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

by David Wangerin

  With that, England had fired their last arrow. Seemingly resigned to their fate, they almost suffered the ignominy ofa second goal, Alf Ramsey clearing Pee Wee Wallace's tame shot off the line. By then American confidence had grown enough for Clarkie Souza - perhaps the best player on the pitch - to engage in an impish dribble through several frustrated opponents. The American public may not have been collectively perched beside their radios, but the locals sensed the magnitude of the occasion. In the stands, firecrackers and bonfires were lit, and what had originally been a crowd of about 10,000 had grown to maybe 40,000 - no one really knows. When it was over, many of them rushed on to the pitch to hoist the two heroes of the game, Gaetjens and Borghi, on their shoulders.

  In his match report, prosaically headlined U.S. Upsets England in Soccer: Gaetjens Scores the Only Goal, McSkimming admitted that England in their general play appeared superior to that of the winners except on the scoreboard', but also claimed that 'the underdog Americans dominated the attack during the entire game'. Years later he compared the result, not without justification, to a baseball team from Oxford University beating the New York Yankees. But his countrymen responded with no more than a shrug of the shoulders. Not even the New York Times seemed terribly bothered, printing a wire service report which credited the goal to the wrong player. (It was hardly alone in conveying such inaccuracies: both the Daily Telegraph and the Manchester Guardian referred to Gaetjens as 'Argentine-born' and the Telegraph even claimed he 'scored with a lovely shot from 20 yards in the corner of the net'.)

  It would require the efforts of a baseball player a year later for the full irony of Belo Horizonte to be realised. With typical self-reverence, the dramatic last-ditch home run struck by Bobby Thomson that won baseball's National League championship for the New York Giants came to be referred to by the American press as the 'shot heard round the world'. Yet international interest in Thomson (born in Glasgow) or the Giants was, of course, no greater than what America had afforded the 'shot' from Gaetjens.

  English witnesses could not agree why or how the Americans had managed to win. Stanley Rous, the secretary of the Football Association, tactfully conceded his country had been 'beaten by a fitter and faster team'. The manager Walter Winterbottom claimed his forwards had been 'far too eager'. The Daily Mail correspondent blamed 'bad shooting, over-anxiety in the second half and failure to settle down on the small pitch'. The Daily Telegraph pointed to 'the small ground and the close marking of the defenders' which'seemed to spoil the Englishmen's close passing game ... repeated switches in the front line brought no results'. Whatever the long-term significance-if indeed there was any-the defeat certainly precipitated a collapse in England's fortunes that summer. A 1-0 defeat by Spain three days later put them on the boat home, sending the press into the first of its many hyperbolic states of indignation.

  That result gave Spain a perfect record - they had also beaten Chile 2-0 - and with only one team to go through from each group, the US's final match was meaningless. In any case, they could not maintain the momentum in Recife against the Chileans, who took the lead with two first-half goals. Wallace and Maca, with a penalty, levelled the score early in the second half, but within six minutes their opponents reclaimed the lead, and the Americans soon wilted on the leaden pitch, conceding two further goals to finish, on goal difference, at the bottom of the group. Strangely, they had ended up exactly where they had been expected to.

  Some in the team received offers to play overseas, but the only takers were the three who had not become citizens, none of whom played for the US again. Mcllvenny joined Manchester United but soon found himself in Ireland with Waterford. Maca returned to Belgium as something of a hero, but his time in the Second Division there was brief and he came back to America for good, fathering a son who spent several seasons in the NASL. Gaetjens moved to France, spending two seasons as a professional before going home to Haiti, opening a dry-cleaning business and even earning a cap for his native country. Fatefully, in 1957 he declared his support for Louis Dejoie, the political opponent of Francois 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, who became president that year (Gaetjens's brother had been an adviser to Dejoie). In July 1964, less than a month after Duvalier declared himself president for life, Gaetjens was forced into a car at gunpoint by two men. His family never saw him alive again; in all likelihood he was shot dead by Duvalier's militia, the Tontons Macoutes, two days later.*

  The rest of the US team returned to their familiar mixture of day jobs and weekend soccer. Colombo turned down $8,000 a year to play in Brazil and stayed with Simpkins Ford. Souza moved to New York and played for the German-Hungarians, making as much money on the field as he did in his day job designing patterns for women's jumpers (the factory and the team were owned by the same man). Borghi became a funeral director. Bahr and Keough played for their country for another seven years and eventually became doyens of the college coaching world.

