Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting)

by David Wangerin

  Soccer had established a toe-hold on America's sporting landscape, albeit some distance behind baseball and college football and the two other most popular endeavours of the day, horse racing and boxing. Yet its subservience to hyphenated-Americans continued to worry Cahill. 'If this game is ever to take its place as a first rank sport in this country,' he warned, 'it will have to get away from its present moorings.' But his and others' efforts to popularise the sport seemed to be bearing fruit. Few could have guessed how high it would climb - nor how far it would fall - in the next two decades.

  2. Tangled Roots

  The first American Soccer League

  Of course I'm sorry in a way to leave the Old Country. But I'm an optimist - always was - and I feel certain there's a good time awaiting me in America. My guarantees are all right - the minimum I shall earn is double what I had last season from Celtic, and the maximum is double the highest salary I have ever earned in any one year. Then the prospects! If what I have been told is true - and I have no reason to doubt my informant - I'll be in clover within a year or two.

  Charlie Shaw, goalkeeper, New Bedford Whalers (1925)

  ew decades in American sport have proved as pivotal as the 1920s. Emerging from the First World War, the country's prosperity combined with an unprecedented amount of leisure time to create what many still regard as the Golden Age of Sport. As with most golden ages the myth often outstripped a more prosaic reality, in no small part because of the fawning descriptions of sportswriters bent on creating mystique and the increasing savvy of promoters and publicists. But the heroes of the era are still well known to even the most casual American fan: the Sultan of Swat knocking out home runs for the New York Yankees; the Galloping Ghost racing across the gridiron for the University of Illinois; the Manassa Mauler sending another pugilistic foe to the canvas. In an age when a sizeable minority of readers began to buy newspapers for their sports coverage, Babe Ruth, Red Grange and Jack Dempsey - and to a lesser extent golfer Bobby Jones, tennis star Bill Tilden and the racehorse Man-o-War - became national icons, attracting interest even from those who had remained impervious to sport. That soccer could find a place among such hero-worship might seem implausible, but by the middle of the decade the fledgling American Soccer League had become popular and powerful enough to deprive European teams of genuine talent and produce a standard of play which many claim was among the highest in the world at the time.

  This is not to say that the ASL is at all associated with the Golden Age. For many years after its demise, its existence was scarcely recognised. Famous sportswriters rarely attended soccer matches or saw fit to chronicle such an un-American game. As a result, while the ASL did provide a showcase for some of the finest footballers the country had seen, none of them became a Ruth, Grange or Dempsey. The league's fleeting existence helped see to that. Although at the beginning of the decade professional soccer's footprint was no smaller than professional gridiron's, the ASL's success flickered only briefly before succumbing to the Depression and to administrative feuds which culminated in what is known as the 'soccer war'.

  The years leading up to the First World War had seen a steady growth in professional sport. Baseball was unchallenged as its king, particularly among the working classes, with the World Series established as a highlight of the sporting calendar. Professional gridiron teams had first appeared in the 1890s and by the mid-1910s occasionally drew crowds approaching 10,000. The infant game of basketball, developed in 1891 by James Naismith, a young Canadian minister and part-time PE instructor, gave rise to an openly professional team in Trenton, New Jersey, as early as 1896. Two years later a pro league formed in the area, and soon appreciable numbers of young men were playing for pay. (The game's real strength, though, remained at an amateur level. By 1910 no fewer than 200 colleges and universities fielded basketball teams, about eight times as many as played intercollegiate soccer.)

  By the early 1920s, then, a number of sports could be considered ripe for a big-time professional league, and it was scarcely a foregone conclusion as to which would succeed. It's easy to forget how fluid the sporting landscape was in the interwar years. In Britain, too, new sports such as greyhound racing and speedway, and the imported game of ice hockey, enjoyed periods of considerable popularity. In the US, fads such as roller polo, a sort of ice hockey on roller skates, had found an audience earlier in the century, but three sports - baseball, college gridiron and boxing - now stood proud of the others by virtue of their mass appeal. Everything else was still up for grabs.

  The ASL represented soccer's first serious attempt at a top-flight professional circuit. The success of major league baseball had established professional sport as a profitable and socially acceptable venture and helped cultivate a new breed of entrepreneur, the club owner. Soccer was outgrowing its aggregation of regional leagues, with clubs of varying levels of financial resources, aspirations and organisational acumen.

  The legacy of the war had been the creation of a number of teams with an ambition to match Bethlehem Steel's. In line with other sports at the time, these were clubs backed either by prosperous individuals or 'works' teams, such as Bethlehem, keen to advance their company's name. Such deep pockets had helped to escalate substantially the outlay required for a top-class team. In 1919 the New York Tribune reported that 'salaries of professional soccer football players - and of some who still pose as amateurs - are approaching the level of the average major league baseball player's stipend in some sections of the country' and that annual earnings 'ranging from $3,000 to more than $6,000 are commonplace in the East'. Considering that in 1919 baseball's highest-paid player, the legendary Ty Cobb, earned about $20,000, this was good money. The Tribune noted that when Bethlehem's touring team had sailed back from Scandinavia that autumn, 'managers and other officials or accredited agents of a score of Eastern elevens of the first rank' were waiting at the South Brooklyn pier to introduce themselves to players not under contract. The result, its reporter observed, was 'a spectacle which reminded somewhat of auctions':

  Bonuses of $100, $200, and in one case, it is reliably reported, $500, for signing up for the 1919-20 season were offered by the bidding clubs, most of which also offered all-the-year-round jobs at simple tasks, such as shipyard timekeeper, paying from $75 up to $110 a week. Of these jobs the players are required to put in short hours and are given two or three afternoons a week 'off' for training.

