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

by David Wangerin

  Yet most of Rote's fame stemmed not so much from his soccer performances as the more conspicuous feats he undertook for the benefit of television's Superstars competition. Three times in four years - to the astonishment of the audience - he finished as the overall champion. For the first time, mainstream America was able to name an American-born soccer player, even if most had never seen him at work. Superstar though he may have been, Rote's salary was strictly minor league: he made $1,500 with the Tornado in 1973. Bob Rigby supplemented his Atoms earnings by working as a supply teacher. Randy Horton commuted from Bermuda, where he worked at a private school. Others more conventionally spent the close season coaching or playing for other teams. And, of course, many of the league's most capable players earned the bulk of their income from the British clubs who had loaned them for the summer.

  Playing in major-league facilities, though, made the NASL look for all the world like the real thing. In 1974 Joe Robbie, owner of the NFL's Miami Dolphins, bought the ailing Gatos and moved them into the 80,000-seat Orange Bowl as the Toros. St Louis, Philadelphia and Dallas also occupied NFL facilities, leaving the Cosmos in the league's smallest ground. Frustrated in their bid to move to the Singer Bowl, a facility built for the 1964 World's Fair (and later revived for tennis as the home of the US Open), they headed for Randall's Island.

  Meanwhile, league officials kept their eyes fixed on what they saw as their salvation: network television. The obsession was understandable. The success of professional gridiron, in which Dallas's Hunt and Miami's Robbie emphatically shared, was plainer than ever, and it had been fuelled almost entirely by staggering amounts of TV money. The experiment of Monday Night Football, launched in 1970, proved a phenomenal success, and the marketing savvy of league commissioner Pete Rozelle - the interests of televisual paymasters never far from his mind - was widely celebrated. Woosnam's impatience to measure up to this new sporting colossus was obvious. If we can do the job properly, we can have greater revenue than football, with less expenses,' he claimed, boasting that in ten years his league would have the most valuable franchises in sport. But in 1974 the income NASL clubs derived from television was about what NFL teams had earned two decades earlier: virtually nothing. Most clubs received some local coverage, but the quantity varied considerably. A Miami channel devoted half an hour to the Toros every Monday night, while the Cosmos found some of their matches being broadcast two or three days after they had occurred. 'Doing the job properly' meant, in part, convincing the networks of what they were missing. But that wasn't easy for a league with just nine teams, none further west than Dallas.

  As with ice hockey a decade earlier, expansion was the key to the NASL's case, and a strategy which brought in lots of money in its own right. Whereas $10,000 once secured a franchise, by 1974 prospective owners were being asked to part with $250,000 - on top of about $450,000 a season in operating costs. Few seemed deterred by the fact that none of the clubs was making money; it was surely only a matter of time before the millions of youngsters playing soccer would start paying to watch it. But television continued to give the game a wide berth. American fans wanting to watch the 1974 World Cup once again needed to seek out a cinema or sporting arena in a big city and stump up for closed-circuit broadcasts. Of course, the fact that the US had again failed to qualify did little to whet the networks' appetite. The campaign started in a rainstorm in Newfoundland, with a 3-2 defeat to Canada leaving the US bid in a familiar hole. The USSFA again meddled in squad selection and reneged on promises to team boss Bob Kehoe, the one-time manager of the St Louis Stars. Kehoe was asked to prepare for qualification by pitting his team against an aggregation from New York's German-American League (they lost). The squad he took to Canada looked nothing like the one which had assembled at a preparatory training camp. But the USSFA was preoccupied with the Olympic team's debut in Munich, which took place just a week later - and which for years afterwards it naively assumed had been a full international.

