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

by David Wangerin

  Yet Scottish football's exceptionally strong ties to the States were loosening. Though they had sent across teams of various descriptions in 1935 and 1939, four decades now passed before they did so again. The 1949 tour was the most extensive of the US ever undertaken by a British national team and a convincing representation at that. The squad included Derby's Billy Steel and Rangers' Willie Waddell in attack, and hardly anyone who was not either an international or about to become one. Needless to say, they won without much trouble - even in the 35-degree heat of Philadelphia they claimed an 8-1 win over the local all-stars. Here too, competition seemed to be of less importance than gastronomy. The Herald correspondent noted that the touring players were more often than not 'in a paradise of food ... The helpings are enormous compared to our austerity standards.'

  Of course, not everything was as impressive. The 'generally narrow and bumpy' pitches with their 'great bare patches caused by the exertions of the baseball players' left the Herald to ruefully conclude that soccer in America would 'never attain world ranking until the pitches are developed exclusively for football'. Other native predilections were treated with similar disapproval:

  The Scottish players have now become used to the American pre-match ceremonial which involves a procession with the players included and then their announcement one by one via the loudspeaker. Each man comes out to the applause of the crowd ... the Scots, however, cannot become accustomed to the announcer who every few minutes during a game bawls out some elementary (to the Scots) commentary about a decision or the identity of the man who just kicked the ball.

  The modest success of the foreign tours may have helped put a few dollars in the USSFA's pocket, but they did little to raise the standard of domestic play. At the London Olympics of 1948, the performance of the US team was not nearly as noteworthy as that of the association, which by the usual excruciating means unveiled yet another ill-prepared squad. A shortlist of about 5,000 players, whittled down through several months of trial matches and committee decisions, resulted in the final unit arriving in Brentford without so much as a training session to its name. Poland's withdrawal from the tournament left the Americans once again facing Italy (a startlingly recurring opponent) and another heavy defeat. The USSFA Olympic Soccer Committee's post-mortem is an archetype of austerity and naivety (not to mention poor grammar):

  Naturally, that 9-0 score is discouraging but the USSFA should be proud of the US Olympic soccer team. All ofthem conducted themselves as gentlemen and sportsman and made many friend for the United States in London and the other places they visited... If at all possible, the US Olympic team should be assembled several weeks prior to sailing so that combination play could be developed. Our team can compete on a equal basis with most of the countries entered in the Olympics but we must give the team a chance to practice as a unit.

  The report pointed with pride to a 2-0 defeat of a Korean XI in a friendly ('much to the surprise of many of the teams from other countries') but was less forthcoming on the trouncings the team received on the journey home: 11-0 to Norway in Oslo, a loss described only as being 'by a onesided score', and 5-0 in Belfast to a Northern Ireland XI which 'fielded six professional players'.

  It hardly suggested that the national team's greatest achievement was just around the corner, although when the time came to qualify for the 1950 World Cup in Brazil there was at least the nucleus of an Olympic team to work with. Midfielder Walter Bahr had grown up in Philadelphia's soccer-friendly Kensington district, becoming a star for Temple University before joining the ASL's Philadelphia Nationals. Charlie Colombo, an archetypal tough-as-nails centre-half, came from the Italian section of St Louis known as The Hill or La Montagna (sometimes denoted as Dago Hill on city maps of the time), and helped the Simpkins Ford club to an Open Cup triumph in 1948. Inside-forward John Souza of Fall River, better known as Clarkie, was probably the most talented player in the team, exceptionally agile and unusually comfortable with the ball at his feet.

  To get to Brazil, all the Americans had to do was finish first or second in a three-team North American qualifying tournament, albeit one which took place entirely in Mexico in the space of 17 days. With the Mexicans likely to qualify no matter where they played, both the US and the other participant, Cuba, were apparently happy to play away from home for the extra gate money.