  Among such high rollers, frustration mounted over the slipshod manner in which their leagues often operated. Even in the best of them, it was not unusual for a visiting team to travel to a match without a full complement of players - or not to turn up at all, saddling the home team with hordes of angry fans. Kick-off times were often aspirations, competent referees were at a premium and finding a decent place to play was far harder than it ought to have been. The Bethlehem Globe even reported on a match in 1921 between Bethlehem Steel and the Erie club of New Jersey (admittedly only a friendly) which took place on a pitch whose goalposts 'were not at right angles to the general field layout, so that the players were continually at a handicap in their sense of direction'.

  Many believed - among them Tom Cahill - that soccer had grown to the point where it should yield something more polished. The success of the Bethlehem and St Louis tours of Scandinavia suggested to Cahill that America was emerging as a soccer nation, and more than a few sportswriters warmed to the idea of a 'world's championship' with the British, as had been conceived in other, more genteel, sports such as yachting and golf. In 1921 Cahill had helped to organise a tour of Scottish professionals which travelled under the name of Third Lanark but included players from a number of different clubs. This aggregation undertook an exhausting tour of 19 matches in Canada and six in the US. They won all but the final game, a 2-2 draw against the newly formed Fall River FC - their fourth match that week.

  Far from being dispirited by the results, which included an 8-1 drubbing of Bethlehem Steel, Cahill was encouraged. But he had become intolerably frust
rated by the petty jealousies and politicking weighing down the fledgling USFA. The causes were numerous: the game's fragmented geography had yielded a number of rancorous factions; remnants of the old-world AFA were still groping for power; and the autonomous, nononsense approach of the secretary himself had produced more than a few festering grudges. One of them was with Guss Manning, who strenuously objected to the USFA's failure to side with the British associations in their desire to exclude Germany and Austria from FIFA after the war. Much to Manning's annoyance, Cahill's high regard for an international governing body held sway. While the British pulled out of FIFA in 1920 (they rejoined four years later, only to quit again in 1928 over definitions of amateurism), the US showed commendable foresight by staying put.

  In February 1921 Cahill, perhaps sensing a plot to overthrow him, announced that he would not stand for re-election as USFA secretary, calling attention to what he perceived as a growing band of malcontents, of which Manning was almost certainly one. 'Their efforts to violate rules, or to skate along the thin edge of what is permissible and what is not, and to protect those of their friends who follow their example, have precipitated protests and reams of wholly unnecessary correspondence and time-consuming annoyances,' Cahill wrote. 'As long as this element can be kept innocuous by the limitation of its members, the organisation can thrive; once it gets in the saddle, its destructive habits will have full sway and the end can be looked for just around the corner.'

  The remarks proved regrettably prescient, but Cahill was sadly mistaken if he thought the development of a bona fide professional league would offer the game any stronger direction. For all its popularity in the years to come, the ASL would be dogged by similar petty-mindedness and political in-fighting. It also lacked a true visionary, someone capable not only of bridging the widening gap between ethnic soccer and 'American' sports, but balancing the financial interests of the new entrepreneurial breed against the development of the game as a whole. It certainly wouldn't be for the last time.

  By May 1921 Cahill's new enterprise, the first to connect the various soccer hotbeds of the northeast, was ready to test the waters. In calling itself an American 'soccer' league instead of a 'football' one, it showed itself to be more pragmatic and enlightened than its parent organisation, which still resisted all attempts to insert the word 'soccer' into its name. Eight clubs were chosen to take part, scattered across a 200-mile swathe of northeastern coastline: from New England came Fall River United and J & P Coats of Pawtucket; from New Jersey, Harrison FC and Jersey City Celtic; from New York, Todd's Shipyards of Brooklyn and New York FC of the Bronx; and from eastern Pennsylvania, Philadelphia FC and Bethlehem Steel. So close were most of the teams to the sea that travel - by player and fan alike - was often undertaken by steamship rather than train.

  It was far from a national league, but it represented a significant advance on anything that had gone before it, and the states involved represented close to a quarter of the nation's population. Not surprisingly, Cahill assumed the crucial position of secretary, with Bethlehem Steel's Luther Lewis, the brother of Horace Edgar, elected president. The bonds between Cahill and the Lewises had become strong, and would remain so to the end. The 28-match fixture list - four contests against every other team - left little room for the assortment of friendlies and secondary competitions which clubs had relied on. Reasoning that the establishment of an elite league would create enough interest to make such contests unnecessary, the ASL kept its clubs occupied every weekend from late summer to late spring, often with back-to-back fixtures on Saturday and Sunday. The only exception it was prepared to make - as it might, with Cahill at the helm - was for the Challenge Cup, which retained its status as the official national championship.

