Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  However, defender Dunleavy – named in the league’s all-star team, along with Fryatt, Provan, David Sadler, Dallas defender John Best and goalkeeper Ken Cooper – was suspended for Southport’s game, which meant he stayed for the final. That infuriated Dallas coach Newman. ‘We thought that was illegal. We felt if he was banned on one day in one place he should not be able to play somewhere else. We went to Phil Woosnam about it but he didn’t want to get caught up in it.’

  Dallas also lost key players, forwards Richie Reynolds and Nick Jennings and full-back John Collins, who were due on the field for Portsmouth against Middlesbrough. With his Atoms strike force absent, Miller fielded six native-born Americans in his starting line-up, including defender Bill Straub, who had not played since being signed from Montreal during the season, as an emergency centre-forward.

  From the kick-off, it was the Atoms who adjusted better to their enforced changes. In front of a crowd of 18,824, they took control of the game and spent most of the first half in Dallas territory. Rigby had little to do in the Philadelphia goal, while Dunleavy smothered Rote. ‘Chris was a really steady player,’ says Evans. ‘He was very reliable and had the kind of experience the team was based upon. The whole team did themselves proud. It was about 100 degrees and that heat made it tough for an energetic team like us.’

  With 20 minutes played in the second half, Dallas defender John Best attempted to deal with a dangerous-looking Atoms attack and diverted the ball into his own net. Five minutes from the end, makeshift striker Straub scored with a header to clinch a 2–0 victory. Best recalls, ‘It turned out that it was going to be my last game because I had a bad hip and I wanted to get into coaching. Kenny Cooper used to tease me because he was at a game at Blackpool when I was playing for Liverpool reserves and he saw me score an own goal. After that game in Texas he told one of the reporters I was one of the most honest players he had ever met because after the Blackpool game I’d said that if ever I scored another own goal I would quit.’

  As the first team to win a championship in their inaugural year in any professional American league – and one that did it with several important American players – the Atoms had a bigger impact than any previous NASL champions. Goalkeeper Bob Rigby made the cover of Sports Illustrated, and the magazine’s headlines claimed, ‘Soccer Goes American’. The attention the sport was suddenly receiving saw Kyle Rote selected for the American version of ‘Superstars’. While British television audiences were watching hurdler David Hemery and judo’s Brian Jacks beating fellow sportsmen at everything from cycling to canoeing, US viewers would see Rote dominate the event in the US. Newman says, ‘He won it three times, until eventually they asked him not to come back. They wanted one of their big football or basketball stars to win it.’

  Rote’s career would never be the same, as the Tornado and the NASL used his new-found fame to promote the sport even more heavily. English midfielder David Chadwick, who joined him as a teammate the following season, recalls, ‘Kyle was outstanding. He knew he was not technically the best and he knew a lot of American kids were riding on his success, so he worked hard. After training he would stay out there for another hour and do more work.’

  While Rote’s career would fail to reach such heights again as he attempted to balance playing with promotional work, scoring only fifteen goals in the next three seasons, his success in 1973 helped put soccer in position for its next big step towards the west. The development of the American players, however, would not advance at the same pace as the league itself. Teams would continue to look abroad for their professionals and the local talent would never again play such a significant part in any season. The new wave of imports was on its way, with the British to the fore.

  6. Way Out West

  The west coast had not seen NASL football since 1968, but the relative stability achieved by the league left team owners in no doubt that the time was right to rectify that situation. ‘There was a lot of pressure to get out to the west,’ says commissioner Phil Woosnam. ‘The east-coast owners were saying that if we didn’t become fully national they were gone.’

  As usual it was left to Woosnam to come up with the teams. ‘Much of my time was spent on expansion and I would always be working on certain cities. My approach was usually to go in and talk to the media and ask if they knew anyone who had an interest in owning a soccer franchise. I would then follow up any leads. I had a pretty good presentation ready, and having Warner Communications in there as owners was a big help in persuading people. Lamar Hunt was a great closer of deals. When I had found potential owners and got things to the key moment, he would jump on a plane and the last push was down to him. It was a combination of his reputation in sports and his personality. Lamar was a very straightforward guy and people trusted him. We told clubs that their payback would come over a long period of time. We felt we were coming along nicely.’