  Decades passed before the American sporting fraternity began to acknowledge what had happened in Belo Horizonte, by which time many in Jeffrey's squad, and the coach himself, had died. American soccer continued to exist in a vacuum, presided over by the acerbic Barriskill - who, it is said, saw fit to conduct its affairs in his underwear when the summer heat of his cramped Manhattan office became too much to bear. The USSFA pursued what it perceived as its Holy Grail - a rematch with England on American soil - only to be continually rebuffed by the FA. So for two years they contested no internationals at all.

  They did send a team to Helsinki for the 1952 Olympics, a competition which was still far more important to them than the World Cup. Changing attitudes towards amateurism permitted Colombo and Souza to travel to Finland, where they played alongside Keough. This, though, was a team amateur in both name and nature. The new chairman of the Olympic soccer committee was William Hobson, a long-serving USSFA official who had taken part in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics as a member of the field hockey team. He had accompanied the 1948 soccer squad to the London Games, but his grasp of the game seemed terrifyingly fragile. Keough recalled Hobson's advice to the 1948 side in Geoffrey Douglas's 1996 book The Game Of Their Lives:

  So he says to his players before the game, 'Now anytime your man gets away from you, what you gotta do is, you gotta yell "Check!"'...'How come?' the players want to know. 'Well,' the coach tells 'em, 'because that's how they do it in field hockey, that's why.' 'Field hockey? Field hockey?' - Keough fairly shrieks now. 'What the goddamn fuck's field hockey got to do with anything?'

  In Helsinki, the US lost 8-0 in the opening round against perpetual nemesis Italy and yet again headed home after 90 minutes. Familiar recriminations over a lack of preparation ensued. Giesler, still the team manager (Bill Jeffrey had worked under him in Brazil) claimed the US were 'comparable to Italy as individuals but as a team lacked the understanding of each other's play'. He recommended sending the US amateur champions in future; there weren't enough resources to do anything else. One final Olympic humiliation, a 9-1 defeat to Yugoslavia in Melbourne, came in 1956 before the introduction of qualifying competitions began to keep American teams at home. By this time, though, Olympic soccer had lost much of its relevance.

  Though still pining for England, the USSFA accepted an invitation from Scotland to play at Hampden Park in 1952, but sent a team with no manager, coach or even a trainer. Bad weather forced their only practice match to be cancelled, although the day before kick-off the coach of Queen's Park - on the way to finishing second from bottom of the Scottish League - was persuaded to organise a training session. None of this dissuaded the Scottish FA from hyping the match as a major international event - the Americans, after all, were the conquerors of England - and more than 107,000 turned up. The 6-0 victory, though, was little short of a farce, and left the Glasgow Herald correspondent fuming:

  [Scotland] thrashed [the US] without expending effort comparable with what they would have employed had they been opposed by a team of Scottish juvenile players. In saying that, I do not wish to be too crit
ical of the juvenile section of Scottish football ... When Scottish followers are eager to see how our failing standards compare with those of countries such as Austria, they have to be content with such rubbish as they saw in what must be Hampden Park's most irritating match in all the great history of the famous ground ... Both backs, Bahr (the most consistent American player) and John Souza might conceivably be considered for one of our moderate Division A teams. The others were merely triers and far from successful triers at that.

  The telegram the USSFA officials are alleged to have sent to New York after the match - '107,765 in attendance; score secondary' - may be apocryphal, but the $14,000 it took from the gate receipts, not including $6,300 in expenses, was certainly more useful to its survival than another celebrated upset.

