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

by David Wangerin

  The penalty-box, which resurfaced briefly as a FIFA experiment 70 years later, was perhaps the most honest indictment of the disorderliness which still haunted the game, not just in the ASL, but across the country. Fist-fights, assaults on referees and pitch invasions seemed to recur almost as often as the bad weather. On March 29, 1926, the Providence Journal reported matter-of-factly:

  Soccer ceased to be soccer and began to be `sock' when Referee George Lambie of Newton, Mass. penalized Fall River after Wilson had 'back-heeled' Drummond. The Coats player took Wilson's act as a personal affront and sought to relieve his feelings by swinging at the other ... A minute later the battle was resumed. The mounted police broke it up. But only for a brief space of time. This round saw about 2,000 fans rush from their seats to the scene of the combat and add to the difficulties of the police. Referee Lambie became the object of more booing ... John Harvey of the Coats team had taken up the battle with Dougal Campbell of Fall River. Several other players of the opposing teams had singled each other out for an exchange of compliments both oral and physical. Finally the mounted officers, aided by their brethren on foot, succeeded in restoring order and Referee Lambie was escorted from the field by players, his exit marked by adverse criticism from the crowd.

  As it turned out, sending off players for short spells often served only to heighten perceived injustices, while the new goal judges were usually locals and thus susceptible to intimidation. After only a few weeks their role was dispensed with - and, inevitably, the ensuing matches produced a controversial scoring incident which held up play for seven minutes in Bethlehem as the beleaguered referee fended off protests from indignant Indiana Flooring players.

  The season ended with Bethlehem interrupting Fall River's run, taking their only ASL title. Hampered by injury, Archie Stark made only 29 appearances but still managed 23 goals, giving him a remarkable 133 in 110 appearances. It had been another exhausting campaign: 44 league matches plus two major cup competitions, much of it staged on the usual glue-pot pitches and ersatz skating rinks. Back-to-back fixtures remained an accepted part of the workload. In one hardly remarkable instance, Bethlehem, having played ASL contests on Saturday and Sunday, boarded an overnight train to Toronto to play in a Monday afternoon friendly, collecting their share of the receipts from a healthy gate of 5,000.

  By the mid-1920s the general opinion seemed to be that soccer in America was taking off, establishing itself or otherwise expanding, but in the Golden Age much the same could be said of almost any sport (in the spring of 1927, 40,000 were said to have attended an exhibition of Gaelic football at the Polo Grounds). More tangible was the amount of money now circulating in the ASL. Nat Agar claimed that the gross receipts of his Brooklyn Wanderers had risen from $5,388 in 1922-23 to somewhere between $120,000 and $150,000 by 1926-27. Some clubs were said to be paying out more than $1,000 a week in wages, and Bill Cunningham even boasted that 'soccer players here ... can make more money than in any country on earth'. Certainly it was more than in England, where the maximum wage was set at 18 a week in 1922 and remained there until 1945.

  The New York Evening Post estimated that ASL clubs that season had spent $100,000 to obtain the services of about 60 players, but plenty of others had been whisked across the Atlantic for nothing, and by the summer of 1927 Europe had seen enough. FIFA summoned Andrew Brown to its congress in Finland and - under pressure from angry central European nations this time - demanded that the USFA crack down on contract-jumping. Fighting to keep his association in good standing, Brown and the evergreen Guss Manning spared the USFA any embarrassment, largely through diplomacy and contrition (to be fair, the jumping was not entirely in one direction). But they were far from out of the woods.

  The ASL's tussles with the USFA were only just beginning, as was its pursuit of a more Americanised game. For 1927-28 it split the season into two halves, partly to reduce the number of meaningless fixtures and partly to instigate a showpiece championship match. Here again the league seems to have taken its lead from ice hockey and its Stanley Cup series, since the NFL's first play-off didn't take place until 1933, and until 1969 major league baseball simply sent the winners of its two leagues to the World Series.

