Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  But it was the Whitecaps’ day. ‘We played terrific football all the way through,’ says Ball. ‘We were in control of it, very comfortable and very professional. We were a good English side who were very well drilled.’

  But, true to the build-up to the game, there was more unhappiness when the Vancouver players returned to their hotel to find their suitcases packed and their rooms – originally booked in anticipation of the Cosmos making the final – occupied by new guests. McNab explains, ‘The league assumed the Cosmos would win the semi-final and would not need the rooms the night of the final. We had rewritten the script but no one changed the booking. What a mess. What should have been a great evening was a real let down.’

  McNab recalls Sammels and Hector making plans to fly home direct from New York instead of joining the celebrations in Vancouver, where 200,000 would line the team’s parade route, while John Best admits that the players’ mood was not as it should have been among newly crowned champions. ‘It was virtually impossible to overcome the money situation. People had taken their positions.’

  The hotel issue would be brought up again at the NASL’s winter meetings, but was put savagely into perspective when one team owner replied, ‘That was terrible, but who really gives a fuck? This league lost $20 million this year.’

  The Whitecaps’ response to the players’ simmering discontent was to offer a considerable wage increase. ‘The players seemed to have a great resentment against the league and some of them accused the Vancouver club of cheating them,’ says McNab. ‘For the 1980 season, all the players were given a 30 per cent increase on their existing contracts, which I felt was generous since the owners had still lost more than $500,000 for the 1979 season – even though we had sold out nearly every game, won Soccer Bowl and had 16,000 season ticket holders. We could win it again and the owners might lose $2 million. I remember telling the players, “This is a great club and the only thing that will happen is that this team and the NASL will fold if you keep up with your demands.”

  ‘Phil Parkes got Dionne Warwick’s agent, who wrote to the club asking for three-quarters of a million over three years. Phil left for Chicago before the 1980 season, but it was a terrible decision for both sides. The club lost a fan favourite and a good goalkeeper and Phil lost Tony Waiters, who spent much of his time and effort coaching him. I heard Phil received a $70,000 contract with Chicago.’

  Into this atmosphere of unrest came a pair of new signings from England – Leeds and Scotland goalkeeper David Harvey and the former Burnley and Leeds striker Ray Hankin. ‘I’d had four good years at Leeds and asked for a transfer,’ says Hankin. ‘There were a couple of inquiries to keep me in the First Division, but I thought a change of pace might suit me better and I knew Tony Waiters and I knew the city was a beautiful place to live so I decided to take the plunge.’

  But what Hankin found in Vancouver was far from the idyllic picture he had imagined. ‘There was a lot of bad feeling in the team because the players felt they had been promised this and that. It was very difficult to settle. The team was not doing well and the players were always talking about the bonuses. I wondered what the hell I was doing there. That first year was really difficult.’

  This time, however, not even Alan Ball was in the mood to help resolve the situation. Before returning to Canada after playing the 1979–80 season for Southampton, Ball accepted an offer to become manager at Blackpool, the club with which he had started his career. He explains, ‘My playing career was starting to come to an end. Vancouver knew what my thoughts were and I said I would play another season, but I would like to go home early. In hindsight I shouldn’t have gone back at all. I was starting a brand-new career and my mind was in turmoil. But I felt obliged to the club and the fans wanted to see me and the other players back, so I decided to go.’

  McNab says, ‘I wanted to cancel his contract. There is no way anyone can give his best for any team and manage a professional club 5,000 miles away at the same time. He was spending all his time managing them by phone. He became mischievous. As good as he had been the previous year supporting Tony and me, he became a huge negative for the team and the management. I had witnessed both sides of Ballie at Arsenal and knew what a disruptive influence he could be on the other players if the situation was not to his benefit. I wanted to get rid of Alan and Willie Johnston before the season started. Willie had become almost impossibly disruptive as he felt his popularity with the fans gave him the leverage to demand more money. I hoped that releasing both Ballie and Willie would salvage the rest of the squad.’

