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

by David Wangerin

  Naturally, it is our ambition to defeat some day an English eleven, a good English team. We have become very enthusiastic over the victory of our native born Scullin team over the largely British Todd Shipyard team. We are quite aware that the game is but in its infancy here ... Please bear in mind that if our comments on America v England seem to you a bit overdrawn, we are but young at the game and tremendously proud of our early success.

  Athletic News responded with disdain:

  The confidence of Mr Cahill may be taken as typical ofthe land which has a mission to produce world-beaters ... If Mr. Cahill has founded his opinion on the tours of Third Lanark and the views of the Scandinavians who have met some English elevens, mostly amateur, his evidence of British ability is very poor stuff ... No doubt the game is making headway in the United States, but our transatlantic cousins would do well to avoid conflict, and to remember that pride goeth before a fall.

  Needless to say, England did not pick up the gauntlet. No American team of any significance would set foot on British soil until after the war, although in 1950 the best team England could muster would receive a painful reminder about pride going before a fall.

  For 1922-23 the ASL conceded enough ground on gate receipts to restore Bethlehem to their natural home. New clubs were admitted (including one in Philadelphia) to replace those which had left, but it wasn't until the season had been under way for more than a month that the final entry appeared: the Brooklyn Wanderers, whose very name hinted at its old-world foundations. The club was fronted by a Sheffield-born chartered accountant, Nat Agar, soon to become a pivotal figure in the destiny of the league. After emigrating to the US Agar had, at 17, entered a team in the New York State League. Sixteen years later his boots remained laced, and for a few seasons he occasionally inserted himself into the Wanderers' line-up to become the rarest of breeds, a player/manager/owner.

  Another addition to the ASL's intriguing cast of characters that season was Sam Mark, described by one local newspaper as `Fall River's leading athletic promoter', who stepped in to rescue the city's franchise. Mark was no soccer fan, but the sizeable crowds that had occasionally infiltrated Fall River's athletic grounds certainly weren't lost on a man with such entrepreneurial leanings. Mark was willing to invest in his club, and certainly let everyone know it. Fall River United became known as the Fall River Marksmen and moved to Mark's Stadium, a 15,000- capacity ground their owner had built for them across the state line in Tiverton, Rhode Island. This enabled the team to play on Sundays, which was then illegal in Massachusetts and other states. The change of ownership would soon steer both team and town to soccer supremacy. In their first season the Marksmen climbed to third place with a squad heavily reinforced from Canada. Crucially, Mark had also succeeded in luring Harold Brittan from Bethlehem Steel. The Derby-born striker responded with 19 goals and nearly a decade of service as a player and manager.

  But the 1922-23 season was memorable more for the sorry conclusion to the Challenge Cup than for anything Mark or his counterparts could produce. The date of this match - ostensibly the most important on the American soccer calendar - varied wildly from season to season, largely according to the severity of the winter. The year before it had taken place in mid-March; more typically, it was held over to May. In 1923 the clash between Scullin Steel of St Louis and the ASL's Paterson FC of New Jersey was arranged for April 1, which was still late enough to alarm four Scullins who also played baseball and were due to report for spring training. Further inconveniencing them was the fact that an eastern city had been selected as the venue. Nearly the whole of St Louis appealed to the USFA to move the match to Missouri (Cahill even received a telegram from the mayor) with the local professional league offering a tempting $12,000 inducement. But the USFA insisted that its policy of alternating between eastern and western venues - which would prove to be little more than a passing fancy - could not be revised. It scheduled the game for Harrison, New Jersey. Begrudgingly, the Scullins made the 900-mile trip, and even raised eyebrows by turning out in numbered jerseys for the big occasion.* In front of 15,000 at the Harrison baseball park they held Paterson to a 2-2 draw, but insisted they could not stay behind for a replay. When the USFA refused to change the venue, the Scullins went home, and Paterson claimed the Cup by forfeit.

