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

by David Wangerin

  Nobody was sure which league would prove the more popular, or which teams were likely to attract the most fans, but there was certainly no shortage of tickets to sell, for venues even a casual fan recognised as major league. Inner-city ovals and high school premises were out. Even the smallest ballpark (Temple University's stadium in Philadelphia), held 20,000. Both New York clubs rented Yankee Stadium, accepting the baseball team's insistence that games should be postponed when it rained to protect the playing surface. In Los Angeles, the Wolves and Toros shared the 93,000-seat Coliseum. St Louis, Oakland and Atlanta all occupied freshly constructed, 50,000-seat multipurpose stadiums.

  As the 22 professional clubs began their quest for the leisure dollar, major league baseball looked anxiously over its shoulder. Commissioner William Eckert spent much of the spring pondering the implications of baseball owners dabbling in soccer. The presence of a new summer game had divided his fraternity. The New York Mets refused to allow soccer on their diamond, fearing, among other things, damage to the playing surface (no mean feat considering the club didn't even own the stadium). Others, including Eckert, were more concerned about the potential conflict of interest - described by the New York Times as 'public relations damage in "downgrading" the relative importance of baseball'. The Times was sufficiently alarmed to claim: 'If soccer thrives under the projected set-up, it can do so only at baseball's expense.'

  But this was a tangled weave of financial interests. CBS, which had the contract to televise the NPSL, had also taken ownership of Yankees, then a poor team at a time of slumping spectator interest. In 1966, average Yankees crowds barely reached 14,000, the worst the club had experienced since the war. Yet this was still better than many - longstanding teams in Chicago, Philadelphia and Cincinnati were drawing fewer than 10,000 at home. To some baseball owners, `economic diversification' was seen as a necessity. These were, after all, men whose bottom-line mentality had attracted them to soccer in the first place.

  For the time being, baseball would need to co-exist with its new rival, and the stadiums which accommodated both sports posed the same idiosyncratic problems soccer had endured from its earliest days. The dirt of the baseball infield was not turfed over, meaning that play in certain areas could disappear into a cloud of dust. Playing dimensions and sightlines were often compromised. The layout at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh produced particularly awful vantage points, especially from the coveted seats behind baseball's home plate. Baltimore's Memorial Stadium had trouble fitting even the gridiron pitch (considerably narrower than soccer's) into its playing confines, and at such a skew that two of the corners verged perilously near the stands.

  These were familiar problems to CBS, which had shown NFL contests at many of the facilities, and indeed had telecast every league game since 1962. The network had developed a variety of innovations to engage the viewer, including the action replay, which it introduced at a college game in 1963. Now they proclaimed their soccer telecasts to be the first anywhere in the world to be regularly broadcast in colour. This was no public relations puffery, since even the NFLwas still often shown in blackand-white. For NPSL matches, CBS deployed six cameras: two covering the majority of play from near the halfway line, one behind a goal, two level with the edge of the penalty area and one roaming the touchline. This was more than had been used for even the biggest matches abroad, but it wasn't far removed from what gridiron viewers had come to expect. The network paired the versatile Jack Whitaker, one of its top commentators, with the Northern Ireland international Danny Blanchflower, who had turned to journalism after finishing his career with Tottenham in 1964. They were faced with the daunting task of educating and entertaining a potentially enormous audience of neophytes.

  CBS faced another substantial problem: where to fit in its commercial breaks. In the late 1950s, television had persuaded the NFL to concoct 'TV time-outs', stoppages designed solely for commercials. But these had been accommodated simply by lengthening the breaks that were a conventional part of gridiron. Soccer offered no such possibility, leaving the league to contemplate some limited form of innovation. Indeed, the NPSL was keen to make its product as television-friendly as possible, plastering enormous numbers across the front as well as the back of the playing strips and adopting squad numbers (if anything was likely to alienate US fans, it was numbering players by their position). Some teams even stitched players' surnames across the back, as was becoming common in other sports. The New York Generals chose their club colours advisedly: dark green and gold, matching the dominant gridiron team of the era, the Green Bay Packers (they were 'good colours for television', John Pinto claimed). And for the millions still without colour sets, the league even adhered to the American tradition of opposing teams wearing light and dark coloured jerseys.

