‘And America was an exciting, far-away place, somewhere we had never had the chance to play before. To go there and live in the Washington Hilton for a couple of months, to play in an indoor stadium like the Houston Astrodome, to be flying to every game, to go to Disneyland and see Andy Williams in concert – it was all so different to anything we had known before. Personally, it was fantastic as well. I was looking to establish myself in the team and I had just finished a physical education course. I was allowed to get off school three weeks early as long as I came back and did a month’s unpaid teaching.’
The welcome extended to the teams when they arrived in the US lived up to the travellers’ hopes. Glentoran’s players were led to the airport terminal across a red carpet by the St Andrews Pipe Band of Detroit. While such receptions were designed to make their guests feel at home, it was going to take more than modified kits, with gridiron-style numbers on shirt-fronts, to make the players think of themselves as Cougars or Stokers. ‘We knew we were representing Washington and in public we talked about the Whips,’ says Clark. ‘But we still thought of ourselves as Aberdeen playing against Dundee or Hibernian.’
And the Americans’ lack of knowledge about the sport was still very evident. Clark adds, ‘People would see our Washington Whips bags with the WW logo and the words “soccer team” and not even know what that was. They’d ask us, “What’s a saucer team?” I think it went over their heads when we told them we were playing in the Cup!’
Newman experienced similar bewilderment among the people of Georgia. ‘As soon as we got to Atlanta they wanted us to go into a parade through town. We rushed to get into our uniforms, got on the parade float and a horse and cart started pulling us down the road. People were looking at us as though we were circus freaks. Nobody there had even seen a soccer ball. I thought, “This is ridiculous.” I jumped off the float, got a ball and started to interact with the people along the route, flicking and heading the ball backwards and forwards to the kids. A couple of the other lads saw what I was doing and followed suit. We became the hit of the parade.’
One of Newman’s teammates was former Northern Ireland winger Peter McParland, who recalls, ‘The first thing the locals taught us was how to eat a hamburger properly. The follow-up was that we got invited to all these barbecue evenings and all these ladies would come up and say they played soccer at school. It seemed to be only ladies playing over there.’
The NPSL’s persuasive arguments to potential recruits about future FIFA recognition put it in a position to launch a month before the rival league’s imported teams arrived in the US. Woosnam, who in his joint role of coach and general manager was responsible for signing up players for the Chiefs, says, ‘Maybe we were all put on a blacklist. But I believed we were doing it right, whereas the other league was just bringing in teams and therefore not doing anything of any value to the community. I thought our league would be in the stronger position with FIFA. Not one player we tried to sign turned us down.’
McParland adds, ‘They told us that it was always on the cards that FIFA would recognise the league in the long run and that we would not be on a blacklist. I was coming towards the end of my career anyway, so I didn’t feel I was taking a gamble. And it was not a bunch of cowboys who were backing the league.’
Doubts remained, however, about the quality of the players whose services had been secured. The ten NPSL teams were stocked mostly by signings from Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe, the dominant nations being West Germany and Yugoslavia. Only eight genuine American players would get on the field during the season.
The British contingent was small and included few recognisable names. Several of them had already been in North America, playing semi-professionally in Canada, and most of the better-known Football League exports found themselves at Atlanta under Woosnam, the former Wales forward. Capped 17 times by his country, Woosnam had played more than 100 League games for each of West Ham, Leyton Orient and Aston Villa and his influence was obvious in the composition of the Chiefs squad. Goalkeeper Vic Rouse was a fellow Wales international, earning one cap while playing 238 league games for Crystal Palace. Brian Hughes had racked up more than 200 games for West Ham and ex-Aston Villa wing-half Vic Crowe had played 16 times for the Welsh side. Winger Ray Bloomfield boasted a handful of games for Villa, while the biggest name on the roster was McParland, another Villa veteran. Scorer of 98 goals in 293 League games, he was one of Northern Ireland’s most celebrated players, having earned 34 caps after being spotted in the League of Ireland at Dundalk. His finest hour had been the 1958 World Cup, when he scored five goals as his country reached the quarter-finals. A year earlier he had scored both Villa goals in the FA Cup final victory against Manchester United, although he was more widely remembered for the challenge on Ray Wood that left the United goalkeeper hobbling on the wing.