  Finishing second in a three-nation tournament may have seemed achievable, but this was an American team that hadn't scored a goal in a full international since the war. Hopes receded further after the opening match, a 6-0 trouncing by the hosts in the thin air and midday heat of Mexico City, a result which quickly ruled out any thoughts of first place. But what really mattered was how much further Cuba had succumbed to baseball. In an attempt to revive their country's flagging soccer interest, the Cubans had in 1947 staged a North American Championship, but attendance was so pitiful the tournament was abandoned. The US had sent a 'national' team in the form of Ponta Delgada, the Fall River club that had won both the Amateur and Open Cups that year, but they were hopelessly outmanned. Such was the USSFA's gratitude that Ponta found themselves financing the trip out of their own pocket.

  Now, two years later, those championships were revived with World Cup berths at stake. In their first match against Cuba the Americans managed a goal - their first in more than nine hours of international play - and held on for a 1-1 draw. More importantly, they discovered that the Cubans were beatable. Although a 6-2 defeat in the return match with the Tricolores wrapped up the North American championship for the hosts, it offered further signs of US progress - some reports even claimed the scoreline had flattered the winners. By the time of the final, decisive match, the American team had grown used to the Mexico City air, and to each other. Largely through the eccentricities of a reserve Cuban goalkeeper, they scored four before half-time and held on for a 5-2 win, qualifying for Brazil on the back of what would ultimately be recognised as their only international victory in 15 years.

  The novel experience of an extended run of matches for the same group of players had helped, but the American team had not spent its days in Mexico as one big, happy family. Its manager, Walter Giesler of St Louis - the author of the misleading 1948 Olympic report - was also president of the USSFA, and, as with Elmer Schroeder decades earlier, team selection carried a pungent whiff of favouritism. One Chicago soccer paper bitterly insisted that 'full-time use of four St Louis players killed all chances of harmony on the team ... Only loyalty to their country prevented a walkout and an early return home by certain players and officials.'

  Striker Jack Hynes of the New York Americans, an ever-present in Mexico City, harboured similar reservations but made the mistake of voicing them to a journalist friend. When his mild criticism -'A postcard from Jacky Hynes in Mexico thinks that we could have fielded a better team' - accidentally ended up in print, the USSFA responded hysterically. Hynes, who had played well in Mexico and was certainly one of the country's best forwards, was never chosen again.

  One of Hynes's striking partners, Ben McLaughlin of Philadelphia, didn't go to Brazil either, but only because he couldn't get time off work. Pete Matevich of Chicago, who had scored twice in the win over Cuba, also stayed at home. In fact, only six players from Mexico ended up at the World Cup. Even those who were selected had other jobs to work around: delivering the mail, designing carpets, stripping wallpaper. Six of the final 17 were from St Louis, the city in which the final trial match had been staged, and from where Giesler also obtained his trainer, Bill 'Chubby' Lyons.

  Bahr, Colombo and Souza were in the squad, as were striker Gino Pariani and Harry Keough, a St Louis amateur full-back who later admitted he owed his place to Giesler. Of the other three St Louisans, goalkeeper Frank Borghi and forward Frank Wallace had played in Mexico. Christened Valicenti, Wallace was better known as Pee Wee. He, Colombo, Pariani and Borghi all played for the Simpkins Ford club that had claimed the Open Cup that year. Two of them had something else in common: Wallace had spent more than a
year in a German POW camp after his tank had been set on fire at Anzio and Borghi had been decorated for his actions as a field medic in Normandy, having enlisted at 19. Wide-eyed youngsters they were not.

  All of them played every minute in Brazil, as did an eccentric 25-yearold centre-forward named Joe Gaetjens, who had not gone to Mexico. Born in Port-au-Prince, Gaetjens had come to New York on a scholarship from the Haitian government to attend Columbia University. He was not an American citizen, though he had obtained papers denoting an intent to become one. That was enough for the USSFA - that and the 18 goals he had scored for Brookhattan in the ASL over the season. And, at the time, what was good enough for the USSFA was good enough for FIFA.

