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

by David Wangerin

  Interest in the game had almost vanished. The deciding match of the 1935 Challenge Cup final between the Central Breweries club of St Louis and the Pawtucket Rangers attracted just 3,000 to Newark's City Stadium. Changing the name ofthe competition to the Open Cup scarcely improved its visibility. An embarrassing 1940 final paired the Sparta Athletic and Benevolent Association club of Chicago against Baltimore SC, the first leg of which ended goalless. Extra time in the second leg failed to break a 2-2 draw, but the USFA had instructed the referee to play further periods as necessary. Baltimore, though, ignored the order and walked off the pitch. Instead of awarding Chicago the match by forfeit, the USFA merely fined Baltimore $50, then ordered a third match to be played in New York. Sparta claimed its players could not get time off work to travel, and the championship was abandoned.

  As its woes intensified, the USFA discovered a measure of salvation in the form of a Belfast-born linen salesman named Joe Barriskill, who replaced Schroeder as president in 1934. Schroeder continued to manage the German-Americans until 1948 and for a time became president of the ASL, but his life came to a grisly end in 1953, when he was brutally beaten and strangled in his apartment. His murder was never solved." Barriskill, a long-distance cycling champion in his youth, migrated to New York in 1910 and befriended Guss Manning, rising through the ranks of the Southern New York Association. His two-year term as president marked the start of an autocratic relationship with the USFA that, incredibly, would stretch into the 1970s.

  Early in his tenure Barriskill found himself confronted with the awkward issue of whether - and how - to send a team to the Berlin Olympics of 1936, a quandary which divided the US Olympic Committee as fiercely as the American public. Jewish groups and others who recognised the propaganda value of the Olympics to the Nazis lobbied hard for a boycott that would have deprived the Games of its biggest foreign participant. They were seen off largely by the efforts of USOC president (and future IOC president) Avery Brundage. No doubt influenced by Brundage's angry denunciation of the boycott movement (which he attributed to Jews and communists), Barriskill and Schroeder considered playing in Germany to be justifiable - so much so that Schroeder received a special award from the Reich in recognition of his efforts.

  Getting a team to Berlin was another matter. With the USFA's funds nearly exhausted, Barriskill - in the brusque, tempestuous style which would become his trademark - collared and cajoled his associates for money. Once again Schroeder was named team manager and, as in 1934, the Philadelphian suffered the misfortune of a first-round draw against the eventual winners (Italy, again). However, he did redeem himself somewhat on the international stage. With no fewer than seven of his German-Americans on the teamsheet (including the captain Francis Ryan, nicknamed 'Hun'), Schroeder's team was only narrowly defeated, though in a match far removed from the Olympic ideal. One report referred to'a bruising game in which the German referee, Weingaertner, frequently was forced to warn the Italians for rough tactics' and noted that when the referee tried to send off Italy's Achille Piccini, 'a halfdozen Italian players swarmed over the referee, pinning his hands to his sides, and clamping hands over his mouth. The game was formally finished with Piccini still in the line-up.' Italy, its team laced with Serie A 'students', won by a single goal.

  Such determined efforts on the field weren't enough to save American soccer from its indigence. After a three-match tournament in Mexico in September 1937, the US did not play another full international for 12 years. The American squad in 1937 bore no resemblance to the one which had appeared in Berlin, nor did it face the same opponents it had trounced in Rome three years earlier. The Mexicans had discovered how to cope with American muscle and won all three matches by embarrassing margins. Not until 1980 would they again lose to their northern neighbours.

  If, as some claim, the 1920s had produced American soccer's golden age, the 1930s represented more an age of balsa wood: flimsy, fragile and not much to look at. But it had hardly been the only sport to struggle through the penury of the decade. Baseball's attendances did not fully recover from the effects of the Depression until after the Second World War. Babe Ruth retired in 1935 and proved irreplaceable as an icon. Player salaries dropped to levels last seen in the early 1920s and poorer clubs from smaller cities flirted with bankruptcy. All manner of innovations were introduced in an effort to drum up interest. Some - the All-Star game, floodlights and a Hall of Fame - endured, though as late as 1934 radio broadcasts were still banned at certain clubs.

