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

by David Wangerin

  But there were only so many established sports to go around, and the sudden rush to make money as a big-league owner - or at the very least reduce tax liabilities - soon required aspirants to think in broader terms. Some began looking closely at soccer. The development of jet travel and the creeping influence of television meant the game's worldwide popularity had never been so apparent. It is not difficult to imagine an American executive in Rome or Buenos Aires switching on the television in his hotel suite and marvelling at the enormous crowds.

  The attraction was mutual. Jet travel had enticed increasing numbers of foreign teams to spend part of their summer in North America, since they could now complete tours in weeks instead of months. The late Fifties and early Sixties saw a remarkable influx of famous clubs - most from Europe and many of them happy to play from coast to coast: Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Celtic, Rapid Vienna, Napoli, Sampdoria, Red Star Belgrade, Munich 1860, VfB Stuttgart and a host of others. As had become the pattern, when the weather and venue were favourable and the competing events few, fans responded in large numbers.

  The success of these tours was not lost on promoters from outside the incestuous American soccer world. In the early 1960s, New York-born Bill Cox became the most conspicuous of them. A one-time art dealer and lumber company executive, Cox had dabbled in sport for decades, and not without controversy. In 1943 he purchased baseball's Philadelphia Phillies but was forced to sell up after only eight months when authorities discovered him betting on his own club. A few years later he operated a team in a short-lived professional gridiron league. But by the late 1950s Cox had turned his attention to soccer, having ventured to big matches in London, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and marvelled at the size of the gates. `I've never been able to understand why soccer hasn't caught on here,' he confessed. He was not alone.

  Cox was convinced the reason for the Americans' indifference was that they had never seen the game played as foreigners did: in a big-time, high-calibre competition. He also suspected that the New York sporting public would welcome a new summer diversion after two ofits three major league baseball teams, the Giants and the Dodgers, moved to California in 1957. (The city did, but it turned out to be the New York Mets, who filled the baseball gap in 1962.) By inviting foreign clubs to participate in a summer competition, Cox hoped to offer fans an attractive standard of play through something more than a series of meaningless exhibitions.

  His International Soccer League, as it was christened, lasted from 1960 to 1965. From time to time, it proved capable of attracting sizeable crowds: the first final, between Kilmarnock and Bangu of Brazil, drew more than 25,000 to the Polo Grounds. It also brought across the odd talented team, none better than the young Dukla Prague side that won the competition in 1961. Dukla were soon to dominate Czech soccer, and their touring team included Josef Masopust, 1962's European Footballer of the Year. More commonly, though, the ISL featured middling teams that often left their stars at home, playing before modest crowds.

  Cox usually included an 'American' all-star team in his venture, but its presence had little impact at the turnstiles - not even in 1965 when an aggregation called the New Yorkers managed to reach the championship series. They lost to Polonia Bytom of Poland with a team that included a free-spirited English import named Bobby Howfield, who had recently been released by Fulham. Most Americans remember Howfield as one of the NFL's early'soccer- style' place-kickers.

  While the ISL didn't make Cox any money, it didn't lose him much, either, and its ambitions towards becoming a proper domestic league grew more transparent. By 1964 it was staging games in Los Angeles and Chicago, among other cities, and was said to have approached basketball star Wilt Chamberlain - all 7ft lin of him - with $100,000 to keep goal for an American team. But Cox had begun to incur the wrath of the USSFA, whose own leagues had been underwriting foreign tours for decades - in 1965 they had drawn a crowd of more than 23,000 to see AC Milan and Santos, a national record for a floodlit match. Almost inevitably, the two parties wriggled their way toward a lawsuit.

  The USSFA had been contemplating a glittering new future of its own. Discreetly, it had put the word out that it would look favourably on anyone interested in underwriting a coast-to-coast, bona fide professional league, of the type likely to excite television networks and elevate the game to a loftier status. It didn't take long for three groups to come forward, each claiming they had the means to take soccer into the stratosphere: majorleague venues, interest from TV, trolleyloads of money and, of course, the benefit of their commercial acumen.

