The lights are turned down low in Alexi Lalas' office, making it easy to overlook the figurative wrecks inhabiting the room's darker corners.
Moving from the playing field to the front office was going to be a crash course in management for Lalas. It has proved to be a demolition derby. Destruction everywhere.
In only three years as a president and general manager in Major League Soccer, the free-spirited former U.S. Olympic and World Cup defender, only 36, has had to negotiate a learning curve so steep it seems almost vertical.
"I make a lot of it up, and I just kind of use my best judgment in other cases," said a half-joking Lalas, who joined the ranks of AEG management, the parent corporation of MLS, in 2004.
"He's been in it three years, and he's had at least 10 years' worth of problems," Galaxy Coach Frank Yallop said.
No one can argue that point.
* It was Lalas who, in his first job as an AEG suit in 2004, had to persuade San Jose Earthquakes fans to keep showing up at Spartan Stadium even though everyone knew the team's future lay elsewhere, as in Houston.
* It was Lalas who had to explain to those same San Jose fans how star forward Landon Donovan had slipped out the back door to play in Germany and then reappeared less than five months later in the uniform of the rival Galaxy.
* It was Lalas who was moved in 2005 by AEG from San Jose to New York to take charge of the stumbling MetroStars, where he fired Bob Bradley as coach and then saw the team sold out from beneath him, the team eventually becoming the New York Red Bulls.
* It was Lalas who was brought back to California by AEG last spring to take over the Galaxy after former GM Doug Hamilton's death. The defending league champion got off to a 2-8-1 start, and Lalas fired Steve Sampson as coach in June and brought Yallop on board.
"If you look at the other GMs in other franchises, it's pretty smooth sailing," Yallop said. "But Alexi has been brought up pretty quickly in this business."
Lalas will be inducted today into the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, N.Y., along with former women's world champion and Olympic gold medalist Carla Overbeck, former men's national team captain Al Trost and AEG owner and MLS benefactor Philip Anschutz.
For Lalas, the occasion should be a pleasant one, helping to balance some of the thorny decisions of the last three years -- the firings of Bradley and Sampson, for example.