  Professional football, still an uncertain prospect in the 1930s, also suffered badly, its image still tarnished in relation to the theoretically simon-pure collegiates. The Heisman Trophy, awarded annually to the nation's top college player, was instituted in 1936, but its first five winners all declined to turn professional. Very few NFL franchises made money, and the Depression all but wiped out the small-town teams (save for Green Bay, Wisconsin, whose Packers grew into a formidable success). The NFL, too, staged an All-Star game, pitting its league champions against a selection of top collegiates in an exhibition which often proved the biggest draw of the season. Attitudes began to change during the war, but it wasn't until the late 1950s that pro football seriously began to rival baseball for attention.

  College football's head seemed a little further above water, buoyed by its relatively affluent fan base and the pristine reputation the media had affectionately cultivated for it (about 50 full-length motion pictures with a football theme were made in the 1930s). 'King Football' reigned most proudly in the south, where very little soccer had ever been played and where major league baseball had yet to venture. Yet there was no part of America where the rah-rah spirit of the gridiron had failed to take hold. The game's popularity transcended mere college loyalty or state pride, arousing passions even along sectarian lines. At many Catholic schools, prayers were said each Friday for the University of Notre Dame to win the next day.

  Against such forces, college soccer could make only modest gains. The game had clawed its way back on to campus largely through intramural and recreational competition, although by 1937 about 80 schools - almost all from the northeast - played at a recognised intercollegiate level. In the midwest, universities as prominent as Ohio State and Illinois fielded teams, but soon became frustrated at the journeys required to play other colleges and gave up after only a few seasons. The story was much the same further west, where only a few institutions (most notably the University of San Francisco) took soccer at all seriously. In the south, beyond Maryland, there was King Football.

  By 1944, the reality of the American sporting landscape had finally reached the USFA, which renamed itselfthe United States Soccer Football Association. The name change sparked no revolutions. Barriskill worked without pay for most of the 1940s, drafting in his wife as a stenographer and frequently paying staff out of his own pocket. Though the association proudly claimed to be the governing body of soccer in America, in truth its powers were minuscule. It was more akin to a fellowship or fraternity, a safe haven for those hyphenated-Americans too stubborn or too passionate to abandon such a patently foreign pursuit.

  The game as a whole fared only marginally better. The war proved more of an opportunity for Americans to introduce their own pastimes to the world than the other way around. Baseball was embraced by the Japanese and rapidly displaced soccer in Cuba and other Latin American countries (particularly Panama, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic). Soccer did enjoy a few returns in branches of the military, most conspicuously in the navy, where it was introduced largely for its fitness value. But at the same time wartime budgets and travel restrictions removed it from many universities.

  Where the sport survived, it did so under peculiar conditions. Most college players had little experience of watching the game and their technique was often primitive. Kicking the ball as if attempting a gridiron field goal - straight on, with the toe and as hard as possible - was a common sight. Others struggled with throw-ins (as did some referees), a frustrati
on which led at least one collegiate league to allow them to be taken with one hand. For a number of years the NCAA even abandoned them altogether in favour of kick-ins. This proved rather more successful than the rash decision to abolish the offside rule, which predictably created enough mayhem in the penalty area for them to quickly change their minds. Well into the 1960s curious deviations - including modifying the penalty box into a penalty semi-circle, which it did in 1958 - were sanctioned by industrious 'rules committees' which did not share FIFA's proclivity for moderation. The absence of restrictions on substitutions - surely the greatest blasphemy - handed even the most neophyte coach an opportunity to win matches through the copious use of fresh legs.

  One could snootily argue that this wasn't really soccer at all, but no real attempt had ever been made to force the colleges to toe a more international line. The USSFA scarcely had the resources of the collegiate association and in any case carried no real influence on how it chose to play the game. What political clout could Joe Barriskill possibly carry, running the association's affairs in his spare time from a broom-cupboard office borrowed from his employer?

