they are wanted by a team.
In this process, I think I will be excited to see where I will get drafted and hopefully I can repay the team that takes a gamble on me with some clutch game winning kicks in my career and help them win a championship. Herbert Prohaska is ready to make the switch from soccer to American football and will enter the draft with his crazy afro haircut and his incredible mustache, looking to steal the hearts of the fans of whichever team he gets drafted for and hopefully this will lead to some great moments in the future. I imagine the helmet would be a problem with that haircut, someone will have to photoshop a helmet onto a photo of Herbert Prohaska. I imagine the funny look of a whole team running over to a guy who just kicked a field goal to win the game and he takes his helmet off and then suddenly he has a crazy afro underneath the helmet. Maybe I would need a bigger helmet.
I probably won’t be taken in the first round, I know kickers are not very valuable, but I will admit a part of me still hopes for it. It would be a great honor to be drafted in the first round and I would be very honored. But no matter where I get drafted, I look forward to playing in the NSFL and kicking some balls.
*Herbert Prohaska - backstory - PDXBaller - 11-20-2019
HE'S BACK
*Herbert Prohaska - backstory - IsaStarcrossed - 11-20-2019
Oh, wow! This was an incredible read, dude. I love the kicker hype! Kickers are my favorite types of people.
I look forward to hearing more from you in the future! This league can always use more media.