  Gaetjens was joined by two others in similar circumstances: Scottishborn Ed Mcllvenny, who had been on Wrexham's books before joining the Philadelphia Nationals; and Joe Maca, who had played in the Belgian Third Division and emigrated to New York after the war. Few of the others were foreign-born. The most notable was Adam Wolanin, once of the Polish first division but now a naturalised American citizen playing in Chicago, and who in any case featured in only one match.

  This motley collection did not suffer the usual fate of meeting each other for the first time on their way out of the country, though the two test matches arranged by the USSFA hardly amounted to methodical preparation. Against touring Besiktas in St Louis, before barely 2,000 fans, the Americans lost 5-0 in a match which saw several of the eastern players substituted early in the second half to enable them to catch flights home. `Coach Eric Keen of the Turkish team said he expected to find more skill in the American players,' reported Dent McSkimming, who also remarked that `few individuals in the United States team appeared to advantage'. Things changed when the team reconvened a few weeks later in New York. Fielding the same line-up that would begin their World Cup campaign, the US held a touring English FA XI - which included Nat Lofthouse and Stanley Matthews - to a 1-0 victory (a result achieved in blue-and-white quartered jerseys emblazoned with an 'H', thought to have been borrowed from the ASL's Brooklyn Hakoah team). It was true that the English tourists had played 12 games in little over a month, though scorelines like the 19-1 defeat they handed a team in Saskatoon suggest they were far from taxed, and four of their players who had been named in the World Cup squad had left for home early.

  The US coach, Bill Jeffrey, did not set much store by the result. Chosen from the university ranks and appointed less than two weeks before the team set out on its 30-hour, six-airport expedition to Brazil, he was a hasty replacement for the original candidate, Erno Schwarcz. Born in Edinburgh, Jeffrey might have ended up playing in the Scottish League had he not suffered the double misfortune of an injury and a disapproving mother. Sent to live with an uncle in Pennsylvania, he found work as a railway mechanic and became involved in the works team. His success there eventually led to a coaching position at Penn State College, where he stayed for 27 years. His 1935 side - which had benefited from an enlightening, if humbling, tour of his native country the year before - went through the entire season without so much as conceding a goal, and in 1951 he honoured a request from the US State Department to send his team on a goodwill tour of Iran.

  Making waves in the peculiar world of college soccer may not have qualified Jeffrey to run a World Cup team (Penn State conceded 64 goals during their eight-match 1934 Scottish tour), but in American circles few coaches were more widely respected, or would leave a greater legacy. Well after his death in 1966 - from a heart attack at a coaching conference - the instructional book Jeffrey wrote during the early part of his tenure, The Boys With the Educated Feet, could be seen in the offices of novice American coaches desperate for college-friendly instructional material.

  The soft-spoken Scotsman freely admitted his team stood no chance in Brazil, and his squad, unashamedly aware of its amateur standing in a world of professionals, seemed to be characterised by a gallows humour. Team-mates christened Borghi 'the Six-Goal Wonder', and with no trace of irony - holding opponents to half a dozen goals was considered a mark of his talent. A lanky man with huge hands, Borghi was a hearse driver by trade. By his own admission he was not much of a soccer player, and had aspired to play professional baseball. His name did not appear on the USSF's initial shortlist, and many expected Gino Gardissanich, the Most Valuable Player of the National League of Chicago, to make the starting line-up. But Borghi's natural hand-eye co-ordination and ball-handling ability, honed by his brief career on minor-league baseball diamonds, overcame many of his technical deficiencies, and that spring they had helped Simpkins Ford to the Open Cup.

  Before the mighty upset of England there was Spain - a match largely forgotten in the light of what followed, but one remarkable enough in its own right. Pariani gave the US an early lead, which they held for over an hour before tiring and, in the last ten minutes, collapsing: Spain scored three times to win 3-1. The capitulation might partly be attributed to the 30-minute halves the St Louis leagues still adhered to, but for a team used to losing to lesser opposition by margins two or three times as great, it was a creditable performance. Not only had the team shown its tenacity and spirit, the scoreline had flushed them with confidence. Without this, it's hard to imagine the US not being overwhelmed by England.