  In any case, the USSFA was much more at home with its own kind: men with colourful first names who still spoke with affection about 'the old country'. It was a world far removed from the American mainstream, and far from a homogeneous one. By the 1940s the ASL consisted of one group of clubs seemingly intent on retaining their ethnic heritage (Brooklyn Hispano, Kearny Scots) and another attempting to distance themselves from it (New York Americans, Philadelphia Nationals). Yet nothing seemed able to transform the game's appeal. The Open Cup final of 1946 between the Viking club of Chicago and Ponta Delgada - who returned the city of Fall River to the national championship series after a 15-year absence - attracted just 5,000 to the decidedly mainstream surroundings of Chicago's Comiskey Park.

  Still, some thought the game deserved better, and even in the immediate postwar years there were people either brave or foolish enough to try to get professional soccer off the ground. In 1945 an attempt was made to establish a multi-city professional league in the midwest. Including as it did an entry from Toronto as well as Detroit, Pittsburgh and Chicago, it called itself the North American Soccer Football League, but it only ever sputtered along, playing a modest schedule in largely empty baseball parks. Partly out of desperation, a team in St Louis was added for 1947, but it ran into difficulty almost from the start. The new Raiders sold just 2,360 tickets for their first home match and a month later drew only 500 on a pleasant Sunday afternoon. When one of the Chicago clubs revealed it was sinking in debt, the league suspended operations. By the autumn some clubs had folded and others had left for more local leagues.

  Two decades would pass before anyone summoned the courage to attempt another pro league, by which time the Open Cup had fallen into even more pitiful obscurity. The first leg of the 1956 final, between the Schwaben club of Chicago and the Hamarville Hurricanes of Pittsburgh, produced an attendance of just 941 at Chicago's Winnemac Park. Gates of less than 3,000 became typical throughout the Fifties for what the USSFA still touted as the national championship.

  The few people who had been paying attention after the war could scarcely have failed to notice the mercurial striker Gil Heron, who helped the Detroit Wolverines win the North American league championship in 1946. Neither this league nor its rivals to the east had produced many black players: Cuba's Pito Villanon is said to have broken the colour barrier in the ASL but he remained a conspicuous presence. It was hardly a surprise. The 'gentlemen's agreement' barring black players from major league baseball was not breached by Jackie Robinson until 1947, about the same time that black players were allowed to reappear in professional gridiron.

  Heron was a Jamaican emigrant who earned his living as a photographer and had played for a number of midwestern teams in the 1940s before joining the North American league. He was also an accomplished sprinter, boxer and cricketer. During an American tour in 1951 Celtic were impressed enough by his footballing skills to offer him a trial, and that year he became the first black player to appear in the Scottish League. Heron scored 15 times in 15 reserve matches, but made only one league appearance before moving on to Third Lanark and, in 1953, Kidderminster Harriers. His football legacy may not have become familiar to Americans, though his son Gil-Scott Heron, the musician and poet, certainly did.

  In those gloomydecades itwas often the charity and bloody-mindedness of Barriskill that kept the USSFA from collapse, though not without periodic challenges from other quarters. In his 1983 book US Soccer vs the World, the sportswriter Tony Cirino gives a colourful account of one such confrontation, with the ex-Hungarian international winger Erno Schwarcz, who by the 1940s had become business manager of the ASL and a key figure in the American game:

  'Ernie came to the office one day,' recalled Barriskill, 'and he said, "We understand you are broke. We are taking over." I said, "Who's broke? Who's taking over?" "You're broke," he said. "You owe us money." I said, "How much money do we owe you?" "So and so and so." I wrote him a check and I said, "Here, put that in your pocket and get the hell out of here and don't come back again or else I'll break your neck."'

  Barriskill proved rather less confrontational towards the chairman of Liverpool, Bill McConnell, when approached about the possibility of a summer tour. In 1945 McConnell had spent three months in the US studying industrial cafeterias (he owned several dozen on Merseyside). The time he spent sampling the decidedly less austere American cuisine soon led him to make a inspired proposition. 'If I could bring my team to play a few games while sampling American malted milks and ice cream, American meats and vegetables,' he was reported to have said, 'they'd go back to Liverpool and win the first division championship.'

