Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  When Woosnam arrived at Upton Park in 1958 he found a club crackling with innovation, debate and sharp footballing minds – many of whom used to spend hours in a local café discussing tactics with the help of salt cellars and ketchup bottles. Woosnam’s teammates included future managers and coaches like Malcolm Allison, John Bond, Ken Brown, Malcolm Musgrove and Noel Cantwell. ‘It was a marvellous time and a great environment to be a part of. My first game was Malcolm’s [Allison] benefit game after he had lost a lung. He was still around the club a fair bit so I got to know him pretty well. There were others in the club who were outstanding football people, strong personalities who didn’t crack when the pressure was on.’

  The culture of Upton Park clearly made its mark on Woosnam, as evidenced by the measures he would introduce to instil a West Ham-type positive attitude in the NASL in future years. ‘We played an attractive brand of soccer at West Ham and it was my best experience in the professional game. The whole attitude of the players towards the game was different to anywhere else. It was the perfect club and a most enjoyable time. You always felt you were learning something. We didn’t win anything but the team was good enough to have won . . . we were leading the First Division for a long time but didn’t sustain it throughout the season.’

  Woosnam already had his eye on a career in management and had qualified as a coach when, in 1960, he was given the chance to take charge at Upton Park. ‘They asked me if I was interested in being player-manager. I said no, but I recommended two people: Ron Greenwood, who I knew from Lilleshall, and Joe Mallett, who had been a coach during my Orient days. Ron got the job.’

  In 1962, Woosnam was on the move, signing for Aston Villa for his final four-year stint in the Football League. He worked as an FA staff coach throughout his spell at Villa Park, but still considered himself a player when the call came to head to America. It was only his desire to keep his word that saw him board the plane for Atlanta after being offered a transfer to Chelsea.

  He explains, ‘The last couple of years at Villa had been hard and I was at that age when I didn’t feel I was in the league to battle relegation every year. It was the summer of 1966 and I thought I had another two or three years and I hoped I could get back into London with a club there. When I couldn’t get a team, I saw a piece in the paper by the sportswriter Clive Toye saying people were coming over to America to start a professional league.’

  Woosnam travelled to London to meet representatives of the new organisation and arranged to visit them in the US. ‘I told Villa I would be going over to America on the Sunday after the opening game of the new season. They didn’t select me for the game because they thought I might not come back.’

  Having attended a league meeting in New York, Woosnam flew south to visit the Atlanta Chiefs. ‘I stayed a week and was impressed. I thought I could learn a lot from the promotion of sports and so on and thought if I stayed a couple of years I could go back into management in England. I felt confident about the success of the Chiefs. The baseball club owned them and that brought other benefits. I felt that we could achieve something with their backing, using their relationship with the public and media.’

  But when Woosnam returned home to tell Villa he was heading to Atlanta as player-coach of the Chiefs he discovered that wheels had been turning in his absence. ‘Tommy Docherty wanted me to sign for Chelsea. He said to Villa that he would like Tony Hateley and me to join him because he had a young team that was developing and needed some experience. Now, I had not signed anything with Atlanta, but I had committed myself verbally and, as much as Chelsea would have been my first choice, I felt I had to go back to Atlanta. They were nice people and I felt obligated to them. By that time I had already asked Vic Crowe and Peter McParland to come over.’

  Woosnam believed that the impending collapse of the sport after the 1968 season would see him heading back to Britain. ‘I thought it was the end as far as most of us were concerned. I didn’t know what to tell the players. Would we be able to play another season? If we did, would they be invited to stay on? I was prepared to go back home.’

  Then came the plea to Woosnam to make a last-ditch effort to keep as many of the 17 NASL teams in the fold as possible. ‘I went to see all the owners and told them, “Don’t give up yet. You can’t expect it to happen in two years.” Because the salaries weren’t enormous in those days they couldn’t have been losing that much money. Some believed and some didn’t.’

