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

by David Wangerin

  The attendance success story of the season was the San Jose Earthquakes, a newcomer to the league. Hoping to place a team in San Francisco, the NASL was persuaded to settle for a smaller market 50 miles south by a Serbian-born entrepreneur named Milan Mandaric, who had made a small fortune manufacturing computer parts (and who decades later would turn his attention to English football, becoming chairman of Portsmouth in 1999). Mandaric's insistence on playing in San Jose - virgin territory for a professional sports team - proved farsighted. The Earthquakes at one stage attracted seven straight capacity crowds, and their record home average of 16,500 was all the more remarkable for coming in a tiny 18,000-seat stadium. The Quakes also laid claim to the league's top scorer, Paul Child, an Aston Villa reserve who had been loaned to Atlanta in 1972 without ever appearing in the Football League.

  Interest was nearly as promising in Seattle. Named after the Puget Sound on whose shores the city was founded (3,000 other entries had been submitted in a name-the-team contest), the Sounders were created with an eye cast intently on the domed stadium being built for the city's forthcoming NFL franchise. Fielding an almost entirely English team, they soon drew crowds of more than 12,000. Similar stirrings were apparent just over the border with Vancouver's new franchise, the Whitecaps.

  After fruitless years of yearning for a breakthrough in the biggest cities, the NASL had stumbled on unexpectedly fertile ground in smaller markets, particularly in the north-west. Big-time Los Angeles, with a thriving ethnic league, took little interest in the expansion Aztecs, who chose a small local college for their home and limped along on gates of 5,000 - even though they finished ahead of the Earthquakes, Sounders and Whitecaps and won the Western Division. Largely Hispanic (though top scorer Doug McMillan had migrated from Scotland), the club won its opening play-off match with Boston to reach the championship game in their first year. Their opponents, the Miami Toros, were no more popular, often luring fewer than 4,000 to their enormous gridiron home. There were a less embarrassing 15,500 in the Orange Bowl for the final, played in a searing heat which laid low the referee, among others. Though the league persuaded CBS to broadcast the match, armchair fans were few. Yet the Toros and Aztecs did their best to produce an exciting contest with an American twist: the visitors produced a dramatic late equaliser and claimed the title on penalties.

  For supporters of home-grown talent, the affair was altogether less exciting, as not a single American-born player appeared in the match. That season, only St Louis, Philadelphia and Vancouver offered native players much of an opportunity, and all three fared poorly. Most managers took an openly sceptical or even disdainful view of the domestic pool. Ron Newman may have broken in Kyle Rote junior at Dallas, but he showed little appetite for further experiments, even suggesting St Louis's dismal season was partly attributable to the fact that manager John Sewell - a Londoner - had played too many Americans. So wide had the schism become that when the Stars met the Tornado later in the season, St Louis players presented their opponents with miniature US flags during prematch introductions.

  Regardless of where the players came from, many discerning fans took little interest in the league. Nowhere was this more apparent than in New York, where the Cosmos continued to founder. Deeming Hofstra Stadium `too far away from the ethnic fan', officials sank $75,000 into improving Downing Stadium, but crowds became worse than ever, trailing even those of the unlamented Generals. Asked by the New York Times to rationalise the club's predicament, one ethnic league official replied: `The number one reason is the field conditions. The number two reason is that people are too ethnic-minded. And the number three reason is the calibre of play.' Three years on from their championshipwinning season, New York was anything but a flagship club. The city may have been home to a multitude of soccer fans, but only around 3,500 of them - the worst average in the league - turned up for the NASL. That was all about to change.

  As early as 1971, the NASL had been courting the one man they knew would send fans streaming through the turnstiles. Pele's response had always been the same, never saying yes without actually saying no. By the autumn of 1974 he had left Santos and, he insisted, played his last competitive match. Woosnam and Toye thought otherwise and, more significantly, Warner Communications were prepared to bankroll sport's most recognised figure. By the end of the year they had drafted a package they believed would convince him to lace up his boots again.

