Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  Six months after more than 61,000 sat in the Coliseum to watch the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs in gridiron’s first Super Bowl, a crowd of 17,824 gathered to witness the USA’s inaugural championship game. It turned out to be a remarkable match. After 63 minutes the teams were locked at 1–1, goals by midfielders Peter Knowles, for Wolves, and Jimmy Smith cancelling each other out. But suddenly the game exploded with four goals in the space of less than four minutes. Clark recalls, ‘There were penalties saved and scored, good goals and bad goals. It was a bizarre situation in a way. It was like a basketball game with all that scoring. But it was one of those games you desperately wanted to win.’

  Twice Wolves hit back to level through Burnside after Munro and Jim Storrie edged their team ahead. According to Munro, ‘Neither side had seemed desperate to make it much more than an exhibition match for the benefit of the locals. Then the burst of goals wiped away the “take it easy” atmosphere. The stadium was in turmoil.’ There was no doubt about how seriously the teams were taking it when Smith was sent off after 80 minutes following a clash with Wolves winger David Wagstaffe, after which Burnside edged Wolves into a 4–3 lead. But with only seconds remaining, Munro equalised for ten-man Washington to take the game into extra-time.

  Wolves scored first in extra-time through Dougan and could have wrapped up victory had Terry Wharton not been denied from the penalty spot by Clark. Once again, it was left to Munro to save the day for Washington, converting a last-gasp penalty to complete his hat-trick and set up a period of sudden-death play in which the first team to score would win. After a total of 126 minutes, Wolves defender Bobby Thomson crossed from the left and Aberdeen defender Ally Shewan deflected the ball off his shins past Clark.

  The Los Angeles Wolves had taken the USA’s first final 6–5. But by the time the champions were boarding their plane back to England, soccer’s accountants were confirming that there had been no real winners in the first year of the sport’s American revival.

  2. Staying Alive

  The return of professional soccer to the United States had clearly not gone according to plan. Some of the teams in the NPSL and USA had returned losses of $500,000. The problem was the age-old one when it came to soccer in the United States. Quite simply, most Americans understood little and cared even less about the sport being served up by the two organisations. Watching the 1966 World Cup on television had been one thing; the audience had bought into the global significance of the event. But that did not mean they would rush out and buy season tickets for their ‘local’ team. Furthermore, the clubs had no real connection to the community. John O’Hare, part of the Sunderland team that represented Vancouver in 1967, says, ‘We didn’t do much to market the team to the Canadians. We should have done more. It was really just the British ex-pats who came to see us.’

  The teams had no history, few American heroes and, as was clear to those who did understand their football, a poor-quality version of the game was being offered. The ethnic groups who had been expected to turn out to watch the sport of their homeland knew a sub-standard product when they saw one.

  The US soccer community could see that on the field there was a clear choice to be made between the fast-track route of bringing in greater quality and quantity of foreign players or taking the more conservative path of growing slowly by developing American players and encouraging greater participation in the sport. The first concern for the team owners, however, was how many of them would still be competing in 1968. The consensus was that the problems of the previous season had been caused by the competition between the two organisations spreading the sport’s fan base too thinly. In December 1967, the leagues took the sensible step of merger and adopted the name originally favoured by the USA.

  The North American Soccer League was born, although it had not been a painless labour. Talks about the proposed merger threatened to become long and drawn out, until an $ 18-million law suit filed by the NPSL against those established football authorities who had tried to isolate them hastened matters to their conclusion. Initially, the new NASL had two commissioners, Dick Walsh and Ken Macker, who had held the posts with the USA and NPSL respectively. Neither came from a soccer background, with Walsh, a renowned baseball administrator, admitting, ‘I hardly even know what a soccer ball looks like.’

  Only 17 of the two leagues’ combined 22 franchises remained, with some teams being moved to prevent having more than one in any market. On the field, a compromise approach was adopted in an attempt to boost the number of home players involved, while at the same time increasing the quality of play. In short, it meant fewer, but better, foreigners, with the number of Americans in the league rising to 30.