A fast, direct goal-scoring winger, McParland also won the Second Division title and League Cup with Villa before moving on to Wolverhampton and Plymouth. Woosnam recalls, ‘He had been playing for Worcester when I played with him in a kick-around game in some kind of summer celebration and I thought, “Peter can still play.” He was only 32 when he came out to America and he did exceptionally well. He had a wobbly knee and we had to leave him out for certain games, but he had two great years.’
Elsewhere, the New York Generals’ line-up included George Kirby, who had scored 188 goals in a seven-club Football League career, and Roy Hartle, who played 446 League games for Bolton. In goal was former Wolves and Aston Villa man Geoff Sidebottom, whose renowned bravery would eventually force his retirement in 1971 after suffering a third concussion in two seasons with Brighton. Coaching the team was Freddie Goodwin, the former Manchester United and Leeds wing-half, who would soon become manager of a Birmingham City team that won promotion to Division One and reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup.
The Oakland Clippers fielded former Brentford and Chelsea centre-half Melvyn Scott and ex-Brentford and Millwall winger Barry Rowan, while the Philadelphia Spartans included Liverpool-born wing-half John Best, whose six games for Tranmere were the extent of his Football League experience. Alongside him in defence was Peter Short, another Liverpudlian, who would score both the Spartans’ goals in their opening-game victory over Toronto. Best and Short were destined to join the group of players who would carve out long and successful careers in the US. While Best would go on to serve as a coach and general manager, Short would end his playing career ten years and seven teams later and then undertake three stints as an NASL head coach. (In February 1984, Short was shot dead in Los Angeles at the age of 39 after discovering two teenagers breaking into his car.)
Playing the majority of the games in goal for the Toronto Falcons was former Scotland international Bill Brown, the last line of defence in the Spurs team that completed the Football League and FA Cup Double in 1961. After losing his place in the side following Pat Jennings’s arrival from Watford, he had spent one season at Northampton before trying his luck in America.
The most recognisable figure among the British ex-pats was former Manchester United forward and ‘Busby Babe’ Dennis Viollet, now 33 years old. A survivor of the Munich air crash, which had taken the lives of eight of his youthful and talented teammates, Viollet totalled 159 goals in 259 League games for Manchester United, including a club record 32 in a single season. It was a mystery that he was rewarded with only two England caps, and it was his love of socialising that was thought to be behind United’s surprise decision to sell him to Stoke City in 1961.
The new era of professional football in the United States kicked off on 16 April 1967, the day after Scotland’s 3–2 victory over England at Wembley had them proclaiming themselves champions of the world. In the NPSL’s season opener, Woosnam’s Chiefs met Viollet’s Bays in front of a modest crowd of 8,434 in Baltimore. It was hardly the kind of game to have the fans battering at the doors of the ticket office for future presentations. A dour defensive battle was won 1–0 by the home side –
exactly the kind of game the NPSL had hoped to guard against by adopting a scoring system that had the purists cringing. Teams would receive six points for a win, three for a draw and a bonus point for every goal scored, up to a maximum of three per game.
CBS approached its weekly live broadcasts of NPSL action with the slogan ‘Just For Kicks!’ But, sitting alongside respected American commentator Jack Whitaker, Tottenham and Northern Ireland legend Danny Blanchflower was in no mood to patronise the viewers. As a man who had captained Spurs to the Double and won 56 international caps, he had his credibility to protect and told it like it was – which meant week after week of often-brutal criticism of the games. It did not help matters when referee Peter Rhodes admitted that 11 of the 21 free-kicks he awarded in the televised Toronto-Pittsburgh match were to allow CBS to work in commercial breaks. At one point he even appeared to push down a player who was trying to get up because the ad break had not finished. Television ratings and crowds slumped as the season progressed, producing a final average attendance of 4,879 per game.
