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

by David Wangerin

  There were 21,583 persons in the enclosure, officially, and it is a safe estimate that approximately 150 of them, mostly policemen, saw all the game. The remaining customers had a look at the first ten minutes of the first half, if they were lucky, but very little after that. No soccer game ever played in the national championships in this country had drawn such a crowd before yesterday's performance. The sprawling green stands of the Dexter Park arena were packed with tugging and cussing humanity while the hills roundabout were black, white or indifferent, as the case may be, with canny neighbors who saw their soccer without the painful necessity of giving up a dollar. Probably those perched on the terraced reaches of Cypress Hills Cemetery saw more of the game than those in the box seats in the grandstand. Certainly they saw no less.

  It was an unlikely conclusion to the most difficult year the professional game had known. In staving off brickbats and threats, injunctions and lawsuits (including a $25,000 libel action from Agar, which was eventually thrown out), and the very real possibility of its own insolvency, the USFA also seemed obsessed with vanquishing its enemies - especially Agar, whom it perceived as its chief nemesis. Interest in the association's professional offering had been patchy, since most clubs were unable to attract the crowds of 2,000 to 3,000 necessary to break even. Cahill's boast early in 1929 that `the signing-off time for the ASL is near' proved wholly inaccurate as both leagues prepared for a second season in the trenches.

  The ASL's position was no less tenuous. Its gates were just as poor and the entire league creaked under the weight of its outlaw status. In attempting to lure Motherwell across for a summer tour it learned the value of affiliation when the Scottish FA stepped in to block the visit. This lack of international support might have eventually placed the league in a more conciliatory frame of mind, but the sight of anxious players jumping to the sanctioned league only inflamed the antagonism. The case of ex-Hakoah Vienna star Josef Eisenhoffer, who didn't seem entirely sure which league he wanted to play in, was dragged through the New York court system. Clubs were as skittish as the players: the Eastern League lost its presence in Philadelphia but recruited a club in Bridgeport, Connecticut; the ASL soon moved its Bridgeport franchise to Philadelphia and Agar created a Hakoah team of his own in Brooklyn. New Bedford returned to the ASL in time for the new season. Fans could scarcely be expected to keep it all straight.

  The breakthrough finally came in September 1930, by which time Cunningham and Cahill had disappeared from view and Sam Mark - who had assumed ownership of the struggling Boston franchise as well as his Marksmen - had stepped forward to help broker a peace. The reunified outcome, diplomatically branded the Atlantic Coast League, looked very similar to the ASL before the soccer war had started. All the outlaws were invited back in, including Agar, who merged his two clubs. Bethlehem and the New York Giants were included, while Bridgeport joined for a short time but ended up in Newark.

  In November the reconciled factions began their season, but now outside events conspired to destroy the structures fatally weakened by the infighting. Two weeks earlier Wall Street had gone into free-fall, with consequences few could anticipate. The Great Depression would not reach its nadir until 1933, but soon even the most resilient of American sports were suffering along with the economy. Attendances at major league baseball fell from a record of more than ten million in 1930 to about 3.5 million in 1932, while even successful college gridiron teams saw their gate receipts drop by up to 40 per cent.

  At first the ASL attributed its loss of revenue to the after-effects of the soccer war, believing fans were still disillusioned. In the main, they were broke. By 1932 more than a quarter of the national workforce was unemployed, a statistic keenly felt in most of the soccer enclaves. Disillusion did cause some to leave the game, most notably the Lewis brothers, whose Bethlehem Steel team played its final competitive match away to the Hakoah All-Stars on April 27, 1930, a 3-2 defeat watched by 3,500. It was enough, too, for the ageing Cahill, who resigned as USFA secretary days after the Steel disbanded in 1931. Unable to translate his energy and enthusiasm for the game into a lasting legacy, the man who St Louis newspapers still proclaimed as 'the father of American soccer' was mercifully left to witness the ASL's death-spiral from a distance.

