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

by David Wangerin

  SOCCER

  in a Football World

  In the series Sporting, edited by Amy Bass

  Grant Farred, Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football

  Tommie Smith, Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith

  SOCCER

  in a Football World

  The Story of America's Forgotten Game

  David Wangerin

  Contents

  Preface to the US Edition 6

  Careless Hands 9

  Introduction

  i. A Game of its Own 15

  America's path to football isolation

  2. Tangled Roots 45

  The first American Soccer League

  3. Strangers on a Boat 81

  False dawns and hard landings for the national team

  4. `We will become phenomenal' 121

  Ambition and folly in the Sixties

  5. Moving the Goalposts 151

  Pele and the Cosmos

  6. Shootout to the Death 186

  The collapse of the NASL

  7. A Foot in the Door 217

  Harsh lessons at Italia 9o

  8. Revenge of the Commie Pansies 244

  The World Cup comes to America

  9. Clash and Burn 264

  MLS: back to square one

  io. Momentary Insanity 292

  In and out of love with the women's game

  ii. Take Me Out to the Soccer-specific Facility 315

  The 2002 World Cup and beyond

  Index 340

  Preface to the US Edition

  he initial publication of this book, just before the start of the 2006 World Cup, was meant to presage a banner year for American soccer. What nearly everyone acknowledged as the strongest team the US had ever produced qualified for the competition with unprecedented ease. Where once only the most blindly optimistic American fans expected their team to hold its own against the giants of international football, the international community now granted the Yanks plenty of respect. Few were prepared to discount a repeat of 2002's quarter-final appearance, or something even better.

  But in Germany things began to unravel just five minutes into the opening match. An early goal by the Czech Republic delivered a suckerpunch to the US team, from which they never seemed to recover. The subsequent draw with Italy was as close as anyone came to defeating the eventual world champions (and, given the one-man advantage the Italians enjoyed for almost the whole of the second half, little short of heroic). But it wasn't enough. Three weeks later, Bruce Arena, the most successful boss the national team had ever known, was unsentimentally dismissed.

  Yet the news wasn't all bad; far from it. More Americans were said to have attended the 2006 World Cup than sixteen of the previous seventeen tournaments put together (the exception, of course, being 1994). This was astonishing enough, but even it paled alongside the news that, back home, the France-Italy final had attracted a national television audience of nearly seventeen million. As it turned out, this was more than would watch the deciding game of the World Series a few months later.

  Some of us remember the days when World Cups weren't even shown on US television; we still call to mind the ground-breaking broadcast of the 1982 final by ABC, whose commentary team felt it necessary to explain that Italy's 2-1 lead over West Germany was "like a score of 14-7 in football." To us, the level of interest - for a faraway match not involving an American team - almost beggared belief.

  Can the nation congratulate itself for at last having joined the international football fraternity? Certainly it has shuffled closer. The stream of commentators who rail against soccer as boring, effeminate or inherently un-American has thinned to a pathetic trickle; heavyweight journalists have turned their hand to producing coherent books on the game; celebrities declare allegiances to teams from the English Premiership. Even ESPN seems to provide its soccer updates through less firmly-clenched teeth.

  Further down the ladder, though, enthusiasm is still tepid. In particular, turning World Cup fans into fans of Major League Soccer (MLS), something the league's own commissioner identifies as a priority, remains stubbornly difficult. MLS may be close to eclipsing the late and increasingly lamented North American Soccer League (NASL) in terms of longevity, and its average crowds continue to exceed those of the NASL at its peak. But it still lacks much of that league's glitter and continues to be looked down at by people whose interest it might have taken for granted.

  There was, then, a certain inevitability about the courting of David Beckham and his capture by the Los Angeles Galaxy last summer. Not since Pele had a soccer name become so familiar to the US, even if for reasons that largely transcend the sport. While the acquisition of a contemporary World Cup star was expected to win favor from the snobs, Beckham's celebrity also provided an opportunity to court the more impressionable neophyte. But fate proved no kinder to MLS than it had to the national team the summer before. Racked by injury and consigned to one of the worst teams in the league, Beckham's first season proved no match for the marketing-fuelled frenzy of his arrival. Ironically, a few weeks later (and to considerably less attention) the similarly-hyped Wunderkind Freddy Adu left for Benfica of Portugal without ever making the impression on the American game many had counted on.

  Certainly, the North American launch of Brand Beckham titillated the paparazzi and offered American soccer the kind of inflated exposure it rarely receives. But not everyone is convinced that the heavily-mortgaged signing of a 32-year-old England internationalist represents the jump-start MLS increasingly seems to need. Twelve years on, the league still loses money, attendance has failed to grow, and TV ratings remain pitiful. With the decision to permit the MetroStars to re-name their franchise after a brand of soft drink - a dark day for sports in America - the league has signaled a disturbing willingness to plumb almost any depth for financial support.