  Who would be wearing them still wasn't entirely clear a few weeks before kick-off. The Generals conducted their pre-season training on a high school pitch in Florida, guided by Freddie Goodwin, a one-time county cricketer and former manager of Scunthorpe United, whose playing career had included spells at Manchester United and Leeds and who later took Birmingham City back to the First Division. Goodwin's polyglot team, with its Italian, Danish, West Indian, Yugoslav and English unknowns, was little different from others in the league. While it was pointed out that almost all of them knew at least some English, it was rather less clear how well they could play. For the Generals in particular this was critical, operating as they did in a city which knew good soccer from bad, and whose hugely influential media was likely to make or break the entire venture. Yet the haste of the NPSL in advancing their start-up date had forced the Generals and their rivals into a mad, desperate rush for players.

  Marketing departments shifted into high gear. The Stokers took out a full-page advertisement in the Cleveland Press to introduce the city to their team and the sport ('soccer is partly football, partly hockey, totally exciting'), while in the Chicago Tribune the hometown Spurs promised 'Excitement! Thrills! Bone-bruising action at Soldier Field!' Both Time and Newsweek ran features on what one of them termed 'the most popular sport in the world, outside of girl watching'. Yet it was hard to know just what buttons to push. In his book Nice Guys Finish Last, Paul Gardner observed:

  In the midst of this uncharted sea, there were just two signposts that everyone recognised. One read 'Pele', the other 'World Cup'. The idea was to use them as much as possible in publicity releases, even if it meant dragging them in by the scruff of their necks. Players were described as 'Haitian World Cup stars' or 'Jamaican World Cup stars', countries that had never got past the preliminary rounds of that competition ... The Baltimore Bays described their new player, Hipolito Chilinque, as formerly of 'Cruzeiro in Brazil's first division. Cruzeiro pulled the Brazilian soccer upset of the year last season when they beat Santos in the Brazilian Cup Final. Pele, the greatest soccer player in the world, stars for Santos.'

  With less than three weeks to go before his team's first match, John Pinto openly confessed to the New York Times: 'I hope by opening day I'll know enough about the game to enjoy it.'

  The build-up reached its peak on April 16, 1967, the most ambitious day soccer in America had ever seen. All ten NPSL teams took to the field - and were greeted by largely empty seats. Those who turned up in Philadelphia to watch the Spartans play the Toronto Falcons came closest to representing a capacity crowd, though the attendance of 14,200 still left the stadium one-third empty. Amid threats of tornadoes at Soldier Field, the Chicago Spurs drew just 4,700. The Generals attracted 7,800, half of what they had expected for their first match, if close to what they professed would be an acceptable season average. Presciently, the New York Times noted those who had turned up included 'a large percentage of young marrieds, as well as fathers and sons', which contrasted with the 'older group of fans' who usually turned out for soccer.

  The signs were more encouraging in St Louis a week later. Although the city's professional league had long since collapsed (one source claims the 'entire soccer struct
ure disintegrated' after 1953), the 34,000 tickets sold for the home debut of the St Louis Stars hinted at a latent interest. But rain spoiled the big day, and since the match doubled as a charity fund-raiser it wasn't clear how many had really considered going in the first place. The 21,000 who attended the Stars' first match turned out to be the club's biggest gate of the season.

  The league put on a brave face, declaring itself 'pleasantly surprised and frankly delighted by the size of the crowds which have turned out'. This might have been true, and certainly any early disappointments could have been overcome if television had established itself as a strong promotional tool. CBS had boldly anticipated an audience of seven million for their weekly broadcasts. Yet their first game, Baltimore v Atlanta, saw Whitaker and Blanchflower trying to play up a catastrophically low-scoring contest, won by a single goal from the hometown Bays. The arrival of warmer weather to the snow belt produced no rush to the turnstiles. In fact, the league's expectation that interest would grow over the season proved entirely unfounded. By June, the Generals were playing to a crowd of only 2,000 against Toronto; Pittsburgh v Atlanta drew less than 2,500; and the pitiful Chicago Spurs attracted just 870 to a match with the Los Angeles Toros.