  By the end of the 1973 season, the mood in the country had been lightened by the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam, attention in Washington DC turning instead to the riddle of the break-in at Democratic Party offices in the Watergate complex. Woosnam’s own political campaigning had produced new NASL ownership groups in Vancouver, Seattle and Los Angeles. All three franchises, however, insisted on a fourth western team in order to keep travel costs down. In the hope of getting a club into San Francisco, Woosnam spoke to Lica Corp.’s founder, Milan Mandaric.

  But, as Woosnam explains, ‘Milan said, “I won’t go in there. I can’t make it work there. The only way I can succeed is to go out into the suburbs, where the sport has a following. Let’s go to San Jose.” So I said, “OK, we’ll keep in touch, but I am going to try San Diego.” We went right to the deadline and could not get a deal done in San Diego, so we had no choice and we agreed to San Jose. And Milan was right. San Jose became a power.’

  Four other teams were added, in Denver, Boston, Washington and Baltimore, with the new teams each paying a franchise fee of $75,000. Even with the loss of Montreal and the Atlanta Apollos, as the former Chiefs had been known in 1973, it meant the NASL was now a 15-team league spanning the country.

  The league was split into four divisions, with each team playing 20 games. In the Eastern Division, the defending champions, Philadelphia Atoms, were kept waiting for Southport to give their approval for Andy Provan and Jim Fryatt to return to America, but Provan heralded his comeback by scoring four goals in the first half of a 5–1 win in the season opener against Washington before adding two in a 3–2 win against the Baltimore Comets. Fryatt weighed in with a goal in each of the first four games, all of which were won. But after winning five of their first six games, the Atoms managed only four more victories all season and finished out of the play-offs. One of those wins came via the NASL’s newly introduced penalty shoot-out system. Like baseball, gridiron and basketball, soccer was doing away with drawn games. From now on, matches ending level would go straight to penalties, although the winning team would receive only three points instead of six. The losing team would get nothing, apart from whatever bonus points they picked up for goals scored.

  Elsewhere in the Eastern Division, Baltimore, returning to Memorial Stadium, were coached by Doug Millward, who had been in charge of the Baltimore Bays back in the NPSL days of 1967. Up front was Frank Large, a 33-year-old centre-forward whose 15-year Football League career had taken him from Halifax to Chesterfield via ten transfers, including three spells at Northampton. His nine regular season goals for the Comets saw him finish as the team’s second-leading scorer behind Norwich City’s Peter Silvester, eight years his junior. Silvester’s 14-goal NASL tally would be the second-highest in the league, as was his individual points total of 32, and saw him voted the league’s Most Valuable Player. Baltimore’s British contingent also included fullback Geoff Butler and former England youth winger Terry Anderson, both of whom had played in Norwich’s League Cup final loss to Tottenham a year earlier.

  Despite winning ten games in regulation time, more than any other team
in their division, the Comets had to settle for second place behind the Miami Toros, led for the second season by Scotsman John Young, named as Coach of the Year. The Toros proved themselves the kings of the new penalty shoot-out, winning on all six occasions that their games finished level. Bringing up the rear in the division were the Washington Diplomats, whose coach was the former Manchester United and Baltimore Bays forward Dennis Viollet. Washington’s team featured Alan Spavin, who had played more than 400 games in midfield for Preston, and Clive Clark, the former Queens Park Rangers and long-time West Bromwich Albion outside left.

  The Boston Minutemen joined Toronto, New York and Rochester in the Northern Division. Coached by Austrian Hubert Vogelsinger, Boston’s Football League imports included former West Ham striker Ade Coker, a forward from Lagos in Nigeria. Coker had exploded into the First Division on the final day of October 1971, when, as a 17 year old, he scored a debut goal after only seven minutes at Crystal Palace. His broad smile lit up London’s television screens when the game was shown the next day and Coker, who had moved to England with his parents at the age of 11, was inevitably bracketed with West Ham’s powerful Bermudan centre-forward Clyde Best, who had been the First Division’s only regular black goalscorer since winning a place in the Hammers’ team during the 1969–70 season. Although both men would find their way to America, Coker’s Football League career never followed Best’s path of success and by the time he arrived in Boston he had played only nine league games for West Ham.