  As he embarked on his rescue mission, Woosnam admitted to reporters that his club had lost $250,00 in two years, less than some. He added, ‘We have developed the Atlanta area as we expected, but this has not happened elsewhere.’ Woosnam’s comments were directed at those teams who had expected instant returns and were not prepared to invest in the future by getting more youngsters involved in the sport. ‘In about 50 per cent of the cities they had set up grassroots programmes but in the others they just wanted to win a game and that was it.’

  The approach taken by Woosnam had received endorsement during the summer of 1968 by his old friend Malcolm Allison. Having observed the American scene at close quarters, the Manchester City coach commented, ‘Phil Woosnam in Atlanta is probably the only one with the right idea. He has gone and got kids interested. It’s what you must do and what the Americans will have to do if they want the game to survive.’

  Ironically, Allison’s City had experienced the improved on-field quality of the NASL during 1968, losing twice to Atlanta and also to Oakland. After the initial 3–2 loss against the Chiefs, Allison claimed their opponents had been of Fourth Division standard and that such a freak result could not happen again. It did, the Chiefs winning 2–1. Peter McParland remembers, ‘We wanted to beat them badly because Malcolm was shooting his mouth off and we thought we had better shut him up. We had something to prove.’

  The Chiefs’ efforts to introduce soccer to children in Atlanta had been driven, not by the club as a long-term tactic, but by the players themselves. Woosnam recalls, ‘We taught the club exactly what they needed to do off the field. The club leadership was among ourselves, the players. The guys had great personalities and were outstanding in the community. Ron Newman led the charge to establish youth soccer in the city – maybe because of need, as there were a number of players with sons who wanted to play. We recruited players who were interested in that side of things.’

  Unsure whether his Dallas team would last the winter, Newman decided to use his time fruitfully instead of sitting around waiting for the results of Woosnam’s tour. Having been the instigator of the Atlanta youth programme, he set about developing a similar movement in his new home town. ‘You couldn’t get uniforms, balls or anything in the stores at that time,’ Newman recounts. ‘My young son, Guy, who had just started playing in England before I moved over, came to me one day with a list of names. He had recruited these kids to play, but there was no one to play against. An American friend said, “Let’s start a league.” He put an ad in the paper and we told people to report at seven o’clock and pretty soon we were overflowing. I had to rush off and get some teammates to help out. We counted out 12 boys and gave them to this player and 12 to the next.’

  Having also recruited fathers to help out with coaching and refereeing, Newman’s next task was to find somewhere to play. ‘There were no soccer fields. I went with Ronnie Foster, who played for Leyton Orient when I was there, to make one at my son’s school. The principal said we could use a field at the back of the school. I remember marking out the pitch in the freezing cold on a Monday. Then it pissed down on Wednesday so I had to do it again ready for Saturday. But by Saturday, the school district had put a baseball diamond in the middle of the field! I remember the head man of the recreation areas of Dallas saying to me, “If you could see all the teams looking for baseball fields you would know why I did it.” I said, “In a few years’ time all those fields will be obsolete because soccer here is going to be bigger than baseball.” Three years later I bumped into him and he said, “You were
right. I can’t get enough soccer fields. I thought you were something from outer space saying that.” I used to be a carpenter in the dockyards at Portsmouth so I ended up making the goals for our first game. I thought I did a pretty good job, but then vandals broke them all up. Not out of spite but because they were good to swing on.’

  Newman’s reward would come in the number of soccer balls being kicked around in years to come. By the end of the decade, Atlanta and Dallas had joined the traditional hotbed of St Louis as the focal points for soccer participation in the States. ‘We had more than 60,000 playing in Dallas five years later,’ he explains. ‘It was like giving away five-dollar bills for a dollar. As soon as kids began to play they could not get enough of it. I went to England in our off-season and went to Birmingham to see Umbro. I brought back all these uniforms. I worked out a cost of about five dollars a set and was selling them to the kids for the same price we got them. But I had no idea about the import duty or anything. The socks were nylon and there was a high import duty on that so it turned out costing us more than we were selling the uniforms for. Then I found out we had American mothers coming in and saying the sleeves were short or the shirt was too long. Back home if I had to play centre-forward for Pompey I had to wear a shirt that was twice the size as me and if I was on the wing the shirt was too small. The mums wanted them to fit like Saville Row. I thought, “Just pull them up, tuck them in or cut a bit off!”’

  While Newman was building goalposts and ordering uniforms, Woosnam was having a frustrating time in meeting rooms. In early January 1969, he addressed the ten owners who had not yet abandoned the NASL. Joe Namath and the upstart New York Jets were preparing that week to upset America’s sporting equilibrium by beating the heavily favoured Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, which meant that it passed virtually unnoticed when only five of ten teams allowed themselves to be counted in for the 1969 NASL season.

  Ten of the previous season’s seventeen franchises folded completely during the winter of 1968–69, while Oakland, renamed as the California Clippers, embarked on an exhibition schedule and the Chicago Mustangs dropped down to the semi-professional National Soccer League. Not surprisingly, CBS cancelled its NASL television contract.

  The five remaining NASL owners took the inevitable step of asking Woosnam to run the league in the position of commissioner. It appeared a thankless task, but the Welshman accepted eagerly. ‘I looked on it as a great challenge and I wouldn’t have done it unless I believed we were going to succeed. Vic Crowe took over at the Chiefs, so I knew the club was in great hands.’

  The one offer from home that could have changed Woosnam’s decision never materialised. ‘There was a group of people threatening to buy Villa, who had got into serious financial trouble. They were talking about me as manager but in the end they didn’t make a decision and didn’t buy the club. At that time I probably would have taken that job.’

  Woosnam enlisted Clive Toye, the former Daily Express writer and Baltimore general manager, as his second-in-command. Toye had abandoned Fleet Street in search of a new challenge after the excitement of reporting on England’s World Cup triumph and had remained close to Woosnam during his battles to keep the NASL afloat. ‘We ended up opening the new league office in the visitors’ locker room of Atlanta stadium,’ he explains. ‘We spent hours on the phone talking and it seemed natural we would end up working together. Phil, being a mystical Welshman, felt a sense of mission and in my case it was plain bloody-mindedness, a determination to make people like soccer.’

  Toye had been offered his position in Baltimore through his close relationship with those setting up the original NPSL, but admits to surprise at how undeveloped the soccer scene had been when he arrived in America. ‘I’d had no idea of just how unknown and unwanted soccer was. There was an absolute lack of knowledge. They couldn’t even spell “soccer”. East of Mississippi there was only one store where you could buy soccer equipment. I felt that in the first two years a number of owners were in it only to have more dates in the stadium and as a self-protection measure just in case it took off. Once it was apparent it was not going to spread like wildfire they said, “Sod it. Let’s get out.”’

  With owners having done exactly that, Woosnam and Toye demanded that the five surviving clubs drastically reduce player salaries and other operating costs so that annual budgets could be held at a manageable $200,000 per team. The next task was to construct a season, but the uncertainty over the future of the league meant that clubs did not have complete rosters. Woosnam played for time by splitting the season into two halves, the first of which was a throwback to the USA season of 1967 with each club to be represented by an imported team from Britain. The hope was that the high quality of play would help create momentum going into the second half of the season.

  Woosnam spent the early part of 1969 visiting Britain to line up teams to play in the US. Gordon Jago, with whom he was now coaching America’s World Cup team, accompanied him. The first half of the season was to be staged as the International Cup, with the Atlanta Chiefs represented by Second Division Aston Villa. West Ham turned out on behalf of the Baltimore Bays, flying out their World Cup heroes Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore and Martin Peters after England’s 4–1 thumping of Scotland in the Home International Championship. Two years after winning the USA crown for Los Angeles, Wolves were back as the Kansas City Spurs. Kilmarnock became the St Louis Stars, while Dundee United reprised their role of two years earlier as the Dallas Tornado. ‘The teams got good money to play out there and we used our personal contacts to get the ones we wanted,’ says Jago. ‘With his background, Phil obviously wanted Aston Villa, while I had always supported West Ham and their manager, Ron Greenwood, was a personal friend.’

  FIFA gave approval for the tournament to be used as a testing ground for a change to the offside law, with no player ruled offside from a direct free-kick. The results would be inconclusive and the response mixed. West Ham manager Ron Greenwood said during the event, ‘We see no real advantage in ruling out offside as the kick is taken. The Americans are confident they can sell this idea but I have my doubts.’

  A typical view of the NASL’s tinkering was expressed by Wolves coach Sammy Chung, who said, ‘It seems crazy that the Americans are looking for ways to change a sport that is fast enough for millions everywhere else while they leave the sport of baseball untouched. For some reason, no one has ever thought of speeding that up.’

  Woosnam’s belief that the International Cup would deliver success at the gate was mistaken. West Ham, who had finished eighth in Division One, opened up against Wolves in front of just over 5,000 fans in Baltimore. The low point came in Dallas, where Dundee United and Kilmarnock, fifth and fourth respectively in the previous Scottish League season, fought out an exciting 3–3 draw in front of fewer than 200 people. Jago recalls, ‘We thought that West Ham, with Bobby Moore and their World Cup players, would be a massive draw but they weren’t to the Americans. Sports fans in America relate so much to money, which is why in later years people went to see Pelé. They heard how much money he was earning so they thought he must be an attraction.’

  On the field, Wolves repeated their success of two years earlier, winning six of their eight games in the colours of Kansas City and scoring twenty-five goals in the process. Five of those goals were scored by England Under-23 international Peter Knowles in what was virtually the swansong of his career. The talented midfielder, whose good looks had made him something of a heart-throb with female fans, would play his last game for Wolves in September of that year, claiming that he had lost faith in football and found it outside the game. He retired to devote himself to life as a Jehovah’s Witness. Those religious beliefs also caused an etiquette problem in the States as he refused to stand for the American national anthem before kick-off.

  With Knowles in full flow, Wolves enabled Kansas City to finish five points ahead of Baltimore’s Hammers. Greenwood’s side won five games, including a 6–1 win against Dundee United (Dallas) that fea
tured a Trevor Brooking hat-trick. The Wolves players were made honorary citizens of Kansas City for their efforts, while Chung put their success down to the serious way in which they had approached the games. ‘I consider there is no such thing as a friendly,’ he stated. ‘One has to drill the killer instinct into the side.’

  The failure of the international teams to attract sufficient fans claimed a victim even before the second half of the season kicked off when, at a league meeting in Dallas, Baltimore owner Jerold Hoffberger broke the news that the team would finish the season and then close.

  ‘Hoffberger said quietly to me that we would be closing and told me not to tell anyone,’ says Jago. ‘He felt that if we couldn’t draw with West Ham we wouldn’t draw with our own players. It was purely a business decision. Like other teams, the owners in Baltimore had seen the 1966 World Cup on television and thought, “This looks good. Let’s get on with it. If it doesn’t work we can just go back to baseball.” The plan was to cut back everywhere and quietly close down at the end of the season. It was a deliberate move to take the sport under.’

  Hoffberger was the owner of the Colt 45 beer company and the Baltimore Orioles baseball team and Jago, whose lame-duck side won only two of their sixteen games, believes he was forced to play the fall guy to protect the owner’s credibility and the image of his other business concerns. ‘The Baltimore owners felt they did not want criticism. They moved us from Memorial Stadium to a high school and then tore up the car park there for repairs. It was a rough inner-city area and people would not go to the games there and leave their cars on the street. I respected the owner, respected his decision, and I took a lot of stick. I remember at one game hearing a foreign voice shout, “Go home to your Queen Elizabeth!” I was getting stick in the papers as well, but I couldn’t just say, “Sorry, we don’t have any money because we are closing down.”’