  The return fixture with the Canadians, on the same day the Olympians lost 3-0 to Malaysia, was staged in Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, whose tiny pitch the Salvadoran referee noted was narrower than FIFA's required minimum. The tie went ahead only because neither team objected, but the 2-2 draw in front of 3,273 (more than 48,000 empty seats) meant American hopes of qualification dimmed even before a ball was kicked against Mexico. A familiar dose of administrative incompetence left full-back Werner Roth, whom the Cosmos had released for the match, unable to play, since the USSFA had failed to register him for the game. Two meaningless defeats against Mexico followed, the second of which portrayed an American team in free-fall. With some players injured and others unable to go to Los Angeles, no one knew who, or even how many, would play. In the event 'Barney' Djordjevic, a GermanAmerican League winger who had been seen loitering in the stadium before kick-off, was drafted in for his first and only international call-up. That this assemblage somehow took an early lead and ended up losing only 2-1 suggests the Mexicans were not entirely concentrating.

  The pathos continued into the following year, when the USSFA bizarrely decided to stage a European tour after its World Cup horse had bolted. Suddenly the national team was provided with more competition than in any other year of its history: 18 matches in eight countries. Team selection was made through a revolving door - 61 men, most of them foreign-born, played at least once, many of them picked up and discarded more according to occasion than form. The US played seven times in less than three weeks and lost their first six matches by a combined score of 28-2, including a 4-0 defeat against Poland and a 7-0 loss to Lazio.

  There was still no full-time manager. Max Wosniak, who had carved out a reputation in the Greater Los Angeles League after the demise of the LA Toros in 1967, was the temporary choice, but he was so unfamiliar with most of the players he had to ask them what positions they played. When the USSFA staged a further series of matches later in the year, Gene Chyzowych, a high school coach who had spent several years in the ASL, was left to reassemble the team. But with many NASL clubs refusing to co-operate, Chyzowych was left trawling lesser leagues in a frantic search for material. The Poles arrived in Chicago for the first of three matches and faced a team different in every position except goalkeeper from the one they had trounced five months earlier in Poznan.

  Beaten 1-0 in Chicago, the US met Poland again in San Francisco a week later, with half the team recruited locally. They lost 4-0, then travelled more than 2,500 miles - or at least some of them did - for a third match in New Britain, Connecticut, two days later. With the NASL season nearly over, more players were now available, allowing Chyzowych to make nine changes to his team. One can only wonder what the Poles made of it all. Matters were scarcely helped by the men in the blazers. At half-time of the third game the manager and his team were ordered by a USSFA official to come out of the dressing room to pose for a photo with the association president. When Chyzowych refused, pointing out that his team held a 1-0 lead and was preparing for the second half, he was paged over the tannoy and reprimanded.

  The US held on to their lead - on a pitch whose unlawful narrowness did not escape censure from the visitors - to claim what might have been the most credible result the country had produced since Belo Horizonte, particularly as the Poles proved such a formidable force in the World Cup the following summer. Chyzowych exclaimed that it was ,one of the happiest days of my life', but only about 8,000 were there to share in it, and most were cheering for the visitors. The nation's press continued its diet of late-season baseball and pre-season football without lifting an eyebrow.

  It proved to be one of only three US victories that year and the goal - a rasping strike from St Louisan Al Trost - one of only eight the team scored. The year ended with yet another loss to Mexico and two emphatic defeats in Israel. Chyzowych's pleas to employ a full-time manager were ignored; the USSFA borrowed the Cosmos' Gordon Bradley to oversee the final few games of the year. By this time, players were appearing in American colours who were not
entitled to do so. Canada had lost to a team containing two of them and complained to FIFA.

  Far from taking the game forward, the USSFA seemed to be holding it back. Without a national manager or any idea of what its best team looked like, reaching the World Cup was a flight of fancy. The association might have taken up residency on Fifth Avenue and distanced itself from the impecunious days of Joe Barriskill, but it still referred to itself as the United States Soccer Football Association, the only people in the country who still understood football to be played with a round ball.

  Two events in the summer of 1974 pointed toward a more enlightened future. The association changed its name to the United States Soccer Federation - perhaps a half a century too late - and at last appointed a permanent national team manager. The choice seemed astute enough: the international coaching guru Dettmar Cramer, who only weeks earlier had helped Helmut Schon to win the World Cup for West Germany. Cramer had performed a similar role in 1966, and in between had toured the world as FIFA's chief coach. It was said he could conduct training sessions in six different languages. Perhaps more relevant for the US was his achievement in leading Japan to the Olympic bronze medal in 1968.