  Before a ball was kicked the league lost its most famous member, principally because of a dispute over the allocation of gate receipts. All but ignored at home, Bethlehem Steel relied on away matches for revenue, and consequently demanded a share of that income. But Fall River and others did not want to concede any of the proceeds from their expected large crowds - a majority view, as it turned out. While claims that Charles Schwab and the Lewis brothers were not involved in soccer for monetary gain had been treated as gospel by the Pennsylvania press, operating at a financial disadvantage didn't seem to appeal to them either, so Bethlehem Steel withdrew from the league. The Lewises, though, acquired the rights to the Philadelphia FC franchise and, having summarily discarded American soccer's most famous team, proceeded to sign up most of its players. According to the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, it was all purely in the game's best interests:

  The Lewises are not out to make money. That is one of the emphatic points they make in placing a team here. They are anxious to impress upon Philadelphia the wonders of soccer, for they hold the belief that the game, properly conducted, is the entering wedge of a movement that will soon put soccer in the forefront of American sports.

  Other clubs seemed similarly convinced of such a lofty destiny. Many secured leases on baseball parks, which tended to offer amenities like dressing rooms and public toilets that were absent from many soccer venues. Others with more primitive and cramped facilities spent several thousand dollars upgrading them. But most of the attention and the money was spent on players, and here the ASL's arrival was ideally timed. The withdrawal of the four British associations from FIFA meant players could break their contracts and venture overseas without fear of international reproach.

  Yet the earliest ASL rosters relied on imports who had found their way to America years earlier. One of the best-known was Paisley-born Bob Millar, a future US World Cup coach, once of St Mirren but who more recently had helped the Brooklyn Field Club to the inaugural Challenge Cup title. Bethlehem had Harold Brittan, who had spent several frustrating seasons with Chelsea, as well as Willie Porter, the crack Hearts forward of the Scottish League'. What native talent there was included a couple of notable goalkeepers: Bobby Geudert (who at least one newspaper thought had been imported from France) and Pete Renzulli, a New Yorker said to have discovered the game by accident - visiting the park to play baseball one afternoon, he came across a kickabout and asked to join in, but because of his baseball spikes was limited to playing in goal.

  Whatever the ASL's pretensions, its start was inauspicious. Crowds fluctuated from a few hundred to a few thousand, largely depending on the weather. By December the newly formed Jersey City Celtics, who were said to have ploughed $6,000 into their start-up franchise, had folded, their brief existence terminated by a string of defeats and intransigence from their baseball park landlords. The remaining seven clubs lasted the season, but winter postponements and apathy towards meaningless endof-season matches - particularly when visiting teams had little financial incentive to travel - meant some did not fulfil all their fixtures. This became something of a league tradition, to the extent that the ASL never completed a season with every club playing the same number of games.

  Twenty-seven goals from a revitalised Brittan made him the league's top scorer - an admirable feat considering he was injured for part of the season - and propelled Philadelphia to the championship, comfortably ahead of the New York Field Club. But the ex-Bethlehemers scarcely dominated league rivals in the way to which they had been accustomed. More significantly, the move from the Steel plant had failed, for dolefully familiar reasons. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted from the earliest part of the season 'a feeling among certain followers of the game in this city that there is not enough home flavor attached to the Philadelphia club for it to have the unstinted support of Philadelphians'.

  The cost of ferrying players to and from Bethlehem compounded the club's problems, but theirs was far from the most critical case. Fall River United, a side of whom bumper gates had been expected, finished perilously near the bottom of the table and on the verge of collapse. The entry from Holyoke, Massachusetts, called in to replace Bethlehem Steel, won only twice all season and withdrew from the league, as did Todd's Shipyards, even though they re
ached the Challenge Cup final that season, losing to Scullin Steel of St Louis. Most clubs were left licking financial wounds. One report claimed New York, whose owner happened to have bought his team's humble playing field, was the only club to have made any money.

  None of this seemed to discourage Cahill. In fact, he spent part of the spring of 1922 energetically defending a fanciful assertion he had made in the afterglow of Scullin Steel's Cup final victory, one which handed the national championship to a team of native-born St Louis talent for the second time in three years. It prompted the plain-spoken secretary to claim he could pick a team of 11 American-born players which would defeat any all-British team, even on their own soil:

  They have stood still in England or gone back. The United States is still inferior in finesse; the Britons are past masters at trapping and controlling the ball. But a team of ten-second men breaks up this combination. In America they play the game in high for the entire contest, whereas in England they want to relax. In goal shooting, speed, aggressiveness and other factors America is equal to or better than the old country today. This opinion is shared in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, elevens from which have met football elevens from this country and from the British Isles, too.

  How much of this braggadocio might be attributed to the secretary's desire to send a US team to Britain, and how much was down to rank ignorance, is difficult to tell. Either way, Cahill's words quickly found their way across the Atlantic. Dent McSkimming, a young St Louis reporter, forwarded a copy of them to Britain's Athletic News, together with his own interpretation: