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

by David Wangerin

  Woosnam had been told of two Turkish brothers working in the city who were big enough soccer fans to have flown to Mexico for the World Cup. Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun were also record producers and serious players in the entertainment industry - Nesuhi was a senior executive at Atlantic Records, and had produced albums for Ray Charles, John Coltrane and Aretha Franklin. With the might of the Warner Communications conglomerate behind them, the Erteguns agreed to the league's revised $25,000 franchise fee - more than double what Rochester and Washington had paid the season before - and hired Toye as their general manager. Woosnam in turn moved the league's offices back to New York. The darkest days seemed to be over.

  There would be no reappearance of the Generals - two high school coaches won a trip to Europe for suggesting the team call itself the Cosmos - though the club revived their green and gold colour scheme, and took up residency in Yankee Stadium. But the first-year Cosmos were a far cry from the celebrated team who would emerge at the end of the decade. They chose as their manager Gordon Bradley, a Sunderlandborn emigrant who had led New York Hota (a Bavarian ethnic club) to the Open Cup title that season. Bradley's rather anonymous playing career had included stops at Bradford Park Avenue and Carlisle United, and a spell with the Generals in 1968. Still only 32, he doubled as his team's full-back and recruited the rest of the squad largely from local contacts.

  The most conspicuous member of the early Cosmos was a Bermudan named Randy Horton, an economics student at Rutgers University with an impressive afro that added several inches to his already-imposing 6ft tin frame. The club's top scorer, Horton was named league Rookie of the Year that season, though fans strangely developed a less charitable attitude towards his somewhat gangly presence. Though the Cosmos qualified for the post-season play-offs - as did half the league - Yankee Stadium remained just as empty as it had been for the Generals and the Skyliners. A crowd of 19,000 was announced for the visit of Rochester, but virtually everyone had come for the second game of the evening: Pele's Santos against Deportivo Cali of Colombia.

  Signs ofheightened interest were modest. The St Louis Stars, persisting with an American-heavy team, again finished with a woeful points total and crowds of only a few thousand, while the American-less Washington Darts completed their season in front of just 1,224. Rochester were probably the league's best team, but even they averaged just 7,500 at the high-school football facility they called home. One of their stars was a Brazilian emigre named Carlos Metidieri, a striker who supplemented his soccer wages by working at a local supermarket.

  The Lancers proved to be gluttons for hard work that season. They were eliminated in the semi-finals by Dallas over three games, the first of which took 176 minutes to resolve. Six 15-minute periods of `sudden death' extra time - nearly the equivalent of another entire match - were played before Metidieri finally found the net. (Woosnam missed the goal in his efforts to reach the pitch; he was about to instruct the officials to abandon the match at the end ofthe period.) Rochester lost the remaining two matches, one of which required 58 minutes of extra time, and Dallas went on to defeat Atlanta in the championship series, taking the decisive game in Georgia before fewer than 5,000.

  The Lancers recorded another footnote by agreeing to participate in the Concacaf Champions Cup as American champions of 1970. Whether they actually were the best team in the country - as opposed to winners of its most visible league - was a matter of doubt, but they sneaked past Pembroke Zebras of Bermuda and Mexico's Guadalajara, who forfeited, and then finished fourth in the final group of six. No NASL club ever entered the competition again. International commitments seemed to matter little to a league stubbornly ploughing its own furrow, often against all convention. The league remained wedded to its bonus points scheme, even over the objections of some of its own clubs ('this system has proved to be successful because the teams in the league come all out to score,' Woosnam contended), and for 1970 and 1971 it counted the results of matches against selected touring teams - including Coventry City and Hearts - towards the league championship. (Relatively poor performances against the likes of Vicenza of Italy and Bangu of Brazil cost Washington a play-off berth in 1971.) It saw no reason to accept the sanctity of the laws of the game, many of which it regarded as outmoded and restrictive. 'The entire world of soccer recognises that changes in the laws that produce greater goalscoring opportunities must be considered,' Woosnam claimed. 'It is our belief, shared by many European officials, that the ultimate answer is to make a change in the offside rule and the size of the goal.'

  F I FA balked at tinkering with the goalposts, but proved more pliable on the other `answer'. The NASL believed that restricting offside to a smaller zone would open up play in the middle of the pitch and create more scoring chances. To the open-minded, this was food for thought, since in many countries the game remained blighted by negative, defensive play. Smack in the middle of the 1972 season, the NASL was given permission to remark its pitches, extending the long line of the penalty area to the touchline, meaning a player could be offside only if he was 18 yards or less from the goalline. The experiment didn't work as intended. The next three matches produced just three goals (one even ended 0-0), and the average number of goals per game actually fell, from 2.87 before the change to 2.68. Defenders simply dropped further back, crowding the penalty area and making it even more difficult for attacking teams to get behind the defence. The new markings were erased at the end of the season, but soon gave way to a more enduring 35-yard line which - again with FIFA's consent - appeared on NASL pitches the following year.

  The spirit of co-operation between the league and its governors contrasted sharply with the more combustible attitudes which had given rise to the outlaw NPSL. Gone, Woosnam insisted, was the turmoil of half a decade earlier when 'the pros looked in one direction, the colleges and the semi-pros in another, and on top of all that, the USSFA wasn't looking at anybody.' This may not have been entirely true, but the NASL was certainly making progress. For the first time, all its franchises returned the following season, although not necessarily to the same city. Washington's move to Miami, where they renamed themselves the Gatos in an attempt to attract the city's Hispanic fans, proved a failure. From their opening match, played in a downpour in front of just 1,700 at a local college, the Gatos lumbered through a dismal season, managing just three victories.

  Other relocations were more successful. In Dallas, Lamar Hunt had moved the Tornado into Texas Stadium, the gleaming new home of the NFL's Cowboys, and found a crowd of 24,700 turning up to watch Moscow Dynamo hold his team to a goalless draw on the artificial surface. By some measure, this was the club's largest gate of the season, well in excess of anything it had ever produced for the NASL. The St Louis Stars moved back into big-time Busch Memorial Stadium and ended up with the league's best average attendance, nearly 7,800. Only the Stars and Tornado remained from 1967, but they seemed to have little else in common. While St Louis continued to field teams which drew heavily on local talent, Dallas manager Ron Newman preferred bringing in British veterans. Newman, a journeyman English striker once of Gillingham, had joined the Tornado from Atlanta as a player in 1968, having decided to stay in the US after being banned by the FA for a year for joining the outlaw NPSL. Not a single native player appeared for the Tornado in his first three seasons in charge.

  Bradley's Cosmos were more tolerant of North American citizens, though most had been born elsewhere. Standards remained fairly modest: the club's biggest name was Josef Jelinek, who had appeared for Czechoslovakia in the 1962 World Cup but more recently had been playing in Mexico. New York posted the best record in the league and won the championship, but local scepticism still ran high. Vacating Yankee Stadium for the cosier (and cheaper) Hofstra University Stadium on Long Island, the club still drew only around 5,000 a game. A crowd of 6,102 turned up at Hofstra for the championship match with St Louis, won by Jelinek four minutes from the end with a penalty.

  While the NASL continued to be dominated by foreign import
s, it had always been assumed that in 'a few years' the league would become predominantly North American. As the Seventies unfolded, though, the playing time given to even the best of the American-born collegiates - names such as Otley Cannon at Dallas, Steve Twellman at Atlanta and Barry Barto at Montreal - remained derisory. The league's managers, almost all of them British, were much more comfortable rummaging through the Football League for durable tradesmen looking for summer work than they were traipsing across North America in pursuit of unproven and unfamiliar names, be they young collegiates or capable semi-professionals.

  Even at college level, the temptation to stock a team full of imports often proved irresistible. In the 1971 NCAA final, Howard University of Washington DC - whose coach, Lincoln Phillips, doubled as an NASL goalkeeper - ended St Louis University's hopes of a third consecutive championship with a team consisting solely of foreign players, primarily from Africa and the Caribbean. When five of them were subsequently deemed to be ineligible, the NCAA - amid allegations of racial discrimination from Phillips - stripped Howard of its title.

  Nicknamed the Billikens after an Asian good-luck figure popular at the turn of the century, St Louis were coached by Belo Horizonte hero Harry Keough. They had won the previous two national college championships, and after the forfeit claimed the next two as well. The Billikens even set a new attendance record in 1973 when more than 20,000 saw their local derby with Southern Illinois-Edwardsville. But the college game was maturing, and when Howard put a legitimate end to the St Louis streak in 1974, their 2-1 victory marked a turning point. St Louis's collection of home-grown players and their native ball-chasing style had always held sway over the college ranks, and helped to turn Keough into the doyen of university coaches. But an influx of gifted players and coaches, many of them imported, now produced powerful teams that relied more on guile and finesse. The consequences proved disastrous for Keough, who never won another title, and for the St Louis area, which hasn't reached the final of the major college championship since 1979.

  The University of San Francisco soon displaced St Louis at the top of the collegiate tree with a largely imported team and no competition from gridiron, which had been dropped from its programme in 1972 (St Louis had done the same in 1950). A few other colleges took similar decisions as soccer became better established on campus, though spectator interest remained negligible. Most games, even those involving top teams, did well to attract more than few hundred. The weather didn't help. Although the college season had long since been moved from winter to autumn, it meant crucial late-season matches often consisted of players skidding across pitches in sub-freezing temperatures. In 1967, bad weather forced the abandonment of the national championship game.

  For those who were watching, though, the improvement in standards was palpable. By the 1972 Munich Olympics it had helped to rescue the US from a decade-long qualification slump. Four years earlier, the Americans had been eliminated over two legs after losing in Chicago to Bermuda, a nation whose entire population could comfortably fit inside Soldier Field. To reach the 1972 finals the US had to play no fewer than 11 times in six countries (and three American states) - and needed to beat El Salvador on penalties in a play-off for the final qualifying round.

  The best-known member of the team was its goalkeeper, a brash, long-haired Harvard graduate named Shep Messing, destined to become one of the first `personalities' in the American game. Messing was a sportswriter's dream. Outspoken and articulate, he claimed to have eaten glass and taken his pet boa constrictor to lectures, and his insolence even led him to demand that the university dismiss its ageing head coach, Bruce Munro, who had run the team since the late 1940s. Messing's Olympic performances were no less outlandish. In the crucial tie with El Salvador he flew into a mock rage during the penalty shoot-out, tearing off his shirt and screaming profanities before slapping his bewildered opponent on the back and urging him not to miss. 'The guy was so confused he made the worst penalty kick I have ever seen,' he recalled.

  The rest of the team may not have been quite as flamboyant, but most were also American-born collegiates, and many ended up in the NASL. In Germany, though, they were outclassed. They failed even to register a goal in their three matches and went down 7-0 in front of more than 65,000 in Munich's Olympiastadion to a West Germany team that included Uli Hoeness, Manfred Kaltz and Ottmar Hitzfeld. American television, preoccupied with Mark Spitz, Olga Korbut and other gold medallists, barely acknowledged their existence, but fans - led by Soccer America - successfully petitioned ABC to broadcast a few highlights.

  In the spring of 1972 the NASL reinstated its college draft which, though not treated seriously by every club, at least demonstrated a desire to take advantage of whatever talent the universities might produce. Twelve of the 35 players selected that year did make league appearances. The Cosmos found room on their roster for Stan Startzell, a US-born striker from the University of Pennsylvania. The following year they drafted a goalkeeper from Cornell University named Bruce Arena, but did not sign him. Arena, probably never dreaming of the contribution he would make to American soccer in decades to come, joined a professional lacrosse league instead. Appropriate noises were made in the league's offices. Woosnam talked of a 'tremendous pool of skilful young Americans' and even approved a rule forcing each team to include two North American citizens on its roster, though there was no requirement for them to play.

  In truth, native participation was less important to the league than professional credibility. With gates gently rising and costs reined in, four clubs - Atlanta, Toronto, Rochester and St Louis - claimed to be nearing profitability. Yet the NASL had no presence on the west coast, nor in midwestern cities the size of Chicago and Detroit. If television was ever going to offer the kind of riches it bestowed on the NFL - a prize the commissioner eagerly sought - it needed to expand. During the 1972 season, Woosnam announced that his owners were seeking to double their membership to 16 by 1975 and 'ultimately to 32 clubs capable of participating in tournaments on a worldwide basis'. No one could accuse him of not thinking big.

  There was only one new arrival in 1973, but it was a spectacular one: the Philadelphia Atoms, an entity which had arisen from a chance meeting between Lamar Hunt and a construction tycoon named Tom McCloskey. Itching to get his hands on an NFL franchise, McCloskey was said to have bought into the NASL only after Hunt plied him with Super Bowl tickets. The Atoms stormed to the league championship in their first year with a team liberally sprinkled with local players and coached by a Pennsylvanian. It seemed to offer proof of the giant strides the American game had taken in a few short years. Yet the club would soon meet a sad end, the first of the NASL's riches-to-rags stories.

  For whatever reason - naivety, patriotism, expediency or a combination of the three - McCloskey had hired Al Miller, the coach of tiny Hartwick College in upstate New York, to manage his team. Miller was a hero at Hartwick, whose campus was as soccer-mad as any in the country. Sceptical of the NASL at first, he eventually surrendered to the allure of becoming its first American-born coach. 'Soccer needs a final touch,' he claimed. 'It has everything but a professional image. I plan to change all that.'

  His strategy was to blend American and foreign players in much the same way the St Louis Stars had been doing with limited success. The imports came largely on loan from Britain, including the future Liverpool manager Roy Evans and striker Jim Fryatt, who had played for seven clubs and held the Football League record for the fastest goal (four seconds, for Bradford Park Avenue). The combination proved surprisingly fruitful. Combined with the Atoms' fan-friendly approach - which, among other things, permitted supporters to hold pre-match picnics on the artificial playing surface and mingle with the players - it captured the imagination of a city starved of sporting success. The Atoms lost only two of their 19 league matches, with their stingy defence, the 'nogoal patrol', conceding just 15 goals. More significantly, their average attendance of 11,000 was easily the largest the NASL had ever seen.

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p; Through to the championship final, both the Atoms and their opponents, the Dallas Tornado, discovered a drawback to taking players on loan - namely, the start of the English season. Dallas strikers Ritchie Reynolds and Nick Jennings and defender John Collins all went back to Portsmouth, while Philadelphia lost Fryatt and 5ft 5in Scotsman Andy Provan to Southport of the Fourth Division. The Atoms were left with six Americans in their starting line-up and played defender Bill Straub, only recently acquired from Montreal, as a striker. Straub scored the clinching goal in a 2-0 victory, his first match for the club. Philadelphia was the NASL's first real success story, one which attracted an unusual level of media interest. Sports Illustrated featured the championship match on its cover - the first time soccer had received such attention - and the honour fell not to Pele or some other international icon, but to Bob Rigby, the Atoms' 22-year-old Pennsylvania-born goalkeeper.

  In Dallas, the largely British Tornado had surprisingly thrown up an American hero of its own. Hardly anyone in gridiron-crazy Texas wasn't familiar with the name Kyle Rote, who a generation earlier had starred at Southern Methodist University in Dallas before helping the New York Giants to NFL success. Now his namesake son, who had begun his college career in the same sport before securing a soccer scholarship from Tennessee's University of the South, became an overnight NASL sensation. Drafted by Dallas in 1972, Rote junior spent the whole of his first season on the bench, but the following year he claimed the NASL's scoring title by virtue of the ten assists' which supplemented his ten goals. (Like other sports in the US, soccer counted both towards its 'scoring' titles, so that the leading goalscorer was not always the top 'scorer'.) Rote's modest, humble demeanour and family pedigree quickly established him as a role model, even if his talent was unexceptional and his status as Rookie of the Year had been achieved largely through graft and an utter lack of pretension. Dallas, it seemed, had found an acceptable face of American soccer - and a winning team. The Tornado's attendance climbed to 7,500 a game.