  But if such anti-climaxes showed how far soccer trailed behind baseball, the ASL was still a step ahead of one or two other fledgling professional enterprises. The first season of gridiron's American Professional Football Association, the precursor to today's NFL, took place in 1919. It included 14 clubs, but there was no set fixture list and no obligation to play a minimum number of contests (a team from Muncie, Indiana, played only one recognised game). With a number of clubs claiming to have finished first, and the league never having drafted any criteria to settle the matter, the champions were not declared until five months after the season had finished. The NFL learnt quickly from such experiences, though its professional brand of gridiron would still take many years to find its feet. By the middle of the 1920s it attracted the occasional crowd above 10,000, but its ability to sustain mass attention was no better than the ASL's. Some have even argued that, at least for a time, soccer was the more viable prospect.

  College football was another matter, growing in leaps and bounds in the 1920s. A tiny Catholic school in Indiana, the University of Notre Dame, became a national institution entirely through the prowess of its gridiron team. Huge stadiums, many surviving to this day, were erected to accommodate ever-larger crowds, including the Rose Bowl in Pasadena (built in 1922) and Chicago's Soldier Field (1924). In 1927 the University of Michigan built a new stadium seating 72,000 but within a year increased its capacity to more than 85,000. The country's appetite for gridiron seemed insatiable, and when Red Grange famously scored six times to almost single-handedly defeat Michigan before a crowd of 70,000 at the University of Illinois in 1924 the college game became a national media event for the first time.

  The new arenas had not escaped the notice of Tom Cahill. ' It is a matter of history that better stands have assisted materially in the increase of attendance at baseball,' he observed. We need permanent fields and stands of high grade to show our desire to care for spectators and to prove we are a permanent sport in the United States.' The New York Evening Telegram agreed:

  The biggest problem of the men interested in the advancement of the sport nationally is that of the parks - of modern, enclosed playing fields where big matches may be staged. There are perhaps fewer than a hundred strictly soccer parks in the United States - enclosed fields, that is, that were laid out primarily for soccer football play. The natural tendency of American soccer managers, however, has been to acquire major, minor and semi-professional baseball parks in all localities for the long stretch of months from the end of one baseball season to the start of the next.

  Cahill's words fell on deaf ears. There were no stadiums in the ASL that could hold 70,000, or even half that. Only one, Bethlehem's, could lay claim to an all-grass pitch. At some grounds match officials were forced to use the same dressing rooms as the players - an understandable source of annoyance - or change at home. Worse, there were very few places where spectators could shelter from the winter.

  For the enterprising baseball magnate, the lack of venues represented a prime business opportunity. The New Bedford Daily Sun reported at the start of the 1923-24 season:

  Outstanding in the list of big openings was that of the American Soccer League season in the Polo Grounds, New York City. It is a new experiment staging Soccer in this great baseball stadium, but Adolph Buslik, owner of the National Giants franchise proved that he had a splendid basis for his confidence when he had a turnout of8,000 for the game. A good percentage of this crowd, too, was made up of new followers, people who just attended out of curiosity, and before half time were standing in their places in the stands yelling. One of the most enthusiastic was Charles A Stoneham, owner of the New York National League baseball club, to whom the game was an
altogether new thing when he was first approached on the subject of putting it into his park. Now Col. Jack Ruppert, owner of the Yankees, is figuring around to see if he can't put a team in his wonderful stadium in the Bronx.

  Buslik, a millionaire fur dealer, had pulled his Paterson club out of New Jersey after their Challenge Cup triumph failed to galvanise local interest (only 849 paid to see what proved to be their last match there). The National Giants did not occupy the Polo Grounds for long - in fact, Buslik sold them before the season ended - but the stadium became a frequent soccer venue for big matches against touring teams.

  Many regard Mark's Stadium as the first soccer-specific facility of any consequence to be built in America, even though Mark also operated a semi-professional baseball team, and his stadium's configuration - with a lone covered stand curiously L-shaped and placed behind one of the corner flags - seems decidedly baseball-friendly. But in 1923-24 it became a fortress for the Marksmen, who dropped only four points there and emerged with the league title, just ahead of Bethlehem. Harold Brittan again spearheaded the attack, but the strength of the team was its defence which, like the rest of the team, largely consisted of former Scottish league journeymen recruited from other ASL teams.