  Behind the proposals stood some of the most famous sports promoters in North America. One syndicate was fronted by Jack Kent Cooke, the Canadian communications tycoon and a former business partner in the publishing empire of Lord Thomson of Fleet Street. In 1960 the flamboyant Cooke ('sports is my life now') had bought an interest in the NFL's Washington Redskins; more recently he had purchased basketball's Los Angeles Lakers and the rights to an expansion NHL team, and he was building a $10 million arena for them both to play in.

  Alongside Cooke was judge Roy Hofheinz, the colourful proprietor of Houston's wondrous Astrodome (opened in 1965), and Lamar Hunt, the Texas oilman and self-confessed sport junkie who had been a crucial figure in the formation of the gridiron AFL and would soon sell big-money tennis to network television. The other two groups also contained men with interests in other professional sports - baseball's Atlanta Braves and Baltimore Orioles, football's Los Angeles Rams and Pittsburgh Steelers - and high-flyers from the business world. They also included Bill Cox, who some had credited with dreaming up the idea in the first place.

  The USSFA appointed a three-man committee to look at the proposals. It was to make its recommendation in time for the annual convention in San Francisco, in July 1966. How the association would cope with the sudden profusion of interest in its game was anyone's guess. FIFA were naturally eager to see soccer take wing in the US, but the idea of promoting a sport from the top down, creating a league before it had any players, left Sir Stanley Rous, by now president of the governing body, and his colleagues treading on unfamiliar ground. Rous's suggestion was to sanction individual clubs according to their merit, rather than en masse. But each group had banded tightly together, and insisted that a merger of any kind was out of the question. The USSFA ignored Rous and decided to sanction one league.

  A few months before the convention, the Cox group decided to take matters into its own hands. It announced that it had formed an 11-team 'North American Professional Soccer League' and would begin play in the autumn of 1967. Cox had decided to 'take the bull by the horns and make our announcement now', bypassing the USSFA's collection of volunteers and part-timers in favour of direct contact with FIFA. Convinced a trip to London had produced a green light from Rous, he thumbed his nose at the USSFA.

  The association had demanded a pound of flesh for its seal of approval: $25,000 per franchise, plus four per cent of all gate receipts and ten per cent of the revenue from any television contract. This was rather more than the $25 a year the ASL paid for its professional licence. Two of the groups balked at such demands, but Cooke's agreed. Not surprisingly, the committee recommended that his consortium, the 'North American Soccer League', be approved. In San Francisco, the delegates duly obliged. Yet before the convention had ended, the two rebuffed leagues suddenly decided they could merge after all and asked to put their case forward. But it was too late. The association did not wish to go back on its deal with Cooke's syndicate, or on the decision to sanction only one league. The NASL believed it was paying for exclusivity - including the right to host foreign tours, seen as critical to their venture's success.

  Quickly, the renegades began to fight back. In August, they announced that their merged 'National Professional Soccer League' was not only going ahead, but would begin in April 1967 - a full year in front of the NASL. They even dangled $30,000 in front of Alan Hardaker, secretary of the Football League, to help them direct their operations. Harda
ker declined, but Sir George Graham, the straight-laced former secretary of the Scottish FA, took up the offer. The NPSL then played its trump card: a long-term, $1 million-a-year television contract with the CBS network. While the agreement was tilted in favour of the broadcaster ('It's a unilateral contract,' sniffed one rival owner. As I read it, CBS doesn't even have to put on one game'), the money wasn't nearly as important as the ability to be seen in living rooms across the nation. In spite of its uncertain status - to say nothing of the fact that it scarcely knew where its players would be coming from - television had given the NPSL a decided advantage.

  The league continued its overtures toward FIFA, who in turn urged Joe Barriskill to broker some sort of merger of the millionaires. But the association had placed itself squarely behind the NASL. Its president, Frank Woods, was named as an executive of the San Francisco franchise, and former president Jim McGuire, a member of the three-man committee who had recommended the NASL in the first place, was chairman of the league. 'We opened the door to the other league,' McGuire later insisted, 'but it takes two to tango.'