  Another year passed before the English FA finally agreed to try to avenge its World Cup humiliation, almost three years after Belo Horizonte and just five months before its portentous date with the Hungarians at Wembley. Anticipating a huge crowd, the USSFA secured Yankee Stadium for a Sunday evening kick-off, but succeeded in attracting only embarrassment. When gentle rain began to fall late that afternoon, the stadium's proprietors abruptly postponed the match, fearing damage to the baseball surface. British journalists, many of whom were due back in London for a boxing match, were flabbergasted; even Rous thought the decision 'inconceivable'. Only 7,200 returned the next day to watch the Americans lose 6-3. ' No England team has ever played before so miserably sparse an attendance,' complained the Daily Herald, maintaining that 'it will be a long, long time before another representative England soccer team sets foot in New York'.

  It would in fact be nearly 11 years, and on more expendable turf. Soccer in New York City typically found refuge in modest Triborough Stadium, a facility on tiny Randall's Island, whose greatest claims to fame were that Jesse Owens had qualified for the Berlin Olympics there and that it was the home of the world's largest sewage treatment plant. Both Liverpool's 1946 and 1948 tours had started at Triborough, Scotland had played three of its 1949 tour matches there, and it had been the venue for the narrow England XI victory a month before Belo Horizonte. By the time England returned to New York in 1964, the facility had been renamed Downing Stadium, and the goal-gremlins had long since disappeared. In front of fewer than 5,000, against a makeshift American team foreign-born almost to a man, England scored ten times without reply. They had also defeated the US 8-1 in 1959 - Billy Wright's last appearance in an England shirt - at a Los Angeles baseball stadium in which the groundsman had apparently not bothered to flatten the 15-inch high pitcher's mound.

  World Cup football was leaving America to choke in the dust. Mexico had become the region's standard-bearer, and a more demanding qualification process, combined with tighter eligibility restrictions, prompted the USSFA to treat the event more as a financial liability than a bid for glory. It opted to play all its 1954 qualification rounds away from home, a decision which netted it a welcome $21,000 but virtually ensured the team would not reach Switzerland. As quickly as the hotchpotch American squad was assembled, it was being dismantled: the Mexican FA had identified four players who failed to meet the new eligibility rules and the USSFA was forced to scratch them from the team. After Mexico won their two matches against the US by a combined score of 7-1 the association tried to back out of its remaining two fixtures with Haiti, but was made to send a team to Port-au-Prince three months later. The two matches, both won by the Americans, were played on consecutive days.

  The USSFA meekly defended its decision to play away by pointing to the cost of hiring a New York baseball stadium, and noting that the Randall's Island pitch was too narrow for FIFA's liking. By 1957 it had realised there were places to play outside New York, but choosing to take on Mexico in Long Beach, California, was tantamount to playing away. Almost all of the 12,500 in attendance came to support the visitors, and took pleasure in the 7-2 hammering of yet another slapdash American collective. As the US had lost 6-0 in Mexico City three weeks earlier, the USSFA disbanded the team, sending the Kutis club of St Louis - prophetically sponsored by a firm of undertakers - to fulfil the remaining fixtures against Canada, both of which were lost. Hardly a newspaper in America bothered to print the final table.

  Well into the 1970s the USSFA continued to stage its qualifiers with Mexico in California, where it could count on a large crowd. That it was a predominantly hostile one, frequently basking in weather more familiar to the opposition, seemed an unavoidable necessity. For the 1962 World Cup, the Americans held Mexico to a 3-3 draw in a Los Angeles baseball park - a result somewhat rashly judged by the LA Times to be 'the biggest international upset since the Alamo' - but a week later were eliminated 3-0 in front of 100,000 in the Olympic Stadium. The Times noted that in the first leg 'Uncle Sam fielded a pick-up team composed of fellows gathered up from around the country, many of whom had never seen each other before'. Nor would they see each other again before the return leg. But this was not necessarily the USSFA's fault, as the chairman of its selection committee took pains to point out:

  Many of the so-called critics are constantly harping on the fact that the team is not together for a period of two to three to four weeks prior to playing. One instance about players playing beyond one or two days was the one in Los Angeles where we invited the team to stay one week there prior to going to Mexico. Out of the entire squad of 15, only five players were able to get time off from work. Our Association will gladly spend extra money for preparatory practice, however, it is the players who cannot get the necessary time from their jobs.