  The Newark Star-Eagle offered this less than glowing epitaph in 1931:

  After plugging along for twenty years in promoting soccer, the dream of Tom Cahill has failed to materialize. He visualised packed stadia in attending the championship finals - oh, yes, as high as 50,000, yet when the title contenders played the deciding game this season only 5,000 crowded a band-box park ... It was his belief that soccer would eventually become America's major winter sport. In the far distant future he saw organized teams grouped into leagues similar to major league baseball. In fact, he tried to put that idea across with cities now represented in the two big leagues. However, the necessary capital was not forthcoming with the result that the game's most ardent supporter was forced to clip his own wings. Whenever Cahill reviewed his plans he was told that the weather elements were the biggest handicap in the progress of soccer along the lines he had arranged. Nevertheless the oldtimers refused to believe that even rain, snow or sleet could hinder the development of the sport. He always held out for weekly crowds of at least 50,000. Simply a matter of miscalculation on Cahill's part.

  With only one defeat all season, Fall River comfortably claimed the first - and only - Atlantic Coast League championship, scoring 84 times in 27 matches. Part of their success was the result of a new striking partnership which featured two locally-born young men: Bert Patenaude and Billy Gonsalves. Both were destined for fame on an international stage, but the 44 league goals the pair scored that season was the first significant achievement of their celebrated careers. Gonsalves's name is indelibly linked to Challenge Cup finals of the 1930s, when he played in eight in a row, with five different teams. The first was in 1930, when Fall River easily disposed of the Bruell Insurance club of Cleveland - or the Cleveland Hungarians, depending on the newspaper - in the bestof-three final series. But the Depression had already bitten hard in the Spindle City (the city of Fall River filed for bankruptcy in 1931) and the halcyon days of the Marksmen were at an end. 'Despite the fact that the Fall River team performed a feat unheard of in American soccer, that of winning every title possible in one season,' the Fall River Herald News lamented, the fans have adopted a "don't care" attitude that does not make the future of the game here look any too promising.'

  But had the Marksmen actually won the league that May? After the soccer war, things were often not as they seemed, and the 1929-30 season had not ended in the spring. It resumed in September - under the more familiar banner of the American Soccer League - as the second of two halves, even though Bethlehem had departed and a club from Newark had joined. The New York Giants were still there, but they were now Charley Stoneham's New York Nationals - the original Giants had been sold and become the New York Soccer Club. When Fall River won the second half of the league, on percentage points from New Bedford, the championship series was once again scrapped. It had been perhaps the longest season in the history of organised sport - 14 months, stretched across three years.

  Amid the chaos, Sam Mark claimed one last hurrah. By February 1931 he had given up on Fall River and merged the Marksmen with New York SC. Hoping to catch some of Babe Ruth's mystique, he renamed the team the Yankees. With Mark's Stadium empty, it wasn't long before a consortium of businessmen - including Harold Brittan, now selling cars - bought the Providence franchise and shipped it down the coast as the Fall River Field Club. But within a few months both the Yankees and the Field Club disappeared. The relocation of the Marksmen had come too late for the Challenge Cup, with the USFA insisting the team play under their old name for as far as they progressed. Largely on the goalscoring strengths of Patenaude (13 goals in eight games) and Gonsalves (nine) they reached the final, by which time everyone but the USFA had come to know them as the Yankees. Certainly on the day of t
he final they were Yankees down to their uniforms, with the New York press feting the club as its own.

  The Yankees/ Marksmen won the best-of-three final against Chicago's Bricklayers, but there were no spectacular crowds. Humble Sparta Field, in the heart of Chicago's Bohemian district, drew 4,500 for the deciding match, won by Mark's club with just ten players - captain Alec McNab broke his arm in a midweek friendly and the club had not brought along any reserves. Patenaude, who had scored five times in the first game, a 6-2 win at the Polo Grounds, added another in the third as his depleted team won 2-0. This, a fourth Challenge Cup triumph in eight seasons, was officially the Marksmen's last game, though virtually no one recognises it as such.