  As the 1975 season began, the Cosmos were also attempting to convince George Best to restart his tumultuous career. The value of Best to the league was manifold: his skills were obvious and easily appreciable, and his lifestyle was capable of writing headlines for even the most socceraverse newspaper. Yet his name scarcely sold tickets the way Pele's did. On tours with Manchester United, the former European Footballer of the Year roamed American streets in anonymity. Introduced at a press conference in which Woosnam unveiled what would become a lasting symbol of the league - a star-spangled soccer ball - Best appeared to have capitulated, but he ended up not signing. Another European Footballer of the Year did begin the season in an NASL jersey: Eusebio, who found himself with the Boston Minutemen after a deal intended for him to join the ASL fell through.

  In June the four-year, 75,000-mile expedition Toye claimed to have made in an effort to land Pele, with stops in Bermuda, Sao Paulo, Munich and Rome, finally reached a fruitful end. For a package approaching $7 million, the richest deal in American sports, Edson Arantes do Nascimento was coming out of retirement. A string of press releases, personal appearances, government statements and even the intervention of Henry Kissinger were credited with minimising the backlash in Brazil, as was Pele's diplomatic tact. 'I think my countrymen will be proud of me helping soccer in the biggest country in the world,' he declared. 'My contract is not to just play for the Cosmos, it is to promote soccer in America.' It wasn't just Brazil which had to be placated. In borrowing a national treasure, the Cosmos had summarily destroyed the NASL's salary cap. Now they proposed that the league renegotiate the allocation of away gate receipts to help finance their acquisition. The rival owners, with images of packed stadiums no doubt dancing in their heads, consented. Here, they sensed, was the turning point in their fortunes. Pele would lead fans to the turnstiles; the game would do the rest.

  Though he appeared only in a white leisure suit, the league's new icon was greeted by more than 20,000 on the Cosmos' visit to Philadelphia. His first match, a hastily arranged friendly against Lamar Hunt's Tornado (chosen because they weren't on New York's list of league fixtures that season) drew 21,000 to Randall's Island, four times as many as had seen the club's previous home game. CBS, having snapped up worldwide broadcast rights for a mere $50,000, relayed the game to the rest of the country, and 11 others. They painted green the bare patches of the frail Downing Stadium pitch and, in the event that any sports fan might have spent the summer under a boulder, relentlessly promoted their telecast as 'The Return of Pele'.

  Five million Americans tuned in - and every one of them missed his debut goal as the network cut away for a commercial break. What CBS lacked in timing, though, it more than made up for in hyperbole, according to the New York Times:

  The announcers were unyielding in their hero worship. If Pele merely touched the ball, he touched it as no other mortal could. If he looked around the field casually, the audience was told 'that's that great peripheral vision ... proved by medical tests'. If, for a moment, the superstar was caught doing something that appeared less than graceful or even downright clumsy, an announcer would quickly start reciting his records ('has scored eight goals in a single game').

  It was a taste of what was to come as American soccer and Pele became inextricably linked. Headlines such as Pele Here Saturday or Cosmos Win, Pete Scores, or even Local Team Has Pele of Its Own emerged with monotonous regularity. Suddenly pro soccer was awash with media coverage, and all because of one man: Pele in the White House, juggling a ball for President Ford; Pele on the Tonight Show, practising his halting English for
Johnny Carson's amusement; Pele on the cover of Sports Illustrated; Pele striking an exultant pose on the features pages of newspapers that had never printed a soccer photograph before.

  His performances on the pitch were almost a side-show to his mere presence in the country. The Cosmos remained a mediocre team, but they were now a staggeringly popular one. Toronto, whose previous two home matches had attracted a total of 5,200, found 22,000 wanting to see Pele on his league debut. In Washington two weeks later, 35,520 - the largest crowd in NASL history - saw New York overwhelm the Diplomats 9-2, Pele scoring twice. Interest turned to frenzy in Boston, where an unruly if adoring crowd invaded the pitch after Pele had apparently scored, mobbing him to such an extent that he was taken offwith a minor injury. The desperate Boston owners had sold close to 20,000 tickets for a stadium that held 12,500, and security arrangements were so poor that Pele's own minders had to rush on to the field to protect him. While all of this might suggest the appeal of the NASL was concentrated in one player, Pele actually put only a small bump in overall attendances. On the west coast, a new franchise in Oregon was pulling in crowds similar to those in San Jose, Seattle and Vancouver. By the end of the season more than 20,000 were following the Portland Timbers as they swept to the Western Division title with the best record in the league.