  The British contingent at Atlanta was largely unchanged, with Newman moving to Dallas during the season after losing his place in the team. Cleveland retained the name of the Stokers and continued to wear red and white stripes, even though most of their players were no longer from the Potteries. The exception was Stoke’s reserve goalkeeper Paul Shardlow, who played in all 32 games and would die a couple of years later after suffering a heart attack during training in England. With former Liverpool, Newport and Norwich centre-half Norman Low in charge of team affairs, Cleveland were one of eight clubs that had British coaches for at least part of the season.

  Former England international and future national team manager Bobby Robson seemed destined to swell that number after reaching an agreement with the Vancouver Royals before the merger of the two leagues. Meanwhile, however, the San Francisco Gales had made a similar deal with the Hungarian legend Ferenc Puskas. When San Francisco folded and the team’s owners bought a controlling interest in the Vancouver club, it was their man who won the coach’s job. Robson turned down the role of assistant, Vancouver’s loss being Fulham’s and, eventually, Ipswich Town’s gain.

  The situation caused inevitable discomfort among the English players Robson had talked into signing for the club. Among them was Huddersfield defender Peter Dinsdale, who reveals, ‘I left England thinking that I was going to play for Bobby Robson and got to Canada to find I was playing for Puskas. I had met Bobby on a course at Lilleshall. We got talking and I decided it was a good time to go over. I was going over on a ship with my family when I heard that Bobby was made manager of Fulham. It disappointed me when I heard that Puskas was the manager because I wanted to play for Bobby.’

  Among Puskas’s other English charges were full-back Bobby Cram, formerly with West Brom and later to be part of the Colchester United team that upset Leeds in the 1970–71 FA Cup, and former Fulham and Crystal Palace winger Brian ‘Pat’ O’Connell. After winning their first three games, the team finished bottom of the Pacific Conference’s Western Division.

  Dinsdale continues, ‘Bobby had got half the team together and Puskas had got the other half. We got on well, but our playing styles were different. All those years ago, there were two different styles of games. The continental players that Puskas signed were ball players and we were runners and because of that we didn’t gel. Puskas had signed older players who didn’t have the legs any more. The language was a problem as well. We were just not a team. We were two halves put together.’

  Gordon Jago, a former Charlton centre-half from London’s East End who had been coaching at Fulham, jumped at the chance to exchange Craven Cottage for Memorial Stadium in Baltimore to coach the Bays. He explains, ‘I came over the previous year with Fulham to play in the San Francisco area. Well, that’s not a bad city for your first experience of America and I fell in love with what I saw. I got a call from Clive Toye, the former Daily Express writer, who was general manager at Baltimore. He asked if I would like to coach the team and I thought it was a hell of an opportunity. It turned out to be the most difficult two years of my soccer life. We couldn’t spend any money on players. But it hardened me up as a person.’

  The Boston Beacons were coached by former Brighton and Portsmouth full-back Jack Mansell and, one year before he signed for Chelsea, right-b
ack Paddy Mulligan was back in Boston after playing there with Shamrock Rovers the previous summer. The Detroit Cougars line-up featured Jim Standen, whose six seasons at West Ham had brought him a pair of Wembley victories, in the 1964 FA Cup final and the next year’s European Cup-Winners’ cup final. Roy Cheetham had played 127 League games in ten years as a wing-half at Manchester City, while teammates included former Motherwell and Arsenal winger Tommy Coakley and Portsmouth and Millwall centre-half Brian Snowdon. Beginning the season as player-coach was centre-forward Len Julians, whose last English team had been Millwall, where he scored 58 League goals in three seasons.

  In Los Angeles, an all-English defensive unit was being built by coach Ray Wood, the former Huddersfield and Manchester United goalkeeper. Centre-half Tony Knapp, a veteran of more than 200 games for Southampton, was the most experienced of the group. The New York Generals retained Freddie Goodwin as coach and, significantly, included Gordon Bradley, an English wing-half who had not played in the Football League since finishing a stint of 129 League games for Carlisle seven years earlier. The Generals finished out of the play-off picture, but Bradley was to become one of the key figures in New York soccer over the following decade.