  Having helped the US Olympic squad in the run-up to the 1972 Games, and serving as an adviser on other occasions, Cramer was enormously respected (Phil Woosnam described him as 'undoubtedly the best qualified man in the world for this position'). But he was also forlorn. Widely expected to succeed Schon after the 1974 World Cup, he was passed over when Schon was persuaded to extend his contract. Hertha Berlin attempted to lure Cramer into the Bundesliga, but without success. The USSF's offer - reportedly $220,000 over four years - was timely and tempting, effectively handing him control of the American game. Accustomed to the arcane politics of the USSF, Cramer's observations on other aspects of American soccer were equally perceptive. Coaching and refereeing, he observed, had not kept up with the boom in participation and greater emphasis needed to be placed on the national youth teams. Few could argue with him - or with the selection of Al Miller, the NASL's first American-born coach, as an assistant.

  The regime began brightly with two matches against Mexico. A gate of 22,164 in Dallas was more than had ever seen the US on its own soil. Playing on the same Texas plastic where the Atoms had clinched the NASL title the season before, the American team - which, naturally, bore little resemblance to the one that had beaten Poland - lost 1-0, having been defeated 3-1 in Monterrey three days earlier. It was at least a team flag-wavers could identify with: Rigby, Rote and Trost all got to play, as did a number of other American-born, college-bred youngsters. More importantly, it was something like a permanent selection, available to the manager whenever required and - Cramer having put his foot down - free from the whims and prejudices of USSF officials. It all seemed a credible leap forward, a time of palpable optimism. But it did not survive beyond the end of the year.

  The root of the trouble was the form of the Bundesliga's leading team. Bayern Munich had staggered into the winter break near the bottom of the league, with faith in manager Udo Lattek having all but evaporated. Twelve years earlier, Cramer had befriended Franz Beckenbauer when it was revealed the latter had fathered a child out of wedlock and helped to save him from being thrown off the national youth team. Now Beckenbauer was making overtures towards the new US boss about taking over at Bayern. For all the feathers in Cramer's cap, he had never held the reins of a Bundesliga club, let alone the reigning national and European champions.

  Six months into his American assignment, he jumped ship. Taking over from Lattek, Cramer steered Bayern to mid-table safety and another European Cup triumph, against Leeds United. An open-mouthed USSF threatened to sue him for $10 million for breach of contract, only to realise they had never managed to put his signature to one. Patrick Keohane soberly reflected in Soccer America:

  Cramer was unlike any other foreign coach. He had been in the United States for five years previously. He had put together a highly successful course of instruction for coaches based on years of experience that only he had. He seemed to be highly motivated to acquire the job as America's national coach. He had a well acclaimed international reputation as one of the most superior minds in soccer, one of only a handful of people so widely respected. More than that, he had studied intensively the problems of American athletics and the psychology and sociology of the American player. The latter is really the rub. Dettmar Cramer knew the sailing wasn't about to be smooth. He was aware of our administrative and organizational problems. The very reason he never signed a contract with the USSF was an apprehension about the organization.

  Within eight months of Cramer's departure, the Olympic team lost 8-0 to Mexico and failed to qualify for the Montreal Games, while the full national team lost 7-0 to Poland and 10-0 to Italy on a spring trip. Bayern even cancelled a midwinter American tour, one presumably arranged to ease their conscience.

  It took two years for the USSF to appoint a full-time replacement. Gordon Jago, back in England with Millwall, turned the job down, so the national team was left in the hands of interim coaches, with all the familiar impediments: hastily assembled squads, poor preparation and few objectives apart from the rather lofty ones of qualifying for major tournaments. Little of this ever appeared in the national press. The US team's profile was so low as to be almost non-existent - even Cramer's shock departure scarcely warranted a mention in the New York Times. Consequently, not every budding soccer fan who had cheered Kyle Rote to his Superstars victories was aware that the Tornado striker also played for his country, or even that the country had its own team.