  The top two teams from each half qualified for the new post-season, which looked at risk of collapsing under the weight of a harsh winter. Some teams played as many as 57 league matches, with half a dozen or more Lewis and Challenge Cup ties to fit in as well. Players were certainly made to work for their wages. As one disaffected J & P Coats player recounted to the Athletic News after abandoning his American career:

  Matches being played on Saturday and Sunday, we would leave Pawtucket at 6 on Friday evening, travel through the night, reach New York at about half-past six on Saturday morning, leave at 9am for, say, Philadelphia or Bethlehem, arrive about noon, play the match at 3, catch the return train to New York at 6pm, arrive New York at 10.30pm, stay the night, play again on Sunday in the New York district, leave at 11 on Sunday night, arrive home at 5 on Monday morning and then get ready for the day's work.

  The most significant development that year was the purchase by the president of the New York Giants baseball club, Charles Stoneham, of the Indiana Flooring franchise just before the start of the season. Stoneham, described by one baseball historian as 'a multimillionaire whose fortune rested mainly on questionable legal securities operations', may have turned to soccer partly out of desperation. In 1918 he had bought what many considered to be the major leagues' most valuable property, only to see it eclipsed by the Babe Ruth-inspired New York Yankees.

  Thwarted in his efforts to rename the Indiana franchise after his baseball team, Stoneham settled instead on the league they were members of. His New York Nationals shared residency with the baseballers in the Polo Grounds, abandoning the tiny New York Oval which many considered the worst facility in the league. That soccer was able to snare a big-wheel outsider made it seem a viable business enterprise, and it was hardly surprising that the baseball man was installed as league vice-president. But Stoneham was no paragon of virtue. He had recently been indicted by two federal grand juries for perjury and mail fraud (though he was cleared of the former, and the latter charges were dropped). The commissioner of baseball had also ordered him to dispose of dubious interests in a Cuban racetrack and casino, but did nothing to stop one of the most powerful figures in New York City's underworld, Arnold Rothstein - the man many regard as the pivotal figure in the 1919 World Series scandal - from making use of Stoneham's private Polo Grounds box.

  With Indiana Flooring's Ernie Viberg installed as his business manager, Stoneham quickly learned the ASL routine, sending manager Bob Millar off to Scotland to fill up on imports. But his club began the season poorly and finished last at the end of the first half of the season, playing before disappointing gates in their major league home. In the Challenge Cup progress proved more immediate, both on the pitch and at the box office. Victories over the Giants at Starlight Park and the Wanderers at Hawthorne Field came in front ofpacked houses, and 16,000 turned up for the final against the Bricklayers of Chicago, which the USFA helpfully staged at the Polo Grounds. The Nationals won, but only after a replay at Soldier Field, where two goals from George Henderson gave them a 3-0 victory. The Chicago Herald-Examiner claimed the onetime Rangers striker, 'formerly one of Scotland's greatest centers, and the best one seen in Chicago in many a year, was the principal factor in the downfall of the Brickies'. Stoneham's investment may not have reaped instant dividends, but some claimed that in his desire to keep the Polo Grounds occupied through the winter he had come to acquire a taste for soccer.

  The situation in Bethlehem was far less encouraging. Travelling to one of the relative outposts of the league, to play before what even the local newspaper admitted was a 'corporal's guard' of spectators, continued to represent financial suicide for home and visiting teams alike. In March the club transferred a league cup-tie to Philadelphia for what it admitted were financial reasons. 'In other cities we are
greeted by salvos of cheers for the other team, but in this city the stands are always quiet,' Luther Lewis observed. 'It is getting so bad that many teams are objecting to playing in this city because of the gate receipts ... Unless we can be assured of moral support and some financial assistance, I'm afraid that the Bethlehem Steel soccer team has played its last game here.' They hadn't, but they did stage almost all their remaining matches that season in Philadelphia, pulling in crowds as high as 3,000 as they pursued a berth in the championship series.