  There would be no tango, only a sort of moshpit. Realising the NPSL was not going to go away (and was in fact about to have 1967 all to itself) the NASL announced it too would sponsor a competition that year. It would do so by importing entire foreign teams - the very practice which had helped to alienate Cox from the USSFA - and rebadge them as American clubs. But of course it could only do this once the European and South American leagues had finished. This made for a rather short season (12 matches, as it turned out), but it would prevent the NPSL from stealing too much of a march.

  The outlaws had given themselves very little time to put their operation together, but they seemed convinced that their sporting know-how and bulging wallets would put everything right. Certainly, neither league was short of money. New York's NPSL franchise had been nicknamed the Generals in deference to its well-heeled owners, RKO General, Inc. The club's directors included John Pinto, an 'entertainment and cablevision tycoon' who was an executive vice-president of the corporation. In the NASL, the Detroit franchise had the weight of the Ford Motor Company behind it, to the extent that the club named itself the Cougars, after Ford's newest model. Dallas's ownership group even included a millionaire fruitcake seller in the form of William McNutt, proprietor of the Collin Street Bakery, who wisely chose not call the team after his firm's principal delicacy.

  The only thing the groups seemed to lack was much of a clue about the game itself. Only a handful of investors professed to be actual soccer fans. The most conspicuous of them was Dan Tana, the Hollywood actor (Peter Gunn, The Enemy Below) who formed part of the Los Angeles NPSL group. As a teenager named Dobrivoje Tanasijevic, Tana had been with Red Star Belgrade before embarking on a strange career that took him to Los Angeles, where he ran a restaurant popular with celebrities, and later to Griffin Park as chairman of Brentford.

  Virtually everyone else, though, seemed startlingly blase. Both leagues took a very clinical approach to what for them was a simple business proposition. The NASL commissioner, Dick Walsh, was a baseball executive who turned up at his first press conference and boasted almost insolently: 'I don't know the difference between a soccer ball and a billiard ball.' Walsh had been vice-president of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a position he left to'create a sports organisation', the mechanics of which he claimed were'the same regardless of what sport you're in'. The NPSL did not appoint its commissioner until its season was less than two months away - and bizarrely chose a man named Ken Macker, who had spent the past few years publishing newspapers in the Philippines.

  By then, NBC had brought the World Cup into American living rooms for the first time, broadcasting the 1966 final via satellite within hours of its conclusion. With the match starting at noon New York time, the country was able to witness one of the biggest sporting events it had never heard of. Extra time forced NBC to edit the match to fit its timeslot, but Germany's last-gasp equaliser and the suspense of the outcome made for compelling viewing - particularly as the images of Bobby Moore receiving the cup from the Queen were transmitted well before the opening pitch of the day's first baseball game.

  The broadcast attracted an audience of about nine million- not earthshattering, but eye-opening for a programme which had begun at 9am on the west coast. Perhaps more importantly, it also attracted an unprecedented level of interest from the American media. Even football-obsessed Texas woke up to find a photo of Germany's equaliser gracing the sports pages of the Dallas Morning News. While the World Cup certainly did not lead to the formation of big-time professional soccer, as many claim, it did help to reinforce the belief that it was a sound investment. And the game's international appeal seemed to point to unprecedented, lucrative streams of revenue which would surely substantiate the boastful words of John Pinto: As soon as we get some stature, we will become phenomenal.'

  There was further cause for optimism later in the summer when Pele made his first appearance in the US. As the highest-paid sportsman in the world, his name was already well known, and when his Santos club arrived for a close-season tour, the level of his popularity was plain to see. On Randall's Island, Downing Stadium filled to its 28,000 capacity for a match against Eusebio's Benfica, with some locked-out fans taking up restricted vantage points along the busy Triborough Bridge. The appearance of the two stars was somewhat overshadowed by an overexuberant crowd, whose behaviour delayed the second-half for a quarter of an hour (leaving organisers to attempt to quell the disturbance by playing polka music over the public address system). Santos eventually claimed a comfortable 4-0 win, the 17-year-old Edu overshadowing his more feted team-mate with two goals. Two weeks later, more than 41,000 turned up in Yankee Stadium to watch Pele lead his team to a 4-1 win over Internazionale ('although tripped, mauled and kneed' according to the New York Times). In Los Angeles, Pele's presence was enough to shatter the city's record soccer crowd, as 31,291 at the Coliseum watched Santos lose 4-2 to River Plate of Argentina.