  Two weeks into the NPSL season, the USA began its sanctioned' minileague'. Yet it, too, found it hard to sustain attention. The 34,965 who visited the new Astrodome for the Houston Stars' first match against the Los Angeles Wolves might have been an impressive figure (for the first league match anywhere in the world to be played on plastic grass), but the real attraction was not soccer but the stadium itself: the 'Eighth Wonder of the World', with its $2 million scoreboard, padded seats, bar and restaurant, and space-age glamour. The Astrodome proved to be the biggest draw in either league, though by the time of the Stars' final home game crowds had dropped to 12,000 - a reasonable average, but one nurtured more by the promotional antics of judge Hofheinz than his Brazilian tenants.

  Elsewhere, the New York Skyliners struggled along with the Generals. Nearly 21,000 turned up for the team's first appearance in Yankee Stadium, but fewer than 6,000 returned for the next, and by early July the figure had dropped to 3,500. In Detroit, attendance at Cougars matches slumped from 11,600 to just 648, while Boston's gates twice dipped below four figures. The Chicago Mustangs, no more able to attract fans to Comiskey Park than the Spurs had to Soldier Field, thought that promising to field a team full of Americans the following season might boost their plummeting gates (it didn't). Even in Washington, where attendance was expected to be boosted by soccer fanatics on Embassy Row, the Whips - Aberdeen in disguise - failed to exceed 10,000 for any of their six games.

  Thus did pro soccer lumber through 1967, left with little more than gimmicks to redress its fortunes. Baltimore featured roving trad-jazz combos at Bays games; the Whips offered babysitting services, free soccer hosiery and even female 'Whipettes' to roam the stands (if proof were ever needed of the relative innocence of the 1960s, the presence of 'Whipettes' at a sporting contest is surely it). Shocking pink uniforms, half-time penalty competitions, ticket discounts, 'ethnic nights' - the owners clutched at straws, and the public steadfastly kept away.

  To make matters worse, uneven refereeing and the muggy summer air fuelled a number of on-field melees and pitch invasions, particularly in the USA. Pitting Glentoran of Northern Ireland against Shamrock Rovers of the Republic, as the league had done in the form of the Detroit Cougars and Boston Rovers, always carried the potential for trouble, though when sparks flew the first time the two clubs met, sectarianism was not to blame. After a last-minute Cougars goal was disallowed for offside, Detroit player-manager John Colrain was reported for punching a linesman, an offence which produced a hefty suspension from league commissioner Walsh. (The affair is said to have so enraged Colrain, who denied striking the official, that when the club travelled to San Francisco a few weeks later he sent Walsh a postcard of Alcatraz on which he wrote 'Wish you were here'.)

  Two weeks later the Cougars were in trouble again when a spiteful match with the Houston Stars disintegrated into a free-for-all. When fans stormed the pitch and players began uprooting corner flags to use as weapons, the match was abandoned ('in the interests of life and limb' according to the Detroit Free Press). There was rarely a dull moment with the Cougars. The Northern Ireland champions later found themselves entering Yankee Stadium behind an Irish tricolour, grinding pre-match festivities to an embarrassing halt. Despite all this the official centenary publication of the Irish Football Association rated Glentoran's presentable results as 'a highly successful series' and they were welcomed home to a 'phenomenal' reception from crowds lining the streets from Belfast City Hall to their Oval ground.