  The Boston locker room also featured veteran Hull goalkeeper Ian McKechnie and former Sheffield United defender Frank Barlow. The much-travelled former England centre-forward Tony Hateley even played in three games early in the season. Boston would finish on top of the division, with Coker weighing in with seven goals and John Coyne, who had come from Hartlepool, via a handful of games for Dallas, scoring eight.

  Dallas and the St Louis Stars were joined in the Northern Division by the Denver Dynamo, who named Englishman Ken Bracewell, a seven-year NASL veteran with Toronto and Atlanta, as player-coach. Former full-back Bracewell, born in Lancashire, had earned a reputation for his fierce shooting as he journeyed around Burnley, Tranmere, Lincoln, Margate, Bury, Rochdale and Canadian team Toronto Italia. To spearhead the attack, Denver signed the distinctively bald centre-forward Andy Lochhead, whose Football League career had produced close to 150 goals for Burnley, Leicester and Aston Villa. Indicative of Denver’s problems was that Lochhead found the net only once in 16 games and, with only five victories, the Dynamo trailed a long way behind division winners Dallas.

  In the all-new Western Division, the Los Angeles Aztecs stocked their team with players from Central and South America, while the San Jose Earthquakes’ dominant overseas group was from Yugoslavia, not surprisingly given their owner and Yugoslav coach, Momcilo ‘Gabbo’ Gavric. But also signing for the Earthquakes was 28-year-old English left-back Laurie Calloway, whose route from Shrewsbury Town to California demonstrated a somewhat haphazard method of recruiting players from Europe.

  Calloway, who had begun his career as a Wolves apprentice and played for four other teams before Shrewsbury, recalls, ‘I had written to Phil Woosnam in 1973 about the possibility of going over. A good friend of mine, Jim Fryatt, had done well at Philadelphia and told me what a great time he had had. I wrote the letter and never heard a thing. Some time later, I was contacted by Hubert Vogelsinger and he said he was coming over to see some players. He was going to be bringing players together for a trial before taking the 18 best back to the US. I told him he could see me play for Shrewsbury against Charlton the week he was going to be there.

  ‘It was a rainy night and, being left-back, I was sliding into tackles. He saw me afterwards and said he was a bit concerned about the way I played because of the Astroturf they would be playing on in the NASL. I said, “I have been playing professionally for 13 years, so I can adjust.” I was concerned at him being that naive. Anyway, he said he liked my aggressiveness and to come to his training camp at Walsall. I got a couple of days off from the Shrewsbury manager, Alan Durban, but I didn’t feel comfortable about my chances because he was bringing in 40 guys and, based on his comments, I was concerned.

  ‘Then I got another call from San Francisco. It was Milan Mandaric, who said he’d been given my letter by Phil Woosnam. He said he was putting an expansion together in San Francisco – he didn’t mention San Jose! “I am looking for a left-back,” he said. “Can I see you play in the next few days?” I explained we were about to play Hereford home and away. “I am coming to London,” he said. “Can I fly from London to Hereford?” I said, “You can, but there’ll be nowhere to land.” So he turned up in Hereford in a limo instead. I had a good game and he offered me a deal. I went to the Boston camp a few days later and told Vogelsinger I had a guaranteed offer from San Jose. He said he didn’t want to let me go but he thought about it over breakfast and changed his mind.’

  Calloway’s only English companion was Paul Child, who had scored 16 goals in the previous two seasons for Atlanta. ‘I came back to England after Atlanta folded and I was in Birmingham for a month,’ recalls the former Aston Villa reserve. ‘The whole time I was being bugged by San Jose, who had picked up the rights to me after the Chiefs folded. I was not sure what was going to happen with the league and I wondered if I was going to be out of a job again if I went back. But living with my wife and our new baby at the in-laws motivated me to go back and give it another try.’

