Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting)
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This certainly suggested that the ASL had come into its own, but perhaps even more telling was its growing intransigence toward the USFA. The 1924-25 season - in which the title was won again by Fall River, just in front of Bethlehem - had pushed American soccer to new heights, but it also planted the seeds of a war which proceeded to choke the life out of it.
In seeking to become a winter counterpart to professional baseball, the ASL owners naturally looked to that sport for inspiration. 'Organised baseball', as it was collectively known, was firmly controlled by the major leagues, not by any independent administrative body, and certainly not one with any international obligations. Financial considerations, rule changes and even contractual matters like the reserve clause all emanated from the 16 major league clubs. Little wonder that so many ASL owners were reluctant to submit to the authority of the USFA by paying registration fees, obtaining clearances for foreign signings and handing over a chunk of the proceeds from Challenge Cup ties. (Of the nearly $16,000 the USFA had pocketed from such ties in 1923-24, more than $13,000 was from contests involving ASL or St Louis League teams.)
Tom Cahill had abruptly returned to the USFA as secretary in 1922 after his replacement, the Oldham-born James Scholefield, had absconded with most of the entry fees for that season's Challenge Cup. With one foot firmly in each camp, Cahill was undoubtedly the man most capable of seeing off any mutiny, but he proved unable to save himself from his enemies. At the 1923 USFA convention Peter Peel, a former president, was voted back into the position by a tiny margin. Within a year he had sensationally (and quite illegitimately) dismissed Cahill on charges of 'insubordination and incompetence'. Both men were strongwilled and outspoken, but the Dublin-born Peel seems to have been more Machiavellian. He even accused Cahill of assaulting him with a knife during a heated exchange (Cahill claimed to have been cutting a plug of tobacco and maintained that Peel chose that moment to offer to 'take care of me mentally or physically'). Peel was voted out of office the following year and declared bankrupt not long after that, but remained an association figure for decades to come, and his name is still respected in American soccer circles. No competition of any note is named after Cahill, but the Peel Cup is still awarded each year to the champions of Illinois.
Cahill's banishment proved temporary, but it came at a critical moment. His replacement, Scottish-born Andrew Brown, a former Presbyterian minister and one-time president of the AFA, soon found out just how uncomfortable the secretary's seat had become. The professionals' financial demands, largely to do with the Challenge Cup, were too onerous, and in August 1924, a month after a stormy annual convention, the ASL withdrew its clubs from the competition. They immediately devised a tournament of their own, the Lewis Cup (Horace Edgar had donated the trophy), and invited the champions of the St Louis League, whose clubs had also withdrawn, to play its winners for the 'professional championship of the United States'."
The paltry crowd of less than 1,000 for the Challenge Cup final, won by the Shawsheen club of Massachusetts, seemed to vindicate the ASL's intransigence. Their Lewis Cup semi-final between Fall River and New Bedford - a new entry to the league, and destined to become the Marksmen's bitterest local rivals - drew nearly 13,000 to Providence's Kinsley Park, a figure touted by the Providence journal as not only the second largest crowd ever to "come out" for a soccer game in the United States' but also the biggest crowd ever present at a sporting event in Providence'. Fall River won 3-0, but went down in the final to Boston, despite persuading the ASL that Mark's Stadium was the only ground able to hold the anticipated number of fans ('the whole thing reeks of commercialism of the worst sort', sighed one Boston newspaper). The tie drew a full house of 15,000, but the visitors pulled off a 2-1 win.
Unable to attract such gates to their own uncovered, rickety park - which was outmoded enough for its major league baseball tenant to have abandoned it ten years earlier - Boston were again disadvantaged by box office pressures in the Professional Cup final. They and the Ben Miller club of St Louis split the first two matches of a best-of-three series, leaving the Wonder Workers to assume, not unreasonably, the deciding game would take place on a neutral site. Ben Miller, though, had drawn 10,000 to their home leg, while only 4,000 had turned up in Boston, and the ASL surrendered the final game to St Louis. Furious protests from the Bostonians were eventually quelled by giving them a greater share of the gate receipts, but there was no large crowd - less than 4,000 on an amenable April afternoon - only the poetic justice of the Wonder Workers winning a thrilling match, 3-2.