  That series, and the entire play-off arrangements, proved to be illconceived and poorly managed enough to leave the league's 'professional' pretences in some doubt. Not much thought, it seemed, had been given to who would qualify for the post-season if, as in fact occurred, two clubs finished with the same winning percentage in one half of the season, or if the same team qualified from each half. The single-match championship final, between Boston and New Bedford, was staged on the latter's home ground, the desire for gate receipts swaying officials into abandoning neutrality. The Wonder Workers had reached the final largely thanks to the decision of president Cunningham to disqualify Bethlehem from the semi-finals for their unorthodox borrowing of the Brooklyn Wanderers goalkeeper. That the league's office was in Boston and that both Cunningham and his secretary, Dave Scott, wrote for Boston newspapers were picked up by incensed Steel fans. By this time, though, the season had encroached into June - ten months from its start - and bringing it to an end seemed to assume priority over ending it fairly.

  On hostile soil, in front of the noisy New Bedford fans, Boston claimed a 4-1 championship victory thanks to a hat-trick from Barney Battles. The Musselburgh-born Battles, son of a Scottish international, returned home a few seasons later to sign for Hearts, and his 44 league goals for them in 1930-31 remains the club record. But this proved to be the last hurrah for the Wonder Workers, whose success on the pitch had never carried over to the turnstiles.

  Under Cunningham the ASL had stagnated. Too many of its clubs still made their homes in humble venues such as Brooklyn's Hawthorne Field, with a capacity scarcely more than 6,000, or decaying major league baseball parks such as Philadelphia's Baker Bowl, part of which had collapsed in 1927 from rotting timber. The league had done almost nothing to develop native-born talent, improve the supply or standard of match officials, or expand into big cities outside its north-eastern strongholds. It did not even produce a season-long fixture list at the beginning of the year. Yet it continued to perceive the USFA as the main obstacle to its success and the source of most of its misfortune.

  In the run-up to the 1928-29 season, the Fall River Globe lamented:

  It is for the United States Football Association to assert its authority as the ruling power of soccer and take drastic measures in bringing the professional game back into favor with those who are helping to support it. It is known that those who own the franchise of the teams, figure that as long as they are backing the teams with the coin they will not allow outsiders to interfere ... Without doubt, the Amateur and Junior Leagues around the district are better managed than the American League and there is not a fraction of financial interest in them as there is in the big league.

  Hope had arrived in the form of Tom Cahill, who was returned to the USFA secretary's post in 1927 after a three-year absence. Sympathetic to the professional cause, but more deeply to the sport, he bemoaned the absence of native-born talent in preference to overseas 'showmen'. It had, after all, been half a decade since a team of American origin had claimed the national title. The ASL was in no mood to listen, especially not with the considerable weight of Charley Stoneham behind it. Even before the Nationals had won the Challenge Cup Stoneham declared that his team would not take part in the competition in future. His rationale was easy enough to deduce. Baseball, after all, did not determine its national champions by pitting major league clubs against decidedly lesser entities, particularly not in one-off matches separate from the more demanding rigour of league competition. And it certainly did not require permission from state, national and international associations to carry out its affairs. While Stoneham may not have been the sole driving force behind the professionals' change of tack, his voice must have carried far - particularly as his championship-winning team had apparently lost money, a ludicrous outcome for a truly professional operation.

  Determined to make the ASL plough its own furrow, Stoneham outlined - just days after the cup final - what the New York Times referred to as 'a new system of operation for the sport'. The ideas were undoubtedly radical for their time, but many of them were quite sensible: halting play for two months during the winter to stage an indoor tournament; scheduling late-season weekday games in the evening to attract people on their way home from work; moving franchises from smaller markets into those with major league baseball teams and stadiums; and creating a western league with which to contest a new form of national championship.

  None of these suggestions was adopted (although the Nationals were already staging midweek 'twilight' matches), but another one was, and it would ultimately precipitate the most infamous of the soccer wars. Less than two weeks into the 1928-29 campaign, the ASL announced that 'because of the heavy schedule this season', its teams would not enter the Challenge Cup. Of course, the season wasn't any heavier than the one before; the league had simply grown more intransigent. At a time when the ASL believed it should have turned a financial corner, most of its owners were still losing money. Writing large cheques to the USFA in the form of gate receipts from Challenge Cup ties was now more than they could stand.