But, for all its faults and in-fighting, at least soccer was back on the US scene. While Hurst’s hat-trick had sewn the final seeds of what would eventually become the NASL, it was, strictly speaking, only a rebirth of the sport on the professional level in America. The first guys to be paid for kicking a round ball in the United States had picked up their pay cheques more than three-quarters of a century earlier.
Largely a game played by upper-class college types as the second half of the nineteenth century came around, soccer had established itself at elite colleges like Yale, Columbia and Cornell, only for those establishments to follow Harvard’s lead in switching to rugby, which developed into America’s own helmeted version of football. But the working-class communities, their populations increased by the influx of large numbers of immigrant workers, ensured that soccer continued and regional leagues developed across the country.
The involvement of corporate sponsors meant that some players were being paid to play on a semi-professional basis and, buoyed by America’s participation in the 1904 Olympics, the NASL operated from 1906 to 1921, the first professional league to achieve any longevity in North America.
The American Soccer League arrived on the scene in 1921, built around the richer clubs from the existing semi-professional circuit, and regularly achieved crowds of 10,000. The ASL even provided a taste of things to come in the NASL by signing several British players. Scotland international Tommy Muirhead arrived from Rangers as player-manager of the Boston Wonder Workers and then secured the services of national teammate Alex McNab from Morton, who was paid $25 a week and given a job at the Wonder Works factory.
By the end of the 1920s, however, the ASL had fallen out with the USSFA over the scheduling of fixtures and was suspended by the governing body, thereby becoming an unauthorised competition. As clubs jumped from one league to another and the stock market crash took away financial backing, the first coming of professional soccer in the US was on borrowed time. Before long, the sport was back to a structure of regional amateur competitions. Even the famous 1950 victory of the USA team over England in the World Cup finals in Brazil failed to bring any significant change. Although the International Soccer League, a competition between visiting foreign teams, began in 1960 and continued for six seasons, it did so in a low-key manner that gained little attention inside or beyond the North American borders.
The 1966 World Cup, however, had apparently changed all that, yet soccer’s summer of ’67 failed to make the anticipated impact. Anyone heading to San Francisco, for example, did so with flowers in their hair, a Gales soccer game coming a poor second to hanging out in the Haight-Ashbury district listening to The Beatles. The trend was repeated around the country.
For those who cared enough to notice, the NPSL’s Western Division was dominated by the Oakland Clippers, who won 19 of 32 games and finished 29 points ahead of the St Louis Stars. The Eastern Division featured a much closer race, with Baltimore and Philadelphia finishing with identical records of 14 wins and 9 draws and the Bays qualifying for the two-legged final by virtue of their bonus points. George Kirby proved to be the most prolific scorer among the British contingent, netting 14 goals for New York and adding two assists, the name given to key contributions in setting up a goal.
Baltimore, with former Derby County and Torquay United goalkeeper Terry Adlington between the sticks, had kept ten clean sheets during the season and did so again in the first leg of the final as Viollet’s individual effort produced the only goal in front of 16,619 fans in Baltimore. Coached by former Ipswich Town inside-forward Doug Millward, the Bays were overpowered in the second leg as Oakland’s Yugoslav midfielder Dragan Djukic scored a hat-trick in a 4–1 win.
The USA, with its traditional points-scoring and ‘teams-in-disguise’ format, was a little more successful than its rival at the gate. On 1 May, the day after Muhammad Ali had been stripped of his world heavyweight title for resisting the US military’s call to go and fight in Vietnam, almost 35,000 saw Wolves draw against the Brazilian Houston Stars in the opening game. The season would produce an overall average attendance of 7,890, with Houston the biggest draw at 19,802 per game and the Boston Rovers trailing in last with an average of 4,171, proving that it needed more than an Irish team to bring out the crowds. Boston’s home game against San Francisco attracted only 853 paying customers to the Manning Bowl in Lynn, Massachusetts, but even that beat the 648 who turned out in a Detroit thunderstorm for the all-Irish battle between the Cougars, from Glentoran, and the visiting Rovers.