The US Professional Cup was never played again, but it had served its purpose. With the USFA's financial position weakened by the Challenge Cup boycott, the ASL was able to wring from the association enough concessions to re-enter the competition the following season. That settled the first soccer war, but a transatlantic showdown was still brewing. After Fall River raided Motherwell for full-back Tommy Martin and striker James 'Tec' White, and Third Lanark for defender Charlie McGill, one Scottish newspaper observed:
Fall River, of course, have paid no transfer fees to Motherwell or Third Lanark. Sam Mark points out that there is no need, nor will there be for a long time. When the American clubs have got all they can get from this side, when they have nothing more to learn from us, they may consider an agreement with our football associations.
Little wonder, then, that by the end of the season FIFA were considering a proposal that would require emigrating professionals to live in their new country for a year before being allowed to play, an idea which stirred feelings of persecution in some quarters. The Fall River Globe was in no doubt the suggestion was 'calculated to halt the serious inroads American soccer football promoters have been making on British and Continental European First Division League teams'.
For the moment Mark and his cohorts continued to flaunt international protocol, and displayed similar attitudes towards FIFA's laws of the game, generally regarded as in need of 'Americanisation'. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the international body's austere stance on substitutions, or more precisely the absence of them. The decade-old exhortation of at least one newspaper -'If soccer football is to be made popular in this country, this is one rule that should be doctored at once' - remained a widespread view, largely for reasons of fair play ('for an unavoidable accident, possibly brought about by the rough tactics of an opposing player, or sudden sickness, by which a player is incapacitated, it is very unfair to the team that is handicapped'). Though St Louis probably pioneered the practice in 1919, by 1922 American universities had also agreed to a limited substitution rule, ostensibly to entice students into trying the game. It proved to be the thin end of a mighty wedge, which by the late 1950s had helped college soccer mutate into a wholly different beast. Even in the 1920s collegiate rules committees were excitedly contemplating other innovations: four 20-minute quarters, kick-ins instead of throw-ins, limiting offside to the penalty area and even moving the penalty spot back four yards.
This creative freedom, permitted by the colleges' tenuous `associate membership' of the USFA, was exactly what the ASL sought: their `direct membership' tied them too securely to the international mast and seemed to be the only thing keeping the USFA in the black. Requests for associate membership were thus rejected, but the veto scarcely dampened the ASL's quest for autonomy. League positions were now calculated in a more American way: not by the number of points earned, but by the percentage of possible points taken. The champions of 1925-26, Fall River, finished not with 72 points but with a 'winning percentage' of.819. This was the criterion used by both baseball and the fledgling professional gridiron circuit (the NFL did not insist on all its teams playing the same number of games until 1935).
The Marksmen lost only twice that season, nine times fewer than second-placed New Bedford, and their arrivals from Lanarkshire had satisfied expectations: White scored 33 goals, and McGill and Martin became mainstays of the league's best defence. Overseas recruiting seemed at last to have caught up with B
ethlehem, who dropped to third, losing an unprecedented 12 times, but their defeat of an under-strength Ben Miller club in the Challenge Cup final brought them one last national title. In front of 18,000 at Ebbets Field, the 7-2 drubbing cemented Archie Stark's reputation as the finest centre-forward of his era. Though his sensational goalscoring the season before had been reduced to a slightly more earthly 54 (43 in the league, only second-best), he scored a hat-trick in the final - a first for the competition - and was said to have rejected overtures from Newcastle United ('I started soccer in America, and here is where I stay'). His goal output would never again reach such sensational levels, but Stark remained a fearsome ASL goalscorer for several seasons to come.