  America's new soccer executives might have been able to appreciate the genius of a Pele, yet their pitiful knowledge of the game soon left them embarrassingly exposed. Telling good players from ordinary ones proved beyond them, and many were taken in by wily agents and intermediaries. One exasperated NPSL executive sighed: 'There's more experts in this game than any sport I've ever seen.'

  Though there was little chance that the world's top players would join an outlaw league, the NPSL's melting-pot squads owed as much to haste and incompetence as any formal restrictions. The Atlanta Chiefs developed an African connection through an English contact, Jack Sewell, who had managed Zambia's national team. They also found room for three Jamaicans, a slew of Britons and a Swedish goalkeeper. The Baltimore Bays picked up players from Haiti and Israel as well as Europe and South America. And the squad of Dan Tana's Los Angeles Toros, managed by Polish goalkeeper Max Wosniak, included players from England, Germany, Mexico, Israel, Yugoslavia, Paraguay, Turkey, Austria, Uruguay and Costa Rica.

  Amid the international flotsam and jetsam, a few stars could be found, though most had reached the tail-end of their careers. Pittsburgh numbered amongst its collection of Dutchmen, Germans and Maltese the former Netherlands international Co Prins, who had played for Ajax and Kaiserslautern (and later appeared in Escape To Victory). Chicago recruited Horst Syzmaniak, capped 43 times for West Germany, but who had more recently figured in Tasmania Berlin's infamously inept 1966 Bundesliga campaign. The Toronto Falcons coaxed Hungary's Ladislao Kubala, formerly of Barcelona, out of retirement by pairing him with his son Branko, while the St Louis Stars fielded Yugoslavs Bora Kostic and Dragoslav Sekularac. And, portentously, the former Wales international Phil Woosnam left Aston Villa to play for and manage the Atlanta Chiefs. 'This is a challenge to me, an opportunity to return something to the game,' he declared. 'We're really spreading the gospel now.'

  One nationality was, of course, conspicuous by its absence: the United States. Even its foreign-born contingent,
which still represented the best of what talent the country possessed, was largely overlooked. The most notable exception was German-born Willy Roy, who had learned the game not in Europe but in Chicago (his family had emigrated when he was six). Two years earlier, playing in the city's top league, Roy had been capped by the US; now he became the property of the NPSL's Chicago Spurs. The Spurs also signed the league's only US collegiate, the Ukrainian-born Nick Krat, who, according to the NPSL press guide, was a great center halfback on the Michigan State team which he brought into the college finals almost single handed'. Apart from Joe Speca, a Baltimore native signed by his hometown club, the only other American-born players in the league were Carl Schwarzen, Carl Gentile and Pat McBride, all local products signed - fittingly, given the city's historic attachment to the game - by the St Louis Stars.

  Of course there were no American players at all in the rival NASL, a fact which became particularly ironic when, less than three months before its season was due to begin, the league changed its name to the United Soccer Association - USA. Officials claimed this was to 'make it easier for fans to remember that the league is sanctioned', although the patriotic overtones were more than a happy coincidence. As the NPSL busily recruited its players, the USA scrambled after entire teams, only to find most of those it was interested in had other commitments. Commissioning Jimmy Greaves and the BBC's Kenneth Wolstenholme to help with the search, it ended up with a host of representatives from the British Isles. League officials tried to place teams in cities with matching ethnic populations: Boston hosted Ireland's Shamrock Rovers, christening them the Boston Rovers; Los Angeles, assigned Wolverhampton Wanderers, ditched Cooke's preferred nickname of Zorros in favour of Wolves; the Cleveland Stokers (Stoke City) adopted the club's red-andwhite striped jerseys, which to Americans made them look like the gridiron referees of the AFL. Cagliari of Italy went to Chicago as the Mustangs, Bangu of Brazil to Houston as the Stars, while New York, which could have taken just about anybody, ended up with Cerro of Uruguay and renamed them the Skyliners.