  The season began with five defeats in seven games, while McNab’s own situation added to the uneasy atmosphere. ‘Tony was totally organised and his administration skills were fantastic. But after 1979 I had a meeting with him. He was supposed to be taking over as general manager at the end of the 1980 season and he did not see me as his future head coach.’

  Yet, after returning to England, McNab received a call from Waiters asking him to return as assistant coach. With no other job offers, McNab accepted. ‘A few days later Tony called again and said, “I have been told to ask you if you will come back as the head coach.” I could not believe my ears. Tony explained that John Best wanted to set up an English system of manager and coach. I accepted, knowing that Tony was not on board with the idea at all. From what I understood later, he thought I had tried to get the head coach’s job from him. How he could think that has always been a mystery to me. Tony had been NASL Coach of the Year and was treated like a god in Vancouver. It would be like taking over from Arsène Wenger at Arsenal – a suicide mission.

  ‘I accepted responsibility without authority. Essentially I had the same position as in 1979, but with a different title. Tony still picked the team but sat in the stands and left me getting booed down on the bench. The players were in revolt against everything at the club and the respect I had gained from them the previous season was lost.’

  Waiters explains, ‘We had a troubled ship and it was always going to be difficult to deal with that situation. There was confusion in the players’ minds about who was making the major decisions. I should have made it clear I was running the team and sorted it out. In the end, I let Bob go and I have mended the fence since. He is a good friend.’

  Best adds, ‘It was impossible for Bob. It was a difficult situation for an experienced head coach and he was not an experienced head coach. I hired Bob again as a head coach at an indoor franchise and he had a great impact in terms of developing young players, but as head coach at Vancouver he was very different to what we were looking for.’

  Ball’s departure came at the end of June. Waiters admits, ‘I had to let Ballie go, which was tough because I had known him since he was 14. He is dynamic, aggressive and an assertive leader, but not only was he unhappy with the financial situation at Vancouver, he had taken the Blackpool job. He was winding up Willie Johnston and we had other players who were being affected by the whole situation.’

  Ball’s final game in a Vancouver shirt was also Johnston’s farewell appearance – for a couple of years, anyway – and, after the 1980 season, Johnny Giles arrived to succeed Waiters as head coach. The Whitecaps would enter a new, less dramatic, chapter in their history.

  16. A Fistful of Dollars

  Anyone arriving at Heathrow Airport in the summer months of the late ’70s ran the risk of tripping over a Football League player with his bags packed and tagged for anywhere from California to Connecticut. When the pop anthem ‘Go West’ hit the charts in 1979, it could have been the theme tune for the British professional footballer. And, in many cases, the uniforms they ended up wearing weren’t much less flamboyant than those of the Village People themselves.

  There was certainly no shortage of volunteers ready to don the red and yellow hoops of the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, the orange and blue of the Detroit Express or the gold jersey of the New England Tea Men with its distinctive scarlet ‘T’ running across the shoulders and down the torso. And it was agents lik
e Ken Adam who provided a vital link between the American clubs and players keen to take advantage of the opportunities, if not necessarily the fashion, on offer across the water.

  ‘Once you have taken some of your own players over there, like Rodney Marsh, Tommy Smith and Alan Ball, you become the person everyone thinks of when they need players,’ says Adam. ‘The clubs looked to me to help them, but I was always a player agent first. I started getting calls from all kinds of players. I remember Bobby Lennox from Celtic, who I had never met, giving me a call to see if I could help him. I knew most of the owners because I went to league meetings.’

  Although some American teams paid transfer fees to purchase the contracts of their British imports, the majority of Football League players heading across the water were still doing so as part of loan deals between the US and British clubs, with the player often caught in the middle of some unseemly haggling. The American season began before the Football League programme wound down, while the NASL play-offs overlapped the start of the new season back home. It meant that delicate negotiations were required to ensure that the NASL teams had their players for the maximum number of games. ‘The loan system was a major pain in the arse,’ Adam recalls. ‘It was not a very practical solution. At some point one of the sides was going to be pissed off.’

  Former Bristol Rovers manager and Portland Timbers head coach Don Megson experienced the system from both sides and says, ‘If the American team did well their season cut into ours in England. You wanted your own player back and the NASL team may have promised they would come back. But then the NASL started insisting that if you signed a player for the season he had to stay until you were out of the competition. It became a very difficult situation to manage.’

  According to various sources, often the only way the American teams could ensure that they had their Football League imports for the maximum number of games was to give an off-the-books payment to the English club’s manager. ‘For sure it happened,’ says Adam.

  Former NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam explains, ‘I went to a Football League board meeting and asked if we could make a loan agreement. I said they could set the standards but insisted that the players couldn’t come back until they were out of our competition. That was where Vic Crowe got himself into trouble in that first year in Portland. They were in the semi-finals and Vic said Peter Withe had to leave. I said, “Vic, he ain’t going back. You have got to find a way that he doesn’t go back, otherwise you are going to get killed.” And somehow he did it.’

  Woosnam denies knowledge of how Crowe solved his problem, adding, ‘No one ever came to me and told me about any backhanders.’

  But Fort Lauderdale Strikers coach Ron Newman recounts, ‘Payment to managers did happen. Otherwise, sometimes the player would be a week late arriving or he would have an injury they still had to repair.’

  Newman also claims that there were opportunities for payments to go in the other direction, into the pocket of the NASL coach. But he insists, ‘I never got involved in it, although I know it happened. A couple of agents said they would put something in there for me, but I couldn’t do that.’

  New England Tea Men coach Noel Cantwell explains, ‘When you were trying to get players from England, good players like Archie Gemmill or Gerry Daly, clubs didn’t want players to go for nothing. The clubs had to think about what state they were going to be in when they came back. Some clubs, like Arsenal and Manchester United, wouldn’t let players go at all unless they were young players who needed experience.’

  Former New York Cosmos and Detroit Express head coach Ken Furphy adds, ‘We were often asked for payments by English managers, but refused to pay it. My clubs never got involved in it, even though it probably cost us a few players.’

  John Best, coach at Seattle and general manager at Vancouver, adopted a similar stance. ‘There were a number of people who were reported to be making those kinds of payments to overseas clubs. But I felt that once you went though that door all was lost. It was going to be a monster that would grow and grow. It was a shame that the loan system operated, but something like that was needed at the time to upgrade the quality of the league.’

  According to Adam, even a gradual erosion of the loan system did not prevent some English managers lining their pockets. ‘There were many instances of players being given a free transfer, but someone getting money as a transfer fee. The Americans were very generous with some of their expenses.’

  Such generosity meant that a stint in the NASL offered veteran British players a lucrative alternative to remaining at home. Former Fulham and Leicester forward Steve Earle says, ‘My basic wages at Leicester would have been about £100 a week and I was on double that when I signed for Detroit. And the club provided us with everything so I was able to rent out my house in Leicester to Ray Illingworth. Some players were getting fees of $35,000 to sign on. My Leicester teammate, Alan Woollett, was offered a great deal by Detroit but wouldn’t go because he didn’t want to leave his dog! He went to Northampton and knew he’d made the wrong decision when they pulled up at a Wimpy and they were given a £1 voucher each to get a meal.’

  Brian Tinnion recalls turning down an opportunity to earn some extra money during a game for Hawaii. ‘We got a penalty and this little Portuguese guy, Diamantino Costa, came up and said, “I take penalty.” I reminded him I was the penalty taker, but he said, “No, no. I take it. I give you money.” I took it and missed the bloody thing. It turned out his contract had him on a thousand dollars a goal.’