Inevitably, some newspapers claimed the attendance at Ebbets Field, home of baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers, had broken the record for a match on American soil. If that was true, it stood for less than a fortnight. A few days after Bethlehem's victory the Austrian champions of 1925, Hakoah Vienna, began a close-season tour of America which attracted unprecedented crowds - and left a legacy that helped to keep American soccer alive, however feebly, for the next 40 years. The standard of soccer in Vienna at that time was extremely high and Hakoah were one of its best teams. Two years earlier they had been the first foreign side to defeat an English club on its own soil (West Ham United, though admittedly in a low-key friendly). But it was not so much the quality of their play as their Jewish identity - Hakoah being the Hebrew word for strength - that persuaded record numbers of Americans to watch them play. Nat Agar and another Jewish ASL owner, Maurice Vandeweghe of the New York Giants, helped to underwrite the tour.
Though they finished only seventh in the Austrian League in 1926, Hakoah arrived in the US robustly promoted as the best the old country had to offer. One could be forgiven for thinking this was what brought people to see them in such huge numbers: 25,000 in Philadelphia, 15,000 in Chicago and 22,000 at Ebbets Field. Their fourth match lives most vividly in the annals of American soccer: 46,000 at the Polo Grounds for an exhibition against what was rather pretentiously billed as 'the best XI in the United States' (actually a collection of players from the ASL's Giants and Indiana Flooring, neither of whom had done much that season). By a yawning margin, this was a record gate for soccer on American soil; incredibly, it would stand for half a century. Though the 'New York Stars' won 3-0 the result was inconsequential. Hakoah had tapped into the collective consciousness of a heterogeneous ethnic group, one still seeking its place in the new world. Even Jews who had become fans of 'American' sports still lacked Jewish idols - their first baseball star, Hank Greenberg, did not join the major leagues until 1930.
Hakoah returned the following summer and so did the crowds. When 40,000 came to the Polo Grounds for a match on May Day, 1927, the New York Evening Telegram observed:
It was estimated by Jewish experts that two-thirds of them had never indulged in sporting activities other than folding up the sporting sections of their dailies to be used as table covers or wrapping paper. Not that they were prejudiced against sports - but such a thing had never been brought to their attention until the all-Jewish team from Vienna visited this country. They read it last year and many nibbled, but yesterday the climax was reached, a climax that sent thick streams of bewildered but happy Jewish people through the Polo Grounds turnstiles ... The advent of the Hakoah team served as an awakening, for blood ties called the thousands to the Polo Grounds on Sunday, blood ties that were as ignorant of sports as they were eager to witness their brothers in combat.
Strangely, the club claimed to have lost as much as $30,000 from that tour, a circumstance which forced their founder, Dr Ignatz Korner, to resign. Hakoah never returned to the US and did not regain their leading role in Austria - American clubs poaching their best players didn't help - yet they had etched themselves firmly enough on America's soccer landscape for generations of teams to adopt their famous name.
The prospect of a foreign soccer team filling big-league ball parks during the more pleasant close-season weather proved irresistible and others soon followed Hakoah, though none would attract quite such staggering interest. Sparta Prague, champions of Czechoslovakia, arrived to some fanfare in the autumn of 1926, and reportedly drew 25,000 for a match with the Ulster United club of Toronto, staged in Chicago. Sparta won seven of their 12 matches, and were said to have returned home to a heroes' welcome from 100,000 people. Teams from Britain, Hungary, Italy, Spain and Argentina also came across. Inevitably, given the ASL's ethnic composition, it was visits from Scotland that proved the most regular. Rangers toured North America in 1928 and 1930, the same year Kilmarnock made their first trip; in 1931, 30,000 were said to have seen Celtic at the Polo Grounds. Preston North End, the first Football League visitors, arrived in 1929. Overseas trips by ASL clubs were much more rare, though in 1930 a diluted Fall River squad visited Central Europe for what proved a disappointing and ill-managed venture. The club won only two of six matches and made a premature return, unhappy with arrangements over gate receipts.