  That, strangely enough, is exactly what happened. How much of an edge such hearty eating actually provided McConnell's team is difficult to gauge, but the month they spent on tour - at a time when even the best English clubs were still hamstrung by rationing and other wartime restrictions - would certainly have given them a head start. The tour must have also bolstered Liverpool's confidence, since most of the American opposition represented little more than target practice. A local all-star unit lost 12-0 in Philadelphia; the ASL's Baltimore Americans went down 9-0; a combined Chicago-St Louis team was beaten 9-3 at Soldier Field. Soon manager George Kay was admitting that 'the terrific hospitality we are receiving is the only thing likely to beat us', while the correspondent of the Liverpool Echo added:

  Apparently the Americans, in an effort to repay some of the hospitality extended to their servicemen in this country, are being exceptionally lavish in the entertaining line - and they were never behindhand in that even before the war ... British clubs, harassed by the difficulty in getting gear and balls, will envy the Americans, where there is apparently no shortage. At any rate, Mr Kay says they used six balls in the floodlit game in Baltimore. It was wonderfully clear under the lights,' he said, 'but the main trouble is that the white ball soon gets discoloured and has to be changed.' One other snag was the press photographers letting off their flashlights behind the goal.

  Their appetite sated in every sense of the word, Liverpool returned to Anfield with ten victories out often. Their nine US matches had attracted about 100,000 fans and grossed nearly $93,000, earning the USSFA a cut of about $7,000. Nearly 20,000 saw the opening match in New York, with 16,000 returning a week later; 12,000 turned out in Kearny and even 7,000 braved a miserably chilly day in Chicago. 'If an epidemic of foreign soccer team visitations develops in this country,' one St Louis sportswriter joked, 'just charge it to our United States food ... soccer elevens, it appears, are like armies - they travel on their stomachs.'

  Liverpool were the country's first significant postwar visitors, and the success of their tour encouraged others to follow. The next summer 43,000 were at Yankee Stadium for the visit of Hapoel Tel-Aviv, even though the match was shown on local television (possibly a first for American soccer). But like the inte
rest in Hakoah Vienna two decades earlier - and with the added intensity given to Jewish-American identity by the Holocaust - interest stemmed more from ethnic solidarity than soccer. The following year 25,000 turned up to watch the new national team of Israel play at the Polo Grounds.

  Liverpool came back in 1948 for another helping of malted milks and created a new landmark. Their 3-2 win over Djurgarden at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn was the first time two foreign professional clubs had played each other on US soil. The 18,000 in attendance helped confirm what some had begun to suspect: fans were more interested in top-quality soccer than the presence of a local team to cheer for.

  The following summer Newcastle United, Internazionale and Belfast Celtic came across, with the Geordies even playing several matches in the hinterland of the Pacific northwest. Organisers began scheduling what were sometimes referred to as'dream doubleheaders', two matches in the same stadium on the same day. Amid such keenly promoted exhibitions the ASL quickly learned its place. In May 1949 Belfast Celtic, who had just withdrawn from the Irish League over sectarian tensions and would soon disappear altogether, took part in one such event, facing a local allstar team in New York. The preliminary match happened to be the ASL's play-off final. When that ended 2-2, necessitating extra time, Belfast's match still kicked off as scheduled, leaving the New York Americans and Philadelphia Nationals to settle the fate of the league championship later in the day.

  Another doubleheader, played in New York in June 1949, drew 17,000 to see a somewhat incongruous assortment of teams. Newcastle defeated IFK Gothenburg (or Kamraterna as the local press referred to them - the 'K' in IFK meaning 'comrades') in the second game, but the first attracted most of the support. A Scottish XI - the full national team, by most accounts - survived what the Glasgow Herald perceived as the 'over-robust and irritating tactics' of a US national selection to win 4-0 in what was very close to a full international. (Probably because it agreed to allow substitutes, the Scottish FA don't recognise it as such, but since at that time an American national team didn't really exist outside formal tournaments the point is academic.)