  And here was the root of the problem. Though there were deficiencies in almost every facet of the American set-up - fitness levels, coaching acumen and certainly organisational competence - a full-time professional set-up might have remedied most of them. But big-time American soccer remained an oxymoron. The ASL's collection of Uhrik Truckers and Ukrainian Nationals, playing in their spartan ovals to people who spoke in foreign tongues, was not professional sport as America recognised it. And playing through the winter, which the league continued to do until 1969, was intolerable. The experience of Arthur Daley, the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter, writing in 1960, spoke for many:

  About 30 years ago this reporter was assigned to cover a soccer championship on the outer fringes of Brooklyn. It was a grim day in the dead of winter with no transportation, no shelter, no spectators and no score. They played three overtime periods. It was enough to scar a man for life. This reporter hasn't witnessed a soccer game of his own free will since.

  Yet the country's sporting landscape was starting to experience seismic shifts it had not known since the Golden Age of the 1920s. Television - on a global scale - made the difference and soccer was not immune from its effects. As early as 1961 the ABC network had taken a crew to Wembley to televise the FA Cup final, possibly the first time armchair sports fans from coast to coast had been given the opportunity to watch a top foreign match. Images of enormous crowds at places like Wembley and the staggering popularity of the game's top talent - in particular, the youthful Pele - left a lingering impression on a number of ambitious promoters. Before the 1960s came to an end, soccer in the US had begun its flirtation with the big time, and the country's ambivalence towards the game began to dissolve - for better, and for worse.

  4. `We will become phenomenal'

  Ambition and folly in the Sixties

  Here is a viable product, they feel, and the whole operation is to be tackled as a promotional and merchandising effort on a scale comparable to what - to use their own words - a major automotive or soap company, for example, undertakes when it attempts to 'condition' the public to its new product.

  Geoffrey Green, The Times, February 25, 1967

  y the mid-1960s, the value of television to big-time sport was unmistakable. Gridiron's NFL and its upstart rival, the American Football League, had each signed lucrative long-term contracts with commercial networks. This virtually assured them not only of a sound fina
ncial footing - as early as 1960 all but five NFL teams would have lost money without TV - but a captive national audience. Baseball, with its Game of the Week, had also become a familiar living-room guest, as had college gridiron and basketball. In golf, tennis, boxing and other individual sports, the medium had begun to 'personalise' sportsmen such as Arnold Palmer and Cassius Clay. The way America chose to watch its sport had been transformed.

  When the NBC network bought the national rights to the fledgling AFL in 1964, it paid a whopping $36 million for the privilege. Almost at a stroke, the future of the league was assured. 'People have now stopped asking me if we are going to make it,' league commissioner Joe Foss proclaimed, and by 1966 the AFL found itself in the remarkable position of being able to hammer out merger terms with the NFL.

  Baseball was not immune from such entrepreneurial spirit. In 1959, one of its most famous executives, Branch Rickey - who in 1947 had broken the 'gentlemen's agreement' banning black players from the major leagues by signing Jackie Robinson - announced the formation of a Continental League, which intended to place many of its franchises in growing cities such as Houston and Atlanta which faced no majorleague competition. Rickey's league never got off the ground, largely because he had alarmed the major leagues enough for them to move into many Continental League markets, killing off the challenge before it had arrived.

  Towards the end of the Sixties attention turned to the other two big-time sports. In 1967 the National Hockey League-which consisted of only six teams, two of them Canadian - doubled in size and established its first presence on the west coast, pandering to television executives who had indicated its limited geographic appeal was a barrier to more lucrative exposure. The following year, an American Basketball Association was introduced as a rival to the NBA; it too would force a merger of sorts a decade later.