Northern Irish champions Glentoran, despite enjoying only moderate success with three wins and six draws, were one of the more colourful teams on the circuit. In their first game, at Boston, player-manager John Colrain was accused of having punched a linesman after he ruled out a goal for offside late in the 1–1 draw. It was the second Detroit goal the linesman had disallowed. Colrain, a former Celtic and Ipswich forward, claimed he had merely shaken his fist and inadvertently made contact with the flag, but he was suspended indefinitely by the USA. Glentoran argued there had been no official investigation and took their case to FIFA, yet Colrain was still banned for the next two games.
There was a controversial finish in the rematch, with Boston bitterly protesting the penalty award that gave Detroit victory, but that was nothing compared with the chaos when Brazilian side Bangu (Houston) visited the University Stadium of Detroit. The Brazilians held a 2–0 lead with 17 minutes left in a bad-tempered game and eventually the contest degenerated into a free-for-all, with some of the Bangu players even grabbing corner flags to use as weapons. The referee abandoned the game and the USA, apportioning blame equally between the two teams, allowed the result to stand. The same evening saw the match between Cagliari (Chicago) and Uruguayan team Cerro (New York) called off with three minutes remaining at Yankee Stadium after a disputed foul led to both sets of players exchanging punches. Even members of the 10,000 crowd invaded the pitch to participate as the referee and his linesmen fled the scene. There was more fighting in Glentoran’s meeting with Stoke, which saw the Irish forward Danny Trainor and Stoke defender Tony Allen dismissed six minutes from time.
Meanwhile, four wins in their first six games meant the Los Angeles Wolves were always on course to take the USA’s Western Division title. Their angular Northern Ireland centre-forward Derek Dougan scored in three successive victories and Ernie Hunt finished as the team’s top scorer with four goals. The defence never conceded more than one goal until the division title was just about wrapped up. Near the foot of the division, Sunderland won only three games as the Vancouver Royal Canadians, while Dundee United had only three victories in the colours of the Dallas Tornado. ‘We took it seriously enough,’ says Sunderland striker John O’Hare. ‘We just weren’t a very good side at that time. It was not through lack of commitment.’
In the Eastern Division, the Cleveland Stokers remained unbeaten in their first seven games before winning only one of their
final five matches to finish second in the table. Peter Dobing’s seven goals made him the leading scorer among the British teams, while Hibernian’s Peter Cormack was on target five times for third-placed Toronto City. Winners of the division were Aberdeen, the Washington Whips, for whom Jim Storrie top-scored with five goals.
‘We had a group of very good young players at that time,’ recalls goalkeeper Bobby Clark. ‘Martin Buchan was on his way to becoming a world-class defender and was later transferred to Manchester United. Jimmy Smith, who went on to Newcastle, was a terrier in midfield, and at the back Francis Munro had a great summer. One of the reasons Wolves signed him was because they saw how well he played against them in America.’
Fans back in Scotland followed their team’s exploits closely. ‘I did a daily report for the Daily Record and somebody else did one for the Press and Journal,’ Clark explains. ‘People were very excited about hearing where we were playing. It was pretty big news at the time for a team like Aberdeen to be over there playing at places like the Astrodome.’
In other British cities, interest in their team’s overseas exploits was less evident. ‘Hardly anyone from Sunderland knew we were even out there,’ says O’Hare. ‘We didn’t have any press travelling with us and I don’t remember any coverage.’
Having won their divisions with identical records, the Wolves and the Whips tossed a coin to see who would host the one-off final, with the Los Angeles Coliseum emerging as the venue. The final brought together teams who had been involved in some of the tournament’s many controversial incidents. During their meeting in Washington, Wolves player David Burnside had aimed a throw-in at Aberdeen’s Munro, hitting the Scottish defender on the head. Munro retaliated by throwing punches and it was Wolves chairman John Ireland, fearful of a public relations disaster, who risked copping a few blows himself by stepping in, pipe still in his mouth, to halt the duel. The teams’ first meeting had ended in a 1–1 draw, but when the Washington management complained that Wolves manager Ronnie Allen had used three outfield substitutes, instead of two plus a goalkeeper, a replay was ordered. The additional game, won 3–0 by the Whips, was slotted into the schedule four days before the sides met again in the final.
Playing for Uncle Sam Page 2