  The more immediate future of the game seemed to rest with the NASL and, to a lesser extent, the ASL, which by 1972 had grown to 14 clubs and expanded into the midwest for the first time. In 1974 the last of its ethnically named clubs, the Philadelphia Ukrainians, disappeared, leaving membership to the likes of the Boston Astros and Cleveland Cobras. In the hope of drawing attention to itself, the ASL had hired an ex-basketball star, Bob Cousy, as its commissioner. 'I am what you call the "name" commissioner,' Cousy admitted. 'When we reach the point where we have a good product, I will be the man to pick up the phone and call [ABC-TV sports supremo] Roone Arledge and say, "Hey Rooney-baby, I've got something for you," and I think he will listen.' Yet as Cousy's league dreamed of network exposure, its teams continued to play in minor league parks before a sprinkling of fans.

  To most of the country, professional soccer meant the NASL, and in 1974 its aggressive expansion policy produced a batch of new teams and a coast-to-coast presence for the first time since the 1968 collapse. Suddenly talk of reaching 32 clubs - more than any of the other major leagues - seemed credible. Soccer arrived in Denver, San Jose and Seattle, and returned to Baltimore, Boston, Los Angeles, Vancouver and Washington DC. Almost at a stroke, the league had grown to look more like its basketball, football and ice hockey counterparts, with 15 clubs split into four regionalised divisions. Six would qualify for the championship play-offs, supposedly limiting - in increasingly popular fashion - the number of meaningless end-of-season matches. 'We are gaining stability and nationwide respect,' Woosnam claimed as he moved his league into plush new offices on Sixth Avenue.

  Respect, though, was not forthcoming from the millions of Americans put off by the game's relative lack of scoring. Even Tom McCloskey confessed he found an indoor exhibition the Atoms had staged 'much more exciting' because of the frequency of'goal kicks' (attempts on goal). Another popular notion, exacerbated by the demands of television, was that every sporting contest needed a winner and a loser. Draws, the catchphrase claimed, were 'like kissing your sister'. Thus, a sport ending not only with a level score but without any score at all was an abomination. Baseball and basketball games always produced a winner, playing on for as long as it took to get one. Even professional football, whose last 0-0 match took place in 1943, had succumbed to the obsession with winners and losers - in 1974 the NFL instigated a period of 'sudden death' to reduce the number of dra
ws.

  NASL owners responded in kind that same year. Having already persuaded FIFA to allow them to paint 35-yard lines across their pitches and amend the offside rule accordingly -which they continued to perceive as a liberating innovation - they now announced that in their brand of soccer any match ending in a draw would be settled by penalties. UEFA had been using spot-kicks to settle drawn ties in European club competitions since 1970, but it scarcely needed to contemplate such a thing for league fixtures. America, though, had never cultivated the soccer mindset which could consider an away draw as a form of victory - a dilemma which was compounded by the fact that NASL coaches, most of them European, had not fully embraced the idea of attacking soccer. Even the American-managed Atoms' championship had been predicated on the 'no-goal patrol'; its attack produced barely a goal and a half per game.

  The new scheme forced the league to modify its points system. The winner of a match decided on penalties now got three points instead of six. This gave rise to the somewhat surreal concept of a `tie-win', a victory achieved not in open play but on spot-kicks. It may also have raised the question in the minds of purists as to whether a game with a 35-yard line and no draws could still call itself soccer.

  Whether because of these innovations or in spite of them, the 1974 season seemed to justify the league's bold expansion and boundless optimism. Rote's winning performance in Superstars had given the Tornado an early publicity boost: nearly 23,000 turned up in Dallas for the opening day and watched their hero score the winner against St Louis. In Miami, more than 18,000 attended the Toros' first home game, while Philadelphia claimed 24,000 for the Atoms (though McCloskey privately admitted of his club's figures: 'We purposely blow 'em up to give the sport the impetus it needs. If it's 5,000 and we say 8,000 does that offend anybody?')