  In New York, a match between the Skyliners (Cerro) and Mustangs (Cagliari) was abandoned after fans took to the field in protest over a referee's decision and began chasing him around the pitch. 'Fleeing for his life, like some rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, the referee stumbled and fell at first base on the baseball diamond,' read an account in the London Times. 'There was a small, grotesque riot. The match was abandoned while the subway trains rumbled by and the music blared out The Stars and Stripes [Forever] to restore order. And all the while the truncheons of the cops were flying.' However unsavoury, the incident wasn't enough to chasten the Mustangs. Two days later, away to Toronto City (Hibernian), they found themselves at the centre of more crowd trouble. When the home team scored from a quickly taken free-kick, manager Manlio Scopigno removed his team in protest, prompting another pitch invasion and another abandonment. Scopigno was dismissed as Cagliari's manager on the team's return to Italy, allegedly because of his team's behaviour in America that summer.

  While the USA struggled with the competence of its match officials and the behaviour of just about everyone else, the NPSL had problems of its own. CBS had figured out how to work in commercial breaks for its Sunday Game ofthe Week, but these had not been as seamless as expected. The network had equipped the referee with an electronic device which it activated whenever it wanted to cut away for an advert. The referee was to comply by prolonging the next stoppage in play, only resuming when a man on the touchline signalled the all-clear. This somewhat cumbersome system seemed to work for a few weeks until the English referee of the match between Toronto and Pittsburgh, Peter Rhodes, admitted to having 'made up' 11 fouls to help fit in the breaks. Rhodes later claimed to have been misquoted, insisting that he had merely extended genuine stoppages, though at least one report alleged he had been seen holding down a prostrate player. Rhodes also divulged that league referees had been told to speak to both teams before the match to emphasise the need for 'co-operation'. The incident was serious enough to arouse the attention of the Federal Communications Commission, but CBS was eventually cleared of misleading its audience.

  Not that there had been many to mislead. As the NPSL season wound down, the game's novelty appeal vanished. Pittsburgh's last match attracted just 892. The Toros ended their home campaign before 2,339 - or 90,661 empty seats. And the Generals, who had spent much of the season with the worst record in the league, finished up in front of 2,821. CBS's audience, reasonably encouraging at first, had nose-dived. Armchair viewers found the game hard going, and the temptation to change channels difficult to resist. After the first telecast, Arthur Daley wrote in the New York Times:

  The soccer game whisked into view sharp and clear, with the orange uniforms of Baltimore - or did they wear the red? - and the other uniforms of Atlanta in sharp contrast to the deep green grass of the Baltimore Stadium field. Everyone was an unknown and the action had no compelling interest. A flick of the wrist, and Richie Allen was hitting a home run for the Phils, Charlie Smith was making a super-spectacular stop of a liner and [Wilt] Chamberlain was wolfing in rebounds.

  The paper's TV critic was similarly dismissive:

  Occasionally there were moments of exotic footwork and team co-ordination that explain the success of soccer elsewhere. But on the whole the patches of tension an
d excitement were so infrequent that it took a notable sense of duty not to sample competing sports attractions on other channels.

  Such discontent had not yet produced the sort of bilious antipathy the game would soon provoke from more reactionary elements of the media, perhaps culminating in Dick Young of the New York Daily News referring to it as a 'game for commie pansies'. Soccer in the 1960s was not yet to be feared, it was merely strange. Devoid of natural stoppages, with no readily discernible tactics or 'plays' and - worst of all - notoriously low scores, it bewildered more than it annoyed. Those whose curiosity had been pricked found it difficult to see what each team was trying to do with the ball or discern a pattern to the game, deficiencies made all the more apparent in near-empty stadiums and amplified by the comments of CBS's Blanchflower, who, to the horror of both league and network, openly disparaged the standard of play.

  Though some gates had been more reasonable than the owners' expectations, recriminations were not long in coming. The 'foreign' nature of the sport was called to account. Could real Americans get behind a team with players named Trond Hoftvedt and Zeev Zeltser, who spoke English only haltingly or with largely impenetrable accents? (Baltimore's match programme had even resorted to offering a pronunciation guide to the names of the Bays' players.) And it lacked scoring. Would fans learn to enjoy the more subtle elements of play - running off the ball, perhaps, or the telepathy of a strong central defensive partnership? Could they come to appreciate a 1-0 victory, the way they could for baseball?