  All the same, MLS deserves a fair amount of praise, not only for surviving but also for growing. It has expanded into Canada and announced an intention to field eighteen teams by 2011. The standard of play, too, is better than many have credited it with. A competition between clubs from MLS and Mexico's Primera Division kicked off in 2007; though won by a Mexican club (on penalties), it offered little evidence of the perceived gulf in ability between the two leagues.

  For me, though, the few steps American soccer has yet to take are far less interesting than the long, tenebrous road it has already negotiated. The burgeoning community of sportswriters, bloggers, and such now attached to the game has plenty to say about its present and future. But, much of the past remains obscure and, in many cases, unjustly so. It was this obscurity, rather than millionaire English footballers and thoughts of international glory, that led me to write Soccer in a Football World, and it continues to fascinate me.

  Acknowledgments

  L to my father, Ronald, who three decades after I moved out of the I ly work towards this book owes an enormous amount of gratitude family house invited me back home and let me stay as long as I needed to put the manuscript together. Thanks as well to my brother and sister and their respective families for their help during my time in the States.

  I spent many productive hours in the archives of the US Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, New York, and for this I am grateful to Jack Huckel and his staff. A special thank-you to George and Peggy Brown for their kindness, patience, and generosity, and to Colin Jose, whose meticulous research and long-standing contribution to North American soccer history - and tolerance of my barrage of emails - was an enormous help. I'm also oblig
ed to Grant Millar for his research assistance in Scotland, to Gunnar Persson in Sweden, to Ulrich Korner in Germany, to Richard Perry in England, and to Roger Allaway and Dan Morrison in Pennsylvania. For their advice on the manuscript thanks are due to Jonathan Davies, Evan Garcia, Simon Jenkins, David Litterer and Ian Plenderleith. I would also like to acknowledge Alan and Eleanor Kreider for providing inspiration at a time when it was badly needed.

  Thanks as well to the staff at the city libraries of Birmingham and Liverpool and at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and to Richard McBrearty and his colleagues at the Scottish Football Museum in Glasgow. In the United States, I am particularly indebted to Steve Kerber and his assistants at the Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, and the microforms team at the Wisconsin State Historical Society Library in Madison, in whose company I spent countless happy hours.

  Most importantly of all, I would like to thank everyone at When Saturday Comes - Andy Lyons, Doug Cheeseman, Richard Guy, Ed Upright, and especially Mike Ticher - for their interest in American soccer history and for allowing me to write about it.

  Careless Hands

  Introduction

  isconsin in October can be a sight to behold, bathed in dazzling autumn colour under crisp, azure-blue skies. This, though, was one of its less memorable afternoons: grey and raw, barren and bleak. All the same, it was a remarkable enough day for me. For the first time in 22 years I was returning to the familiar plot of land behind the big football stadium, the bumpy pitch where I had spent many an afternoon keeping goal for the college soccer team.

  It wasn't something to look back on too fondly. We were one of the worst teams in the midwest, and I was only ever a reserve. Once or twice we won, but usually we lost. Sometimes we got slaughtered. I can't remember many of the scorelines, but I won't easily forget the 14 goals we conceded to a university from central Illinois. I got to play for much of the second half- to the intense relief of our besieged first choice - and for the last few minutes my opposite number was a young man with only one leg.

  Trouncings were only to be expected. The other defeats may have been less emphatic, but they didn't disguise our inexperience. Most of us hadn't played soccer for very long, and only a few had been coached to any standard. I'd joined from a high school that didn't even have a team, and all I knew about goalkeeping had come from books and TV. Like the rest of the squad, though, I was spared from too much embarrassment by rank anonymity. Soccer was hardly a campus attraction. When the weather was fair, passers-by might linger, more out of curiosity than interest. But once the temperature began its descent toward winter, when November skies masked the sun and the north winds started whipping across the exposed field, we were virtually on our own.

  The wind was just as biting 22 years on. But a lot of other things had changed. Certainly the players had. They could shoot with either foot now, and flick on an in-swinging corner, and bring the ball under control with a single deft touch. Some of us had been able to do those things, but not many could do them all, and very few would have been given a run-out in this team. Far from being one of the worst in the midwest, it had become one of the best. It had also been granted many of the accoutrements of American sports events: pre-match music, player introductions, standing for the national anthem. Ball-boys chased down errant shots, substitutions were announced over the public address, a huge electric scoreboard counted down the time. Twenty-odd years ago, we just got changed and went out to play. Sometimes we needed the referee to remind us what the score was.

  What struck me more, though, was what hadn't changed. The team still played on the same patch of grass behind the football stadium and, for all its prowess and promotion, still attracted only a scattering of fans. Perhaps there were a few more than there used to be, but most of the aluminium on the portable stand along the touchline was bare, and many of those in attendance seemed more interested in talking to each other than in encouraging their team.

  An entire generation of soccer had passed since I'd last come this way. I was one of the millions who had been introduced to the sport by the North American Soccer League. Pele arrived in New York when I was 13, and I don't remember seeing a soccer ball until he did. Was there even a place in town to buy one? I'd never heard of a penalty kick, the World Cup - or for that matter the NASL, whose nearest team the season before was 400 miles away.