  On the basis of having more teams than ice hockey's NHL or basketball's NBA or ABA, the NASL now boasted of being 'the third largest pro sports league in America'. It had expanded into Chicago; San Antonio, Texas; Hartford, Connecticut; and Tampa, Florida. Seven of the nation's ten biggest metropolitan areas now played host to professional teams. There was no doubt, Woosnam insisted, that the league was here to stay. Yet none of the clubs was making money, and many continued to skate on thin ice. There was only so much Pele could do to prop up the likes of the Baltimore Comets, who opened their season before just 4,000 at a local college and saw those numbers drop to about 1,000 by midseason. Hartford had fought off competition from an ASL entry called the Connecticut Yankees for soccer rights to their stadium, but soon found only a few thousand willing to enter it. In Toronto, the Metros were rescued from oblivion by the local Croatia club, but with strings attached - though the NASL had strict rules against ethnic nicknames, they made an unwieldy exception for the Toronto Metros-Croatia.

  Exceptions, of course, were nothing new to a league so willing to tinker with rules. For 1975, the NASL decided to include a period of suddendeath extra time ahead of the penalty kick tie-breaker, a development which predated FIFA's use of the 'golden goal' by a couple of decades. The arrival of five more clubs also forced an overhaul of the championship play-offs. Eight teams now qualified for post-season play, a format likely to bewilder fans in other countries but which had now become common domestic practice. And, in the most overt indication yet of its fixation with the NFL, the league relabelled its championship game the Soccer Bowl.

  However much sentiment might have demanded it, not even the obliging play-off format could accommodate Pele and his pedestrian team. The winners of the inaugural Soccer Bowl were yet another firstyear entity, the Tampa Bay Rowdies. Managed by the South Africanborn Eddie Firmani, whose playing experience had been drawn from Italy and England, the Rowdies lost just six of their 22 league matches with a collection of largely British and South African youngsters. Here, too, the novelty of the sport, combined with a successful team, produced appreciable crowds. But the Rowdies were also armed to the teeth with marketing weaponry, enough to attract the attention of their peers outside soccer. They had an odd nickname - apparently chosen by someone blissfully unaware of the game's international reputation for fan violence - but emblazoned it proudly across the front of their strip, which itself was a puzzling combination of plain white shirts and shorts with green-and-yellow-striped sleeves and socks.

  The Rowdies installed a Wurlitzer organ in their stadium and commissioned a team song to accompany their ubiquitous slogan, 'Soccer is a kick in the grass'. Home turf was referred to as Rowdiesland; the nubile cheerleading corps were Wowdies; fans, however inappropriately to British ears, were Fannies. The gimmickry attracted plenty of attention, but not all of America was impressed, nor was the club simply grafting accepted American sports practice on to soccer. One of the top baseball teams of the period, the Cincinnati Reds, prided themselves on offering little more than the game to ticket-holders.

  A 3-0 win over Miami in front of nearly 23,000 put the Rowdies in the Soccer Bowl. There they met Portland, a team even newer than they were - less than two months before the start of the season, the Timbers hadn't signed a player or a manager. Vic Crowe, whose NASL experience included three years alongside Woosnam in Atlanta, but who more recently had been dismissed as manager of Second Division Aston Villa, filled the coaching spot, and hastily brought in a fleet of British pros, some of whom went on to greater success in their native country. One was Peter Withe, scorer of 16 of the club's 43 goals, whom Timbers fans fleetingly referred to as the `Wizard of Nod' for his aerial prowess. By the time of Portland's final home game, 33,500 were turning up at Civic Stadium and supporters had taken to proclaiming themselves residents of `Soccer City, USA', a strange boast given that their team was entirely imported. Not a single minute of play had been granted to an Americanborn player.

  At Soccer Bowl 75 in San Jose - the first time the league had dared to choose a neutral venue for its championship game - Tampa claimed a 2-0 victory over the Timbers with goals from Clyde Best and Haitian defender Arsene Auguste. Yet it was their defence, led by the Crystal Palace centre-half Stewart jump, that drew most of the praise. It didn't help Portland that the Earthquakes' home pitch was considerably narrower than the all-British Timbers were used to, but with CBS again televising the match, the crowd of 17,000 that nearly filled tiny Spartan Stadium projected a far more attractive image than the vast expanses of empty seats at the two previous championship games.

  For all the promising signs, the NASL was still fragile, as the Philadelphia Atoms were about to make painfully clear. Singularly unable to regain their championship form of 1973, the Atoms were haemorrhaging fans and by the end of 1975 had completely lost their way. Tom McCloskey's construction empire had crumbled and he put the club up for sale, while Al Miller left for Dallas. Even the Atoms' principal accomplishment of 1975 proved bittersweet. Their top goalscorer, Chris Bahr, was named the league's Rookie of the Year, an award with which he strangely chose to end his pro soccer career. The son of 1950 World Cup half-back Walter, Bahr was a student at Penn State University and placekicked for its powerful gridiron team. His proficiency hadn't escaped the notice of NFL clubs, who of course could pay him more in a week than the NASL could in a year. 'I'd like to be able to play soccer also,' Bahr pleaded to his wealthy suitors, but his foot was too valuable to be risked. Upon signing for the Cincinnati Bengals that spring, Bahr left the NASL and spent the next 14 seasons in the NFL.

  His predicament was hardly unique. Many of the nation's top college soccer players found themselves courted by the NFL as much as the NASL thanks to gridiron's recent discovery that soccer-style kickers - `sidewinders' - were far more effective than their toe-jamming forerunners. Oddly enough, Bahr's predecessor at Cincinnati was a German goalkeeper named Horst Muhlmann who had played in the Bundesliga for Schalke and had originally come to the US to play soccer (he joined the Kansas City Spurs in 1968). The loss of Bahr to the NFL cast an even longer shadow over the Atoms. Deadlines came and went for a new owner, then at the 11th hour a Mexican consortium stepped in and predictably created an almost entirely new team. But los atomos were a failure on the pitch and at the gate, ending the season with six straight defeats and an almost deserted stadium. They were finished.

  It was a media relations disaster: the first soccer team to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated extinct after just four seasons. But awkward questions about why the surge of interest at schools and colleges was not producing a more tangible fan base were buried under an avalanche of Pele-fuelled optimism. The NASL wa
s not prone to looking back. It was selling more tickets than ever, and it had no shortage of wealthy patrons willing to stake a claim in the game's future. Not many tears, then, were shed in Colorado over the failure of the Denver Dynamos - it was merely a case of new owners stepping in and moving the franchise to Minnesota. Hampered by similar apathy, Baltimore migrated 3,000 miles west and became, of all things, the San Diego Jaws, after the recent Hollywood blockbuster. Any member of the new team was to suffer the ignominy of being referred to as a law.

  Nicknames were not the NASL's long suit. Another film, The Sting, was the inspiration for the Chicago franchise, whose logo featured an angry, boater-wearing bee buzzing beneath a soccer ball. More than one careless newspaper referred to them as the Stings; another, perhaps more mischievously, as the Stink. Hartford were christened the Bicentennials, a clumsy patriotic reference to the nation's 200th birthday that journalists preferred to shorten to Bi's (though it did not carry quite the sexual connotation it would today). Headline writers also enjoyed reforming the Washington Diplomats into the Dips and Toronto's Metros-Croatia into the M-Cs. And for the few who still had no idea what the sport involved, the new Minnesota team created the most inane name of all: the Kicks.

  The one franchise which did not dare move, of course, was the Cosmos, yet their underachievement remained the most worrying. Warner Communications' investment in Pele had put Clive Toye under pressure to produce a winning team, but Gordon Bradley's polyglot squad was not the answer. It was also clear that unassuming Downing Stadium was hardly the venue to convince a jaded New York media that big-time soccer had arrived, particularly when Yankee Stadium had just been given a $48 million refurbishment for its famous baseball tenant. At considerable expense - roughly more for a single game than an entire season on Randall's Island - the Cosmos moved back into the Bronx's sporting cathedral. They also began refashioning their team from the top down, shepherding Bradley into an administrative role and filling the vacancy with Teessider Ken Furphy, recently dismissed as manager of Sheffield United.