  The support Fall River offered its Marksmen may have been feeble compared with the enormous gates college gridiron could produce, but it was encouraging enough to its owner. Though attendance figures appeared infrequently in newspapers, it seems even in the most rank conditions the club could count on the support of a few thousand intrepid fans. When conditions and the opposition were at their most enticing, the numbers swelled to five figures.

  Considering the economic conditions the city was now suffering, this was little short of miraculous. `Spindle City' was no more - its factories had failed to keep up with improvements in textile production technology, and as a result it lost most of its livelihood to the more modern mills of the southern states. As Roger Allaway relates in his 2005 book Rangers, Rovers and Spindles, the removal of machinery from two Fall River mills to Tennessee in July 1924 marked the beginning of the end, and the magazine New Republic soon wrote of Fall River as 'a city of misery, want, unemployment, hunger and hopelessness. The cloud that shadows her seems to have no silver lining.' That same year, though, the Marksmen claimed the first ASL-Challenge Cup double and began to eclipse Bethlehem as the game's front-runners.

  The torch was passed at an epic cup semi-final between the two clubs in Brooklyn, when about 20,000 shoe-horned themselves into tiny Dexter Park to witness the Marksmen's surprise 2-0 victory. The final in St Louis attracted 14,000 to another baseball park, where Fall River beat the local Vesper-Buick club with a defence 'as strong as the proverbial rock of Gibraltar', in the eyes of the New York Times. Fred Morley, a striker with Football League experience at Blackpool and Brentford, scored twice in a 4-2 win.

  Mark's accomplishments represented a watershed in the league's development and, despite his city's economic despair, helped to usher in the ASL's peak years. Franchises continued to come and go, but the league seemed on the verge of establishing professional soccer as a viable entity. For 1924, membership increased to 12, bloating the fixture list to 44 matches. In Boston, the millionaire president of the Mystic Steamship Company, AG Wood, bought an expansion franchise which came to be known as the Wonder Workers, most likely in honour of one of his firm's tugboats.'

  The Wonder Workers arrived with an almighty splash. From the Coats club, they obtained the evergreen 'Whitey' Fleming, still one of the best wingers in the country, and from elsewhere a high calibre of imports. They included Alec McNab, Morton's outside-right, who had twice played for his country; Johnny Ballantyne, Partick Thistle's promising 24-year-old striker; Mickey Hamill of Manchester City, a Northern Ireland international; and two Dunfermline Athletic exports, full-back Tommy McMillan and goalkeeper Willie Paterson. For a time the club was managed by Tommy Muirhead, who had spent the previous seven seasons with Rangers. The Cowdenbeath-born Muirhead had left Ibrox after the club refused to permit him a second income as a whisky salesman, and his arrival in Boston soon persuaded others to join him. Yet after only a few months, claiming to have been hounded by immigration authorities, Muirhead made his peace with Rangers and returned. Many Scots, though, viewed the wing-half's change of heart with suspicion: had he returned just to scout for more players to take back across the Atlantic?

  The paranoia was understandable. By the start of the 1925 season the drain on talent had reached proportions perturbing enough for the Scottish FA to call a special meeting over what newspapers referred to as the 'American Menace' or 'American Tangle'. Ballantyne, it seemed, had joined Boston while still under contract to Thistle; so, according to The Scotsman, had McMillan and Paterson, Queen of the South's Hugh Collins (Brooklyn) and Helensburgh's Bobby Blair (Boston). What began as a trickle of disaffected peripheral players had progressed into a steady stream of top-flight professionals, men only too aware of their value in the marketplace.

  The contractual set-up of British clubs was as restrictive as baseball's reserve clause and, they assumed, internationally binding now that they were again members of FIFA. But it could scarcely stop players from boarding a ship. `The offer came suddenly, and I had to make my mind up suddenly,' Ballantyne told one reporter shortly before his departure. `I hope to make about 112 a week in America. What chance have I of doing that here?'