  The season’s tale of the bizarre was the Dallas Tornado, who, having been represented by the players of Dundee United the previous year, needed to build a team from scratch. Owners Lamar Hunt and Bill McNutt hired Yugoslav coach Bob Kap and charged him with recruiting a squad. Kap’s approach was to hire a group of inexperienced youngsters, mostly amateurs, from England, Holland and Scandinavia. By the time the Dallas Tornado took the field for their first game of the 1968 NASL season they had already played 45 games on an exhausting winter-long world tour that was designed to turn them into a coherent unit. Travelling through Spain, Morocco, Turkey, Cyprus, Iran, Pakistan, India, Ceylon, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Tahiti, the Tornado won only ten games. As they trekked around the world they waved the US flag and acted as representatives of a country most of their players had not yet seen.

  Ron Newman heard the tales of Kap’s unorthodox methods when he arrived following his mid-season trade from Atlanta. ‘He was weird. The way I heard it, he would put an ad in the local paper wherever he was going, asking for people who had played football. A load of guys would turn up and when he asked who they played for they would say, “Liverpool” and add in a whisper, “Gasworks”. One guy’s mate even turned up with him one day and Kap asked him if he wanted to go on a world tour. It turned out he didn’t even play football! I guess it seemed like a great idea to send the team off all over the world to get experience but later on the money seemed to have disappeared.’

  Whether through inexperience, incompetence or travel sickness, results proved the folly of Kap’s approach. It was not until the 22nd game of the NASL schedule that Dallas gained the first of only two victories. Inevitably, Kap did not last the season, being replaced by Englishman Keith Spurgeon, who had coached Ajax Amsterdam after suffering a serious injury playing for Tottenham. A total of 36 players represented the Tornado in 1968, while Newman, injured early in the season at Atlanta, acted as assistant coach after his arrival.

  The season started with a significant change in the CBS commentary booth, where the network bosses decided they’d had enough of Danny Blanchflower’s straight talking. Had he been retained, however, he would have been passing comment on a vastly superior product. ‘It was a very good standard,’ recalls Phil Woosnam. ‘It was the highest standard we had in the league until the mid-’70s.’

  The league was split into two conferences and four divisions, with Atlanta winning the Eastern Conference’s Atlantic Division on the back of the league’s best defence. The Cleveland Stokers captured the Lakes Division ahead of the Chicago Mustangs, while the Kansas City Spurs prevailed in the Western Conference’s Gulf Division, thanks in part to the 17 goals scored by Irish forward Eric Barber, who had played just three games for Birmingham after signing from Shelbourne. The Pacific Division saw a triumph for the San Diego Toros, whose co-coach was George Curtis, the former Southampton wing-half. The Toros had an identical record to the Oakland Clippers, but San Diego gained one more bonus point to head into a two-legged Conference Championship meeting with Kansas City. In the same division, Los Angeles retained the gold strip of the Wolverhampton team that had won the USA title, but there were few other similarities as they won only 11 of 32 games.

  Having disposed of the Spurs, San Diego’s opponents in the final were Atlanta, who drew 1–1 at fellow division winners Cleveland before winning 2–1 at home three days later with goals by Peter McParland and the South African Kaizer Motaung, later to return to his homeland to form the famous Kaizer Chiefs club. Motaung had been the Chiefs’ top scorer in the regular season with ten goals, one more than former Bournemouth forward Graham Newton. Woosnam had discovered Motaung at Johannesburg’s Orlando Pirates. ‘I had been invited to coach the Zambian team in the summers of 1963 and 1964 and one of the guys I worked with said I ought to go down to Johannesburg to look at a couple of players,’ he explains. ‘One of them was Kaizer. We could hardly hide the fact that we were there watching him because we were the only two white faces in a crowd of 30,000. He made the difference to our team that year. He had immense ability around the box.’