  Some players viewed a move to the NASL career as a great family opportunity. Alan Merrick, who swapped West Bromwich Albion for Minnesota, explains, ‘I might have earned a little bit more in America, but that wasn’t the reason I stayed. I sensed the kids would have a better opportunity. If I had gone back to England I would have had to send them to a private school for them to have the same opportunities.’

  Others looked at their careers beyond football, with Neil Rioch saying, ‘It was a fresh direction, to see how the Americans went about preparation and coaching. I thought it would be very educational.’

  And for players like Laurie Calloway, whose Football League career had been played out in the lower divisions, it was a chance to taste the big time. ‘We had sell-out crowds in San Jose and suddenly I was playing in front of 35,000 instead of being in the Third Division. I made the all-star team the first two years I was there and from an ego point of view it made you feel good. In the Third and Fourth Division I was making the same money as my bricklaying mates. In San Jose, I was somebody.’

  Once in America, most British players found every need taken care of. Vince Casey, former public relations director of the New England Tea Men, remembers Helen Viollet, the wife of assistant coach Dennis, taking on the role of interior designer. ‘She was the one who chose everything, from the knives and forks to the bed sheets and furniture. So while the team was at Charlton Athletic preparing for the season, she was in the US outfitting the apartments.’

  Alan Merrick remembers, ‘I was picked up at the airport by a guy called Don Byerly. No one in the world would know him apart from in Minnesota. He had a grocery store with carpets. It was like walking into your own house, but with food everywhere. He drove us to an apartment that was fully furnished and had a fully stocked refrigerator. The next day we were escorted to a car dealership to get our brand-new cars. They were taking the plastic off the seats as we were pulling away.’

  Portland’s Mick Hoban recalls, ‘The Timbers set up sponsors so that when you got to town you were given a family. They told you everything from where you got buckets, to where the kids could go to school. Most players still have ties to those people.’

  Casey recalls Charlton winger Colin Powell watching in amazement when Tea Men general manager Bob Keating changed the player’s flat tyre in his business suit. ‘The attitude was, “Let’s just get it done.” Colin was so impressed that executives in the organisation would change a flat tyre, but to us it was no big deal. It wa
s just the way you put together a club. The British players seemed overwhelmed by that.’

  For those players looking to extend their tenancy in America, some things were more important than car maintenance, soft furnishings and even money. Often additional dollars would be foregone for the promise of a green card, the prized document granting the right to remain and work in the United States. Tampa Bay Rowdies striker Derek Smethurst explains, ‘After 1976 I decided I was going to try for $60,000 a year. But then I told them, “I will take $40,000 but I want a green card within six months.” I knew it could be got and I negotiated it that way, otherwise the lawyers would have let it get delayed. It was hard to get a green card without the club behind you. I was officially the groundsman for two years.’

  Former Portland and Los Angeles Aztecs forward Chris Dangerfield says, ‘Peter Short was negotiating my contract at LA and he said he would give me this and that and added, “I will give you a green card.” I thought, “Whatever,” but that turned out to be the greatest thing I could have had. Life in America was that one day you were here and the next you were traded. I was one of those guys who had more clubs than Tiger Woods, but when I decided to stay in America, that green card gave me flexibility and security.’

  Tinnion adds, ‘The green card was the best Christmas present I ever got. I applied for one when I was in Hawaii and then in Colorado but both those teams folded. I applied again when I was in Detroit under Ken Furphy, but one day Ken said, “We are struggling for money. I am going to let you go.” I asked him if he could do me a favour and keep me on just until I got my green card. That was some time in November and on 23 December it came though.’

  British players took a little time to get used to a system where teams could trade them at a moment’s notice, in the manner of children swapping soccer stickers in the playground. Former Burnley centre-half Colin Waldron says, ‘When you are transferred you have no say in it. Tulsa came to me and said, “You are sold to Philadelphia.” I said, “No, I am not. I am not going where I don’t want to go.” In the end they explained the financial side of things and I said I would go.’