  Not all the top players were British, and not all were recruited on the sly. One of the more exotic arrivals was Tewfik Abdullah, a Cairo-born inside-forward who had played for Egypt in the 1920 Olympics. Abdullah, his forename somewhat predictably corrupted into Toothpick, had made fleeting appearances for Derby, Hartlepools, Bridgend Town and Cowdenbeath before ending up with the new Providence club in 1924, where he scored 15 goals. Boston acquired Norwegian-born Werner Nilsen, who had been playing in the city, acquiring the nickname Scotty along the way. Most cosmopolitan of all was the Indiana Flooring Company team, which had obtained the New York FC franchise (and kept the club in that city, despite its name). It signed a number of Scandinavian players, including one-time Gothenburg forward Caleb Schylander - known as Kairo or Skyhook - and his club and national team-mate Herbert 'Murren' Karlsson. The club's new owner, Ernest Viberg, didn't seem to have a nickname, but he had been the interpreter for the American teams that toured Scandinavia and was also a sportswriter for the New York Evening Telegram.

  But the best player in the league that season by some distance was not a new arrival, nor anyone who had learned the game across the ocean. Admittedly, the powerful and deceptively quick Archie Stark had been born in Glasgow, but he emigrated to the United States as a child and signed his first professional contract in New Jersey. After serving in France during the war Stark made his name with the Erie club of Kearny and joined Bethlehem Steel in 1924. There he set one of the most prolific goalscoring records professional soccer has ever seen.

  Stark's arrival in Bethlehem was triggered by the departure of the Jackson brothers, Alec and Walter, who had scored 27 goals between them in 1923-24. Walter, the older brother, was the more celebrated catch, given his league experience with Kilmarnock, but 18-year-old Alec had also proved his worth as a striker. In the close season the two returned to their native Scotland, ostensibly for a family visit, but they abruptly decided to resume their professional careers there. Walter returned for another season in Bethlehem years later, but Alec signed for Aberdeen and never came back. He became a star of Herbert Chapman's formidable Huddersfield Town side and won 17 caps for Scotland, including one as a member of the famous 'Wembley Wizards' that destroyed England 5-1 in 1928. Of all the exceptional players to grace the ASL, Alec Jackson, 'the Gay Cavalier', is probably the most famous - even if he spent only a single season there. And he might never have made it home after he misjudged the water depth at a swimming pool in Fall River and split his head open.

  Hard as it might be to believe such a talented combination wouldn't have been missed in Bethlehem, Sta
rk proved a worthy replacement - for them both. In his debut season with the Steel he managed no fewer than 67 goals in 44 games. The achievement was all the more remarkable in that it came in the last season before the offside rule was changed to undermine the stifling defensive tactics that had developed in Britain, a move that immediately produced a deluge of goals and led to the two historically unmatched scoring feats in a Football League season: George Camsell's 59 for Middlesbrough in 1926-27 and Dixie Dean's 60 for Everton the following year. (Dean reportedly turned down a 125-aweek offer to play for the New York Giants in 1928.)

  Stark stood head and shoulders above his ASL peers: 67 was more than the second- and third-best league scorers put together, and five times as many as Bethlehem's second top scorer. He found the net in 33 of his 44 league matches, at one point scoring in 15 out of 17. 'He is a great opportunist and given the slightest chance will slip past the opposing defenders like an eel,' observed one publication, which also noted Stark's 'wonderful aggressiveness and great speed together with a natural cleverness which is dazzling'. At the height of Stark's fame, Ed Sullivan, the New York sportswriter later to become television's premier variety show host, termed Stark 'the Babe Ruth of soccer' (at a time when there was a Babe Ruth of virtually anything one could think of). Sniffy outsiders might assume that his rampant form was simply the byproduct of a uncompetitive league, one where genuine talent could easily make an impression. In fact, the American Menace had raised standards to levels few other countries could match. In January 1924 the New York Times reported:

  There was once a time when a star from England would be met on his arrival in this country by many club officials seeking to obtain his services, but of late there have been occasions when a player from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean has come to this country only to find that the competition was stronger than he expected and has returned again without having gained a position as a player.