  San Diego went into the final with the ageing Brazilian Vava, a World Cup-winner in 1958 and 1962, accompanied in midfield by Englishman Ray Freeman. After a goalless draw in California, the second leg was played on a rainy night in Georgia, with just under 15,000 in attendance. ‘There was a great atmosphere,’ says McParland. ‘The crowd was very enthusiastic because the city of Atlanta had never won a national title in any sport.’

  It was McParland who scored the first goal in a 3–0 victory, enabling Woosnam to add the NASL title to the Coach of the Year prize he had been awarded. ‘In those days I had a great belief in overlapping defenders,’ he says. ‘One goal came from the full-back going wide on one side and the second came down the other side. For the third goal, Kaizer picked the ball up in the centre circle and went all the way before putting it in the back of the net.’

  Barely had celebrations died down in Atlanta before the realities of the season began to hit home. The league’s budget had been set with a break-even average crowd of 20,000 in mind, yet only 3,400 per game had attended. Vancouver were among the teams in dire financial straits, which meant a shock was in store for Dinsdale and his teammates. ‘We were playing in the Empire Stadium, which held about 40,000, and because we were only getting a few thousand at our games there was talk about the future of the team. But I had a contract for three years and I thought that if I had a contract it would be paid up. But they tore up our contracts and left us with no money and no one to go after to get what we were owed. It turned out that the team was owned by a shell company that had no money in it so our contracts were never paid.’

  Several other owners were poised to desert the NASL’s sinking ship. John Best, who had moved to the Cleveland Stokers after seeing the Philadelphia Spartans close down following the 1967 season, could see the writing on the wall as his new team rattled around with 4,000 fans in a stadium that held 80,000. But he argues, ‘I felt the owners should have been more patient. You have to earn the attendance of fans. There is no God-given right to demand that they come and watch. You have to put all those little building blocks in place, and the pace of growth was a very important thing when you were looking at what was trying to be accomplished.’

  Few, however, were prepared to show such patience in the face of losses that were estimated at $20 million over two years. Besides, at the end of a year that had seen the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, ongoing civil and racial unrest and the presidential election victory of Richard Nixon, there were more important priorities than propping up a ‘foreign’ sport. America’s new soccer league was on the brink of collapse
and it was up to a Welshman to save it.

  3. Man for All Seasons

  Phil Woosnam had always been a little different to most of his peers in professional football. While others spent their late teens and early twenties establishing themselves at their clubs, or falling by the wayside, Woosnam had his nose buried in books as he gained a B.Sc. in physics and maths from the University of Wales in Bangor. And by the time the NASL’s 1968 season ended with the league facing the prospect of collapse, the articulate and intelligent Welshman had shown enough vision, foresight and passion about soccer in America to land himself the role of the sport’s reluctant saviour.

  Woosnam remembers, ‘They kept the league’s problems under wraps until a couple of weeks before the end of the season. I used to attend the league meetings because I was general manager at Atlanta as well as coach, and late in the season was the first time I found out we could be going down from seventeen teams to five. The ringleaders of the remaining clubs at that time were Lamar Hunt, who owned Dallas, and Dick Cecil, who was president of the Atlanta Braves baseball club and the guy I reported to. They asked me to go round the country to all 17 owners and try to persuade them to keep going.’

  It was a far cry from the career Woosnam had imagined for himself when he was turning out as an amateur for Manchester City’s second and third teams – and playing one League game – during his college days. Born in the small Welsh village of Caersws in 1932, Woosnam did not start playing League football regularly until his early twenties when he appeared for Leyton Orient while stationed in London as part of the national service duties that followed his graduation. ‘Orient weren’t Manchester City but they were still a good Third Division team and were up at the top with Alec Stock as manager,’ Woosnam recalls. ‘When I came out of the army I taught at Leyton County High School as well as playing, but I realised that if I didn’t teach any more I might be able to play for a First Division club. So I retired from teaching and when West Ham came in for me I moved five miles across town.’