Though the ASL still relied heavily on British imports, like America it was growing more cosmopolitan. The central European tourists helped to expose a new seam of talent which would be mined with similar ruthlessness. A number of Hakoah players signed forASLclubs, including the Hungarian internationals Lajos Fischer and Jozsef Eisenhoffer. Both joined Nat Agar's Brooklyn Wanderers, as did full-back Dezso Grosz of Budapest VAC (also a Jewish club) and, near the end of the season, Franz Sedlacek, thought to be the highest-paid player in Czechoslovakia. The New York Giants obtained another Jewish Hungarian international, Bela Guttmann, later to become one of the most successful managers in Europe (he led Benfica to two European Cups in the 1960s). In New York Guttmann played alongside Moses Hausler, capped at inside-forward for Austria, and Erno Schwarcz, who had twice played for Hungary and later became the ASL's business manager.
While the influx of continental stars seemed to be bringing America closer to the rest of the football world, it was actually doing nothing of the sort. Some ASL owners were now so aggrieved by their lack of autonomy that reports of a breakaway league - playing by whatever rules it deemed appropriate - began to surface in newspapers, many of them sympathetic to the cause. 'The game should be Americanized and must be Americanized if it is to be popular with the sporting public of the US,' insisted the Fall River Globe. 'True, soccer is soccer the world over, and the rules have been standardized by Fl FA... [but] what of it?' A columnist in the New York Evening Post agreed:
The American sport public has definite likes and dislikes. It likes some of the things which please our British cousins and dislikes others. It is futile to bring this game of soccer here with a set of rules which are splendid for conditions in England and Scotland and say: 'Here is the game. Take it or leave it'. Many years ago the game of English rugby was brought here for our collegians. But it was not suited to the American temperament. We want more contact, more vitality. This experience is interesting in its relation to soccer. There may be little things here and there that can stand improvement.
Or even big things, like the national championship itself. In January 1926 the Detroit News presented the remarks of an unnamed, soccerambivalent 'New York sports editor', deeming them to be 'of great value to those in Michigan who have strived for years to stabilize soccer without any marked degrees of success':
'Soccer,' the editor said, 'is being played under a multiplicity of handicaps which makes the task of boosting it very difficult. The leaders of the game are its worst enemies because they fail to see the American viewpoint and insist on conducting soccer along British lines which are not suited to American conditions. The present method of conducting the American championship under the worst weather and field conditions by a special hit-and-miss plan is altogether wrong. The meaning of these national games as indices of superiority is almost negligible. Yet they decide the championship. Why? Because it is done that way in England and Scotland, and American soccer must be conducted along the same lines.'
The threat of a splinter league was averted, but trouble was just around the corner, and it began in earnest with the removal of Cahill as the ASL's guiding force. Factions in New England and elsewhere helped force his resignation and ushered in a more sympathetic and pliable replacement. Bill Cunningham was a sportswriter for the Boston Globe with fairly tenuous links to the game, but he had been an Ivy League gridiron star and thus something of a celebrity. Duly proclaiming himself 'converted' to soccer ('the greatest athletic sport in the world today'), Cunningham presided over a more laissez-faire and independently minded operation. Cahill, who had probably done more than any other individual to get the USFA and the ASL off the ground, now found himself removed from both organisations. 'I am not through with soccer yet,' he declared, and time will tell the story.'
And how it would. Cunningham duly rubber-stamped the owners' rule changes - with the USFA's blessing - which included the long soughtafter use of substitutes: two per team, to be used only during the first 75 minutes of play. This was an innovation which had come very late in relation to other American sports, though it was not until 1965 that the Football League allowed substitutes and another five years before they were seen at the World Cup.
The ASL also commissioned the use of judges at each end of the pitch to help the referee determine whether the ball had crossed the goal-line. And, seemingly caught up in ice hockey's sudden surge of popularity, it incorporated that sport's penalty-box (not yet known as the sin-bin) as a further disciplinary measure. Players could be sent to the box for 'ungentlemanly conduct', which included bad language, yelling or 'making other noises' (penalty: five minutes, or ten for a second offence), or 'rough play' (ten to 15 minutes). Fines were also levied for each visit, though only on registered professionals; amateurs were to be dealt with by the league 'as it deems fit'.