  Or more than most could stand. Three teams - Bethlehem, Newark and the New York Giants - asked the USFA to keep their names in the draw. The ASL perceived this as mutiny and threatened the clubs with expulsion unless they changed their mind. When they did not, Cunningham hit them with a $1,000 fine. Then he threw them out of the league. The USFA sensed its nose had been tweaked. Its new president, Armstrong Patterson of Detroit, gave the ASL 24 hours to reconsider its decision, threatening 'drastic action' if it did not. It wasn't hard to guess how drastic the action might be: the ASL could be cast into renegade waters, left to sink or swim entirely on its own. This, though, was a fate it seemed prepared to accept. The war was on. The USFA revoked the league's membership and the ASL professed not to care. 'No club shall be punished for its loyalty to the parent body,' thundered Patterson, 'and if it is to be a fight to the finish, the USFA is fully prepared to defend its position, even to the extent of sanctioning a new organisation.'

  Enter Cahill. Well before the ASL's suspension in October 1928, the USFA secretary had been furtively devising plans for a rival pro league. Now, less than a week after war was declared, he announced the formation of an Eastern Soccer League. It admitted the three ASL exiles, lured a few of the stronger teams out of the New York state leagues and established a `Hakoah All-Stars' franchise which included a number of Viennese players. Within a month the venture was under way. The abrupt emergence of a competitor surprised the renegades and the immediate defection of many ASL players to safer waters - including Davie Brown, Pete Renzulli, Bob Millar and Murren Carlson - alarmed it as well. When 6,000 fans attended an early Eastern League doubleheader in New York, the new entry claimed a propaganda victory.

  But the ASL fought back, bringing perpetually simmering feuds and rivalries to a rolling boil. Nat Agar, owner ofthe Brooklyn Wanderers, also happened to be vice-president of the Southern New York State Football Association, to which many of the Eastern League clubs were affiliated. He now spearheaded a move to pull that association out of the USFA, and when it did, he took over as its president. The ASL hastily formed a team in Philadelphia to square off with the Eastern League entry there and was rumoured to have planted an agent in Bethlehem to trawl for disaffected players (three in fact did leave for New Bedford). Impudently, it even appealed to FIFA to investigate the schism. FIFA, all too aware of the contract-jumping the renegade league had once condoned, unsurprisingly threw its weight squa
rely behind the USFA.

  There were eight clubs in the Eastern League, but it soon became apparent that Bethlehem, the Giants and the Hakoah All-Stars were in a class of their own. In the hope of sustaining fan interest, player loans were hastily arranged. Bethlehem gave away virtually its entire reserve team and New York Hispano, a former state league team, were suddenly graced with the decidedly un-Hispanic presence of `Wee Willie' Crilley, a veteran ASL forward who had come to the US not long after scoring 49 goals for Alloa Athletic in 1921-22, a club record which still stands.

  As the autumn half of the season lurched to an awkward end, both factions stridently predicted victory and blamed each other for the conflict everyone agreed was ruining the game. In truth, neither league was prospering. The New York Celtics, a latecomer to the Eastern League, survived only a few weeks of the spring half before folding. In the ASL, Jersey City disbanded after playing only seven matches and the long-serving Coats team disappeared in March before reforming as Pawtucket Rangers. Rumours, claims and counter-claims abounded as the season wore on: Nat Agar had asked his players to take a 50 per cent drop in wages; Fall River fans had demanded that Sam Mark bring Bethlehem Steel back to New England; an Eastern League match in New York attracted a paid attendance of 39. Accusations that the two leagues were trying to poach each other's clubs (including, bizarrely, Stoneham's Nationals) also took wing - and as the season drew to a close New Bedford's ASL franchise actually did jump to the Eastern League. But the Whalers played only eight times there. Reportedly unimpressed by the standard of play and pining for derbies with Fall River, they jumped back.

  The play-off system each league had originally devised was scrapped, largely because the winners of both halves were the same: Fall River in the ASL, Bethlehem in the Eastern League. A cash-strapped USFA turned the Challenge Cup final into a best-of-three series. The Hakoah All-Stars won the first leg against a St Louis entity known as the Madison Kennel Club - the image of a bounding dog sewn onto their shirts - in front of a healthy 18,000 in Missouri. For the second game Brooklyn's Dexter Park, a modest baseball facility, overflowed with eastern fans desperate for top-class action. The New York World reported: