Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  By the end of the season, the Bays were attracting fewer than 500 for their home games. ‘It was easy to close down then,’ says Jago. ‘We had lost games, not drawn fans and moved into a small stadium. They probably did it the right way. The beer sales and the baseball team didn’t suffer.’

  The 16-game NASL season saw Newman assuming charge of the Dallas Tornado, coaching them to a modest third-place finish. The final table demonstrated the effects of the NASL’s unique scoring system. Atlanta had the best record, with eleven wins and three draws, while Kansas City won ten and drew four. But the Spurs’ 53 goals eclipsed Atlanta’s 46 and the resulting bonus points gave them a 110–109 edge over Vic Crowe’s team to earn their second title of the summer. The St Louis Stars, reflecting the summer’s wave of patriotism that surrounded the success of the Apollo 11 moon mission, chose to include 14 home-grown players in their 18-man squad but won only three games and trailed in attendance with only 2,274 per game. At this stage of the sport’s development, some things were still a giant leap too far.

  4. Bright Lights, Big Cities

  Football fans around the world have little trouble in remembering 1970 as the year of the breathtaking Brazilians. In America, however, the World Cup made little impact. As the tournament neared, an appalled nation was reeling from the killing of four Kent State University students in anti-war demonstrations and watching in grim fascination as Charles Manson and members of his ‘family’ were sentenced to death for the grisly murders of actress Sharon Tate and others. But, unknown even to the country’s soccer faithful, events down Mexico way were about to ensure that the NASL’s tide would turn, eventually carrying some of the world’s biggest stars to America’s shores.

  The demise of the Baltimore Bays had left Phil Woosnam with the task of preventing the NASL being reduced to four teams. He succeeded by persuading the Rochester Lancers and Washington Darts to part with $10,000 each for the privilege of stepping up from the American Soccer League. Ironically, they were to be the two leading teams in the expanded 24-game campaign.

  Coventry City were invited to be a part of the new season, one of four international teams who played against each of the six NASL clubs. The home teams’ results in the four games were to count in the standings. Hertha Berlin, Portugul’s Varzim and Israeli team Petah Tikya were the others who participated, although Dallas Tornado asked to be excused a game against Israeli opponents on account of owner Lamar Hunt’s Arab oil interests. Mexican side Monterrey therefore stepped in for one game. Coventry won five of their six games, while the Washington Darts were awarded the International Cup after two wins and two draws against the foreign opposition. Washington’s team included English defender Chris Dunleavy, who helped his team keep 12 clean sheets and was to be a key figure in another expansion team’s success two years later.

  Vic Rouse took over as head coach in Atlanta, where his team included Dave Metchick, the former Fulham, Orient, Peterborough and Queens Park Rangers midfielder, scorer of eight goals in twenty games. In Dallas, the Tornado had Englishman Ken Cooper in goal for the first of nine seasons with the team, playing behind Dick Hall, a defender with a handful of League games to his name at Bournemouth.

  English-born Alan Rogers was back in the league as head coach of the Kansas City Spurs, having been in charge when the team had been in Chicago in 1967, while newcomers Rochester had NASL veteran Peter Short in defence alongside Scot Charlie Mitchell. Born in Paisley and signed by St Mirren, Mitchell had moved to America and joined the Lancers in 1967. The club’s arrival in the NASL marked the start of his ten-year playing career in the league.

  As Southern Division champions, Washington were heavily fancied to beat the Lancers, who topped the Northern Division despite winning only nine games. But it was Rochester who achieved a decisive 3–0 first-leg victory in the final, clinching the crown when Washington could win only 3–1 in their home leg.

  The overall standard of play was considered to have increased and crowds had risen slightly to an average of 3,600, but it was in Mexico that the NASL had scored its most significant victory. Woosnam explains, ‘We had set a goal to have eight teams in 1971 and we decided we had to go back into New York if we were going to have an impact. By this time I was vice-president of the US Soccer Federation [USSF] because that went with the role of commissioner. The people I met there said, “There are some people within Warner Brothers who have got a tremendous interest in soccer. Two brothers by the name of Ertegun.” To make contact I decided I would go to Mexico for the last week of the World Cup.

  ‘After the final I was trying to find Ron Greenwood, who was over there from England. I went to his hotel and said I was looking for Ron and they told me to try this big reception that was being put on by some guy from America. I went and knocked on the door and a little guy opened it. I said, “Hello. I’m looking for Ron Greenwood, my name is Phil Woosnam.” He said, “Nice to meet you. I’m Nesuhi Ertegun.” I laughed and said, “I have been waiting to meet you for six weeks.” It was fortunate timing.’

  Ertegun was executive vice-president of Atlantic Records, a subsidiary of Warner Communications. Coming from a Turkish background, he was a huge soccer fan and arranged to meet up with Woosnam when they returned to New York, along with his brother, Ahmet, and Steve Ross, the chairman of Warner.

  The search for a major backer for a New York team had earlier led Woosnam to approach the broadcaster David Frost, whose interest in the sport was well known. Frost’s advisers turned down a deal, but Woosnam’s cocktail party encounter opened the mighty door of a media giant and on 10 December 1970, Woosnam found himself announcing the birth of the Warner-backed New York Cosmos. The first year of the new decade had begun with New York boasting the champions of gridiron and baseball, the Jets and the Mets, and now the year was ending with the birth of a franchise that would dominate its sport more completely than any of the other teams in town would manage throughout the ’70s.

  New York was only half of the NASL’s big-city strategy for 1971. Canada’s largest city had also been targeted and the Toronto Metros signed up to join the league. Woosnam announced, ‘Stability of the league is now finally established and the addition of such great soccer centres as New York and Toronto is further indication of the progress the game has made at all levels.’ The league did lose the Kansas City Spurs, but the addition of the Montreal Olympic increased the number of teams to eight and the NASL was able to command a franchise fee of $25,000 from each of the three new clubs.

  Despite the money behind the club, the Cosmos team that took the field in 1971 had little of the glamour of its future sides. Composed largely of players from local amateur teams, the squad also included Englishman Barry Mahy, a former New York General, and player-coach Gordon Bradley, the former Carlisle midfielder who had played for the Generals in their final year, 1968, before spending a year under Gordon Jago in Baltimore. A promising junior with Sunderland, Bradley’s career had been set back when, at the age of 16, he suffered a knee injury that kept him out of football for two years. His stint at Carlisle followed a brief spell at Bradford Park Avenue and he moved to Canada in 1963.

  In Toronto, the choice as coach was 36-year-old Scot Graham Leggat, who had won 18 caps for his country and played more than 250 League games for Fulham after transferring from Aberdeen. Leggat, formerly youth-team coach at Aston Villa, was in the job market as part of the fallout from Tommy Docherty’s sacking at Villa Park. ‘I felt I was part of the Docherty set-up and was working on the same things as him, so I thought I should resign,’ Leggat recalls. ‘Phil Woosnam phoned me and said that Toronto were looking for a coach. I said at first that I was not really keen to move my family but Jack Daley, the general manager of Toronto, called me and said, “We have no team and we need you to build one. You can be player-coach.” He asked me to send a résumé but there was a mail strike. So I said, “I can’t send you anything but I can be in Toronto at 4 p.m. tomorrow.”

  ‘Two gentlemen showed me around, but at that
time the team had no players, no field, just a couple of offices. And the first game was only eight weeks away! I said, “Let me think about it.” I went home and said to my wife, “We shouldn’t go, but I am going to go anyway.”’

  While the Cosmos might have had the money of Warner Communications behind them – even if they were not yet dipping into it – Leggat quickly discovered that there were very few dollars to throw around north of the Canadian border. ‘I went to local practices and thought, “My goodness, how are we going to pick a team from here?” I managed to find a couple of players who looked like they might fit in and my assistant, Arthur Rodrigues, knew he could get players from Portugal. But I don’t believe in having 11 veterans on your team.’

  With no money to spend on established players and no desire to stock his team with Portuguese journeymen, Leggat turned to his contacts book. ‘I phoned Aston Villa. I also phoned Bobby Robson, who I had played with at Fulham and was now manager at Ipswich, and I phoned Bert Head at Crystal Palace.’

  Included in the handful of youth and reserve team players acquired from those sources were defender Neil Rioch, the brother of future Scotland player and Villa teammate Bruce, Glasgow-born full-back Brian Rowan, who would enjoy six seasons in the NASL, and a 15-year-old midfielder from Ipswich. ‘I had been scouting amateurishly and I had seen Ipswich’s youth team play Coventry. I liked the look of their right-half, Brian Talbot, and a lad called Bruce Tormley, who was Canadian. I asked Bobby Robson about it and said I would meet with their parents and let them know we would take good care of them. I said it would be great experience for them, that they would be playing against veterans and would come back better players. That was how we sold it.’

  Talbot, who would go on to win England caps and FA Cup-winner’s medals with Ipswich and Arsenal, celebrated his 16th birthday in Toronto, but Leggat admits, ‘I actually felt a bit sorry for Brian and the young lads. The money was very, very poor because we had to pay to provide accommodation for all the guys from England. We were able to give them about $80 a week – a shoestring budget.’

  Rioch recalls, ‘I remember going over with Brian Talbot and we struck up a friendship straight away. We were housed in the Royal Oak Hotel, the finest hotel in Toronto, but only for about five days. Then it was the King Street West Motel. We really had to look after ourselves, do our own washing and ironing. But it was fine. There were about six of us who were full-time and it was a great experience for youngsters like us. We trained twice a day because we worked with Graham during the day and came back and trained with the part-time pros in the evening.’

  Elsewhere in the league, Barry Lynch, a 20-year-old former Aston Villa apprentice, top-scored for Atlanta with eight goals, while West Ham full-back Clive Charles, one of the handful of black players in first-team squads in England’s First Division, played a major role on the left flank of the Montreal defence. The Dallas Tornado added Tony McLoughlin, a 24-year-old Liverpudlian forward who had played 27 games in a two-year spell at Wrexham, and defender Tommy Youlden from Portsmouth. Ever-present in the Dallas midfield was Englishman Roy Turner, in his third season with the Tornado.

  For once, the format of the regular season was unchanged. Teams again played twenty-four games, including four against overseas teams, one of whom was Hearts, runners-up in the previous season’s Texaco Cup, who won four of their eight games on American soil. Changes were made to the play-offs, with the division runners-up included and sudden death extra-time introduced. That led to an epic semi-final confrontation between Rochester and Dallas.

  Tornado coach Ron Newman recalls, ‘We used to train in the evening because the players had jobs in the day. It used to get a bit dark and we could not afford to put lights on the field, so we went over to the local school, where they had big lights. We used to play under the light and to score you had to hit the light pole. We were like moths. The further away you got, the harder it was to see the pole so we all used to swarm round the light. Anyway, I had a problem with our Yugoslav goalie, Mirko Stojanovic, at training and I suspended him for the semi-final at Rochester, which was a great move considering my other keeper, Ken Cooper, had not long had knee surgery and hadn’t played for two months! Kenny said, “I’ll play.” I said, “How can you play? You can hardly walk.”’

  Cooper, a former non-leaguer in England, talked his boss into letting him take part in what turned out to be the longest game in the sport’s history. With the game tied at 1–1 after 90 minutes, Cooper continued hobbling around his six-yard box during period after period of extra-time. ‘We had no shoot-outs at that time, so we kept playing until someone scored,’ says Newman, whose team eventually lost in the sixth additional period when Brazilian Carlos Metidieri beat Cooper to end 176 minutes of action. ‘It was the first game I had ever seen where both teams celebrated at the end.’

  League commissioner Woosnam was present, but had missed the winning goal because he was on his way to the field to instruct the referees to end the contest if the period remained goalless. Dallas defender and assistant coach John Best adds, ‘I remember having blisters on my feet and being absolutely exhausted. One of the thoughts I had during the game was that in America there were a lot of states where professional sports could not be played on a Sunday, so I was looking at the clock and thinking that we had better get the game over by midnight.’

  Newman made up with Stojanovic in time for the second of the best-of-three series. ‘He apologised and played brilliantly. But I learned a valuable lesson,’ Newman admits. ‘Never to back yourself into a corner.’

  Dallas proceeded to win at home in the second game to set up a decider at Rochester, where it took another 148 minutes for the Tornado to win through to the final with goals from McLoughlin and English defender Bobby Moffat. Atlanta were the opponents in the title decider and the Chiefs won the first of another three-game series 2–1 with a decisive goal after 123 minutes. Dallas took the second game 4–1 at home and returned to Atlanta to take the lead after two minutes through another Englishman, Mike Renshaw. Moffat made it 2–0 just before half-time and the Dallas defence held firm for victory, although only 3,000 people had turned up to see the action.

  The star of the Tornado’s play-off run had been the eccentric McLoughlin, playing in his only NASL season. Best recalls, ‘Ron and I had been talking in the off-season about how we needed a striker who was very good in the air, an old-fashioned English type of forward. We felt most teams would have difficulties with that because a lot of teams were not strong in the centre of defence. I was given a tip in England to watch Tony, who had been with Everton as a youngster and was playing in non-league for, I believe, Wigan. He was a real handful in the area so we offered him a contract. He scored in his first game and did well over here.

  ‘But he was a handful off the field. How can I put this without getting into trouble? Let’s say he marched to a different drummer. You have seen Liverpool fellows who are that way, very rough and ready. He was the only player I have ever known who taped his knuckles before the game. He had problems with the climate as well. He had a broken nose – it was somewhere around his left ear – and he had real problems. He had a lot of headaches and difficulty breathing during games. In the end he had surgery.’

  Newman adds, ‘Tony was a crazy man. I remember once we were at a big party at Lamar Hunt’s dad’s place. There was a TV reporter there who was helping us a lot. Tony was walking along the side of the pool with him when he nudged him into the water. The guy was about to go on the air. I have a feeling that incident didn’t help his career, but I don’t remember using it as a reason to get rid of him. Actually I can’t even remember whether we didn’t want him back the next year or if he just didn’t come back.’

  Atlanta’s place in the final had been earned at the expense of New York. The Cosmos had limped to second place in the Northern Division, despite winning only nine of twenty-four games in a season during which they hardly lived up to attendance expectations at Yankee Stadium. Only 3,701 attended
the season opener and only once did they attract more than 10,000 to a game.

  New York’s results, however, were still way ahead of Toronto’s. Leggat’s fears for his inexperienced side proved well-founded, as they won only five games. Indicative of the coach’s problems was that he ended up playing in almost half the games himself. ‘I had not played for three years and I was 37 but at times I was our best player, so I played in a few of the games,’ he explains. ‘One of my biggest pressures was to get the foreign players to accept the wages we had to pay and to convince them that withholding tax was the rule of the country. But when we went to Montreal some of the older players decided to go on strike because of the tax issue. We went there with 11 players and I was substitute for every position.’

  The Metros’ crowds, ranging from 2,000 to 12,000, also left something to be desired. ‘The theory was that because Canada is made up of different nationalities, people would go and watch soccer,’ says Leggat. ‘But everyone in Canada compared what they saw with the best team they had seen back home. You may be a Scunthorpe fan but because you have seen Manchester United play you compared us to them.’

  Crowds in Toronto were better than in some other cities in the NASL, however, and Leggat says, ‘I remember playing at Yankee Stadium and in St Louis and if the crowd had held hands they would not have gone round the bottom ring of the stadium.’ For someone who had played in internationals in front of 100,000 and been a First Division regular it was something of culture shock. ‘Every game I thought, “What am I doing here?” But the kids were good kids. We had a kid called Angus Moffat who drove up from Detroit every game. We had a team that buzzed instead of strolling around like veterans would have done and that gave me satisfaction.’