  The desperate situation became still more fragmented the following year, with clubs merging and folding as the league struggled for breath. By the autumn of 1931 Mark had moved his failing Yankees to New Bedford, but in vain. He then turned his back on the game altogether, to spend most of the rest of his life operating nightclubs, leaving the stadium that bore his name to eventually fall into decay.

  One of the last matches of the league's original incarnation also proved to be one of the most remarkable. The New York Giants won the spring half of the league and New Bedford the autumn, necessitating the first championship series in three years. Gonsalves, now with the Whalers, scored twice in an 8-3 victory in New England. Three days later the Giants, who had acquired Patenaude following the Yankees' demise, scored six without reply, overturning the five-goal deficit to claim the championship 9-8 on aggregate.

  This amazing result - witnessed by just 3,000, and not at the Polo Grounds but the more humble Starlight Park - handed Stoneham what proved to be his only league honour. His colourful life, which came to an end in 1936, continued to be punctuated by court appearances and allegations of impropriety. Control of the baseball team passed to his son Horace, who infamously moved it to San Francisco in 1957. Partly as a result of this the Polo Grounds were demolished in 1964 - not without sentiment, but with scant acknowledgement from the nostalgic sporting fraternity that it still held the record crowd for a soccer match in America.

  Another ASL, effectively a new organisation, emerged from the abyss of the Depression, devotedly propped up by hyphenated-Americans whose passion for the game far outstripped their financial wherewithal. But the American Menace had long since been tamed, and no one was under any illusions about establishing the'national pastime of the winter'. Soccer's bid for widespread acceptance, modest even at the height of the Golden Age, had failed, and other winter diversions such as basketball and ice hockey would soon cast it into decades of unremitting obscurity. The Golden Age had produced no bullion.

  3. Strangers on a Boat

  False dawns and hard landings for the national team

  This is all we needed to make the game go in the United States.

  Bill Jeffrey, Brazil, 1950

  f any sporting occasion was tailor-made for Hollywood, this was surely it: the strange afternoon of June 29, 1950 when the United States upset England at the World Cup. In spite of its place in football history, and the worldwide attention it continued to receive, the match had remained stubbornly obscure to most of America - including, it seemed, its entertainment industry. Finally, in the spring of 2005, came a feature-length chance to enlighten the uninitiated: The Game Of Their Lives. Directed by David Anspaugh, who could lay claim to a number of popular sports dramas, the film was shot on location in St Louis and Brazil, and made use of a number of ex-professional players as technical consultants and extras. To soccer fans, it was all very exciting: the most famous day in America's World Cup history at last committed to celluloid.

  Panned by critics, Lives proved to be a box-office disaster. In its first weekend it grossed only $175,000 -roughly 131 times less than the Nicole Kidman film The Interpreter and even five times less than the US release of a Hindi film, Waqt: The Race Against Time, both of which opened the same day. It sank without trace. The famous soccer episode may at last have been brought to a mainstream American audience - with the usual artistic licence - but the nation was not the slightest bit interested in hearing it.

  Little seemed to have changed in 55 years. The day after Belo Horizonte, the country's reaction had been similarly underwhelming. US sports pages were, as usual, preoccupied with baseball: the Boston Red Sox had defeated the Philadelphia Athletics 22-14 to set an American League record for total runs in a game, and the Negro Leagues had impudently signed two white players to turn the tables on the majors. America had become a country which spoke of soccer in the same breath as fencing or water polo, and its interest in faraway international competition was largely limited to the Olympics. Although the White House had held receptions for sporting heroes and hopefuls from the time of Theodore Roosevelt, the US's humble World Cup entry received no presidential well-wishing on their departure and no congratulations on their return. (Admittedly Harry Truman did have rather a lot on his mind: the day after the match he had sent troops into Korea to resist the North's attack across the 38th parallel.)

  The victory over England was all the more remarkable since it came at a time when the domestic game had fallen into one of its most barren eras. Belo Horizonte did not represent the culmination of a series of promising results, nor did it spark anything remotely comparable in the decades that followed. It was not planned and American soccer could not build on it, a missed opportunity that echoed those involving the national team at other momentous World Cups 20 years earlier and 20 years later. All of this was a matter for regret, but it served to make the achievement of its unheralded team all the more commendable - and incredible.

  Some have argued that America's 1950 entry was a lot better than most give it credit for, and the result far less astonishing than, for example, North Korea's 1-0 defeat of Italy in 1966. Certainly that upset is far better documented. Most of those who witnessed the 1950 match are dead. The winning goal has not been preserved on film or even in a decent photograph; no one is even sure of all the jersey numbers worn by the US team. The North Koreans of 1966 were a well-drilled unit of pseudo-professionals who had prepared for the World Cup with the support of their government and the public. Their victory was aided by the fact that the Italians lost their captain to an injury before half-time, in the era before substitutions. America's result was achieved by semi-professional and amateur players who had played together only briefly, men who earned their living outside soccer and succeeded more in spite of than because of their country's infrastructure. And they had reached Brazil on the back of a single qualifying victory - the first for the US in a full international since 1934, it would later be determined. Whether the England team they faced in Belo Horizonte was in decline, propped up by reputation rather than form, is irrelevant. Had the Americans beaten anybody in Brazil, it would have been almost as astonishing.

  England had played 256 internationals before stepping onto the patchy, bumpy pitch ofthe Independencia Stadium, but Belo Horizonte was their first against the US. No one knew how many matches the Americans had played, let alone how many had been official. Nobody had bothered to log them - and nobody would for some time to come. There had been only a few dozen, scattered thinly across the years, and two of them occurred before the United States Soccer Federation even existed.

  The team which first represented the US, against Canada in 1885, 28 years before the current federation was formed, consisted entirely of players came from the Kearny area of New Jersey, including five from the famed ONT team. The match took place at ONT's field, before a crowd of 2,000 ('some 60 of whom were ladies', according to the New York Times). The Canadians won with the only goal of the match. A year later, on Thanksgiving Day, the two countries met again at the same place, and the Americans won 3-2. These were, by most accounts, fierce contests: the Times reported that in the inaugural game 'two of the players indulged in a regular fist fight'.

  It was another 30 years before the United States played its first recognised international, an
d 38 before they contested one at home. In the meantime, soccer - with 30-minute halves - was played in a rather constrained fashion at the St Louis Olympics of 1904, where more than 80 per cent of the participants were from the host nation. Two American entries, one a local college, the other a local club, competed against Gait FC of Ontario, who took the gold medal.

  The national team's official debut took place in the unlikely setting of Sweden during the First World War, with Thomas Cahill firmly in command. The visit came about after Cahill, in his capacity as USFA secretary, sent a copy of Spalding's Soccer Football Guide, the bible of its day, to the secretary of the Swedish National Gymnastic and Sporting Association, Christian Ludvig Kornerup. Replying in memorably understated prose, Kornerup confided that the thought had occurred to him that it would be a good thing if the United States could send a team to Sweden. Cahill took the comments at face value and, receiving belated confirmation from Stockholm, hastily arranged a tour. He accompanied the team as its manager and even served as a linesman on what was later recognised as its international debut.

  But he did not choose the squad. The USFA's 'national and international games committee' was pressed into action for its first serious undertaking, and produced a selection far more national in scope than that which had appeared in Kearny three decades earlier, even including a representative from the west, Matt Diederichsen of St Louis. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle looked at the selections favourably:

  It is generally conceded that the team is about as good a combination as could reasonably be expected to make the trip and will without doubt give a good account of itself. Emphasis has been placed on the speed of the Yankees to offset the superior brawn of the Scandinavian players, who are noted for their muscular development and strength.