  Only one member of the American press corps turned up in Brazil, on his own time and largely at his own expense. Dent McSkimming, steadfast 53-year-old correspondent of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, was one of the few US journalists even aware of the significance of the competition. A well-travelled, erudite man, McSkimming had covered soccer for decades, and with a devotion few could match. In the 1920s, he had taken leave of absence from his newspaper job and worked in the engine room of a merchant ship bound for England, home of the Football League. McSkimming preferred watching from an isolated part of the ground to the disconcerting chatter of the press-box. ('I never meant to be anti-social, but I couldn't cover a game while listening to a political argument, a baseball discussion or anything else ... Turn your head a second and you've missed what could be important action.') His presence in Brazil was similarly inconspicuous, since the Post-Dispatch ungratefully printed his reports without a byline.

  In the run-up to England's encounter with the US, the altogether more abundant English press corps had taken up a familiar refrain, with the correspondent of the Daily Herald boasting that sportswriters here consider England to be more superior scientifically than any visiting team seen to date'. A 2-0 win over Chile had done nothing to dispel such claims, and against a team of part-timers begging to be termed plucky there was no reason to expect anything short of a cakewalk. When the Americans arrived at the Independencia Stadium - some wearing Stetsons, some chomping on cigars - they were largely a source of bemusement to the international press, who knew virtually nothing about any of them.

  The Americans, in turn, knew almost nothing about international soccer. Indeed, their greatest weapon in this match, as Maca later claimed, may have been their naivety. While the full-back from Brussels might have fretted over the prospect of facing Finney, Wright and Mortensen, such names meant little to his US-born team-mates. Even the puzzling - or, as some claim, presumptuous - absence of Stanley Matthews from the England team-sheet may not have carried much weight. Few of the Americans, after all, had ever seen him play.

  The scoreline carved out on the bumpy, barren surface of the Independencia, with its treacherous cinder track hugging the touchlines, owed as much to woeful English finishing as to American grit. Borghi, in a curious combination of short sleeves and knee-pads, saved impressively from Wilf Mannion early on, but was a helpless spectator during several near-misses. That his sheet remained clean with half an hour gone seemed something of a fluke; even after he clawed Tom Finney's header over the bar, a deluge of England goals seemed inevitable. England may have been profligate, but they underestimated their opponents' resolve. They also had to contend with a predominantly hostile crowd whose affections for the underdog grew with each scoreless minute.
Even the tamest of shots from Pariani, flying straight into the arms of Bert Williams, drew lusty cheers of encouragement.

  The goal came seven minutes before half-time. Bahr received a throwin on the right and, under pressure from Billy Wright, took aim from 25 yards. The next anyone knew, Williams had been wrong-footed and the ball was in the net. Prostrate on the ground lay Gaetjens, who may or may not have deliberately flung himself at the speculative effort. Whether he stumbled or launched himself headfirst is not clear and doubtless never will be. But he had made contact - if only just, with the side of his head - and his team entered the dingy dressing-rooms a goal to the good.

  The English later complained of 'gremlins in the goal', but for all their good fortune the Americans had marked tightly and defended capably. They were anchored by two decent full-backs: Keough, wise beyond his 22 years, and Maca, who had lined up for Belgium against Jimmy Mullen and England in 1946 (allegedly prompting the Wolves star to ask him in Belo Horizonte: 'How many countries do you play for?'). There was also the bruising presence of Charlie Colombo, an amateur boxer who eccentrically wore an old pair of boxing mittens whenever he played. Cursing, spitting, kicking and scratching, the mean streak he carried onto the pitch had been made known to Roy Bentley and the other England forwards almost from the first whistle, but he is best remembered for his second-half rugby-tackle on Stan Mortensen, for which he was spared a sending-off by the Italian referee, Generoso Dattilo (conspiracy theorists claim Dattilo was keen to see England lose to boost the chances of his own country, though as it turned out they were eliminated on the same day). Mullen headed the ensuing free-kick goalwards but Borghi scrambled the ball to safety - after it appeared to have crossed the line.