  Surrounding Calloway and Child were the Yugoslavs, players from Haiti and Poland, and a group of Americans who included Glasgow-born Johnny Moore. Calloway adds, ‘We did have some factions. But you have that in any team. In England now there are a lot of people in the same team who don’t like each other. And in those days, even if you had all English and Scots in your team it was something if you had a week without a tussle.’

  At Western Division rivals Seattle Sounders, John Best had graduated from Dallas to land the coaching job, setting himself a three-year timetable for success. ‘In that time span you should be able to build a competitive team,’ he explains. ‘You may get lucky and have some good things happen on the field early but I didn’t expect to win the championship in the first year. It is not always healthy for that to happen anyway. Maybe then there is a temptation to grow too quickly, without establishing the organisation.’

  Having interviewed with Los Angeles and Denver, Best was impressed by Seattle’s ‘civic-minded’ owners and accepted their offer to build the Sounders team. ‘I basically went to England and Holland for the nucleus of the players. I knew managers and ex-players and I would go and speak to them, tell them what I was looking for and see if they knew players who might fit those profiles. Then I would watch them as many times as I could and talk to other teams’ scouts. I didn’t necessarily have the perfect team, but it was a good solid club.’

  Best’s most significant signing was former Everton and Southampton wing-half Jimmy Gabriel, a fiery red-haired Scot who had proved over the years that he was unafraid of sticking up to the likes of Billy Bremner and Tommy Smith in the heat of battle. Gabriel had gone on to have spells at Bournemouth, Swindon and Brentford, pushing him past 500 League games, and by 1974 was thinking of life after his playing career. ‘John Best had been in the Liverpool reserve team when I was at Everton but I didn’t really know him,’ he remembers. ‘But when he came over and asked me if I would go over as assistant coach I trusted him right away. He laid out in plain and simple terms what he wanted and what he was offering and I was looking for the opportunity to coach. It sounded like a good deal to go over for a few months to coach and continue playing.’

  Best says, ‘Jimmy was the classic example of what I was looking for. I didn’t just want a team that was made up of skilful players, but more down-to-earth guys. A typical English club, if you like, in terms of how they played and the determination and discipline they brought to the field.’

  Among the rest of the large British group in the s
quad, Hartlepool goalkeeper Barry Watling arrived with a rather less impressive résumé than Gabriel, but proceeded to lead the league in the goalkeeping statistics by conceding only 0.8 goals per game. John Rowlands, another Liverpudlian who had skipped around eight lower-division teams, was the Sounders’ top scorer with ten goals and eight assists.

  The Western Division was completed by the Vancouver Whitecaps, whose squad included 34-year-old Scottish midfielder Willie Stevenson, the former Liverpool and Stoke veteran who won a winner’s medal in the 1965 FA Cup final. The action out west began with a crazy game in Los Angeles between the Aztecs and the Sounders. Gabriel explains, ‘Every time the ball went out of play they stopped the clock, like they do in American football. So instead of playing 90 minutes we played for about two hours. It nearly killed half the team. We said, “We can’t be playing like that every week,” but they got it right after that.’

  That game was the first of the Aztecs’ 13 wins, a total that saw them finish with a league-best 110 points. At one point they won a league-record eight straight games and finished seven points ahead of the Earthquakes, for whom Child scored fifteen goals and added six assists to win the individual scoring award with thirty-six points. Child scored seven goals in the last seven games of the season and the Earthquakes put together a late-season burst of five wins to send them into a play-off game at Dallas full of confidence.

  ‘It was one of those seasons when everything was going right,’ recalls Child. ‘There were no individuals. We won as a team and lost as a team. We thought we would do very well in the play-offs. But Ron Newman at Dallas was a damn good coach and he had some very good players.’ They proved too good for the Earthquakes, who were beaten 3–0, Renshaw scoring twice. Child continues, ‘We played on Astroturf and they were very good on it. All you seem to do on Astroturf is chase the ball and unless you play on it regularly you are not used to the bounces or the timing of the ball. A big part of my game was getting on the end of through balls and I just remember chasing the damn thing out of bounds the whole time.’