  How quickly it all changed. By the time I entered college, the shops were selling all manner of balls and boots and shin guards and even 110 SOCCER T-shirts. I'd been to my first professional match, in Chicago - 21,000 to watch the Cosmos - and seen my first FA Cup final on US television. My home town had spawned two teams, and I played for one of them.

  All of this had happened before any of these players were born. For them, soccer was a familiar activity, not some exotic arrival or the 'phenomenon' it had been in my youth. Events such as the World Cup were not the obscure, esoteric affairs of decades earlier. The United States had hosted the competition three times - twice for women and once for men - and, to considerable fanfare, it had even won one of them. Yet soccer's impact on the average Wisconsinite, like the average American, was still terribly limited. For many the game was still the same 'pussy sport' it had been when I was a teenager. This, after all, was a part of the country that adored the Green Bay Packers and other he-men in suits of armour, where autumn weekends were spent in the stadium or in front of the TV listening to how one player or another 'really loves to hit people'.

  In 1987 I emigrated to Britain, worn down by repeated attempts at justifying an 'unnatural' and/or `un-American' activity. Defending a sport which prohibited the use of the hands and produced very little scoring was as close to 'discussing' soccer as I had usually come, while sitting among thousands of impassioned, knowledgeable supporters had been an impossibility in a country whose teams and leagues appeared and disappeared without anyone taking much notice. As I wallowed in my new life as a fan in Britain, I began to think that the US did not deserve soccer, that it might be best for everyone if the Yanks stuck to their own hand-friendly, high-scoring games and left the rest of the world alone.

  Since then some attitudes have changed, including my own. But many have not. In spite of its staggering popularity as a recreational activity, in spite of the country's international success, and in spite of the stubborn perseverance of MLS, soccer in the United States remains a minority sport. Consequently, as with other minority sports, its history is deemed to be of little significance, or is even dismissed out of hand. We still hear claims that Pele's time with the Cosmos represents the 'true birth' of the American game - a spurious assertion, but hardly surprising in an age when colour television has eroded the significance of eras preserved only in grainy black-and-white. Yet it is a great pity that names such as Thomas Cahill, Archie Stark and Billy Gonsalves - or, for that matter, John Harkes and Kasey Keller - count for so little in such a sports-happy country. Even today the most obsessive fan, the sports anorak who has committed to memory the hallowed numbers of Pete Rose's 4,256 base hits and Dan Marino's 420 touchdown passes, struggles to name 11 American soccer players of any repute. Historians have not treated the game with much sympathy, either. Even the most comprehensive accounts of the birth and growth of the country's sporting pursuits make virtually no reference to soccer. It's almost as if it didn't exist.

  Admittedly, for much of the 20th century the game in the US was almost unremitting in its anonymity, moribund even after the famous 1950 World Cup victory over England, by which time even the most sympathetic newspapers saw little reason to treat soccer with any more reverence than the municipal dog show. Only when professional sport discovered the power of television did it receive any sort of resuscitation, but sadly it was left largely in the hands of the wrong people: those whose love of money eclipsed whatever interest they had in the game. One by one, they disappeared.

  There are far too many people who think American soccer didn't amount to anything before Brazil's most f
amous No 10 turned up in New York, or who might agree with the assertion made by one New York Times correspondent in 1994 that 'the history of the World Cup in the United States begins and ends with a game in the Brazilian mining town of Belo Horizonte on June 29, 1950'. In truth these are merely convenient signposts, events any fan of the game easily recognises. The rest takes a little more unravelling.

  Though not as steeped in legend as baseball or college gridiron, or the football of other lands, soccer has existed in America for much longer than many give it credit for. The United States joined FIFA not in 1994 or 1975, but 1913. The National Challenge Cup, which, warts and all, produced the country's first official national champion in 1914, survives to this day as the US Open Cup. One need only examine the early 20thcentury sports pages of newspapers the size of the Boston Globe or Chicago Tribune - replete with photos, match reports and line-ups - to realise that soccer once mattered. The country's first serious professional venture, the original American Soccer League, came to fruition before its gridiron equivalent, playing to thousands of devoted fans who often defied the most miserable of conditions. For a time the ASL, which lured dozens of top professionals from Europe and was a significant factor in America's success at the first World Cup, threatened to secure a permanent place on the country's sporting landscape. Its hopes, though, rapidly disappeared through a toxic combination of factors: many economic, some self-inflicted and a few propagated by the media.

  By the time Pele arrived, the roots had been forgotten. In 1980 the veteran sportswriter Zander Hollander edited an ambitious 544-page book titled The American Encyclopedia of Soccer which, for all its meticulous record-keeping of the college game and the NASL, failed in the rather more significant task of chronicling what most regard as the country's first professional league. The `encyclopedia' mentions that 'several old-timers interviewed in 1978 recalled a "soccer war of 1931" and an "old American Soccer League" in the 1920s', but goes no further. Reference to the National Challenge Cup is limited to a single paragraph. America's dismal World Cup qualification efforts of the Fifties and Sixties are entirely ignored.