The Greatest Team That Never Was

This is the story of the greatest American soccer team that never was.

US soccer was in its heyday in 1980. The North American Soccer League, the country’s major league, was in its most stable and prosperous time. And, soccer, in general, had made it in America. Everything looked rosy for the sport that had so long been more promise than reality.

The American Soccer League was no different. The older, smaller sibling of the NASL did not operate at the same level, but the league seemed ready to break out of its semi-pro shell. A few years earlier the ASL finally became a truly national league when it expanded to the west coast. And, in 1980, the league expanded into Arizona, a soccer community that even the NASL had yet to tap.

In late June of 1979, Leonard Lesser, a Phoenix insurance executive and president of Phoenix Professional Sports Inc., which included five unnamed associates, purchased the NASL Memphis Rogues for a reported $1.6 million plus $1 million in debts. The Phoenix investors hinted that, if the sale was approved by the league, the franchise would likely be moved to Phoenix.

A week later, Rogues owner Harry Mangurian, rejected the offer of the Phoenix group to buy the NASL franchise. While Mangurian refused to reveal the issue, a newspaper article at the time revealed that Phoenix Professional Sports had not been able to come up with the necessary cash deposit of $200,000 nor a “proper” profit and loss statement. Lesser, claiming that the Phoenix group had a net worth of about $100 million, disagreed that the sale was off and expected to pay a $650,000 security bond. The sale was never finalized.

Two months later, in September, Lesser’s Phoenix Professional Sports, Inc. acquired an expansion franchise for Phoenix in the ASL. The official announcement was made at the Phoenix Press Club with “retiring” ASL commissioner Bob Cousy and Phoenix mayor Margaret Hance on hand. The announced cost of an ASL franchise at that point was $250,000 and Lesser said that the team’s operating expenses would be over $500,000 for the 1980 season. The team would play at Phoenix College’s Hoy Field where it would need to have an average attendance of six to seven thousand to break even. The average ASL attendance was about 3,800 per game.

It was also announced that Phoenix’s head coach would be Jim Gabriel. He had been the head coach of the Seattle Sounders for the past three years and resigned from the team only six weeks before. Lesser contacted him only a few days after the resignation and Gabriel inked a five-year contract with PPS. Lesser named himself general manager of the nascent team with Gabriel to be assistant GM. Gabriel brought Harry Redknapp, his assistant coach in Seattle, with him to Phoenix as an assistant coach and player.

In December, Jerry Underwood of Phoenix won a name-the-team contest and the team was dubbed the Phoenix Fire. The team officially signed a lease with the state to use Hoy Field for the season. And, Gabriel, with seemingly deep pockets, began signing players.

Roger Verdi was the first player signed to the expansion franchise. Born Rajinder Singh Virdee to Indian Sikh parents, his family moved to England when he was a child and he eventually changed his name due to racism. Playing with youth clubs in England, Verdi, a defender, moved to North America when he was not offered a professional contract by an English club. Verdi played in the NASL from 1972 to 1978 and then moved to the ASL in 1979 helping the Columbus Magic make the league finals. 

Later that month, the team signed three more players. The first two were Terry Hickey, a midfielder from London, and Darrell Oak from North Dakota. The fourth player signed was New Yorker Manny Matos who had won the 1974 NCAA Division II championship with Adelphi University. All three of the signees had previously played for Gabriel in Seattle.

On January 11, 1980, the ASL held its annual college and territorial drafts in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Fire selected eight players in the draft including Henry Valdez, from Mesa High School, as its very first draft pick during the territorial round. Of those players, only the team’s final pick, Jim Anglim, a midfielder from Adelphi University, made the final roster.

At the end of January, the Fire signed two more players. Victor Arbelaez was a Columbian forward who had helped the University of San Francisco win an NCAA soccer championship in 1975. Aarbelaez was also a veteran of the ASL and NASL as well as the Major Indoor Soccer League. His claim to fame in the major league was scoring the only goal for the Las Vegas Quicksilvers in a 1-0 win against the legendary 1977 New York Cosmos team.

But, the bigger story for the Phoenix soccer community may have been the signing of Ray Ochoa of Mesa. Only 19 years old, Ochoa had been an all-state athlete at Mesa Westwood High School and played for the Mesa Stormers of the Arizona senior league.

On February 11, the Fire announced the signing of three veteran players which announced to the rest of the ASL that the expansion team would be a force to be reckoned with for the 1980 season. Scottish striker, Jimmy Rolland, had spent the prior four seasons with the ASL’s Los Angeles Skyhawks. Rolland had helped the Skyhawks to the 1976 ASL championship in their first season and was the team’s leading scorer and league MVP as the team made the ASL final in the 1978 season.

Another big signing was Liverpudlian, John Rowlands. The defender (and sometime forward) had been a journeyman in the English Football League before joining the NASL as a teammate with Jimmy Gabriel with the Seattle Sounders in 1974 and 1975. Rowlands was acquired from the NASL’s San Jose Earthquakes to play for Phoenix.

The other signing from England was Tom Jenkins. The midfielder had been a teammate of Jim Gabriel at Southampton during the late sixties and early seventies then joined Gabriel at the Seattle Sounders later in the decade. While Rollands and Rowlands were still starters when they joined Phoenix, Jenkins had barely played more than a handful of matches for Seattle the prior two seasons. Immediately before joining the Fire, Jenkins had played regularly for the Pittsburgh Spirits of the MISL during the league’s inaugural 1979-80 season.

Along with building a competitive roster, the expansion Fire also made outreach with the Phoenix community. Along with the signing of Ochoa, the Fire’s staff also took part in a celebrity soccer match against local celebrities. The outreach seemed to work as the Fire’s season ticket sales of 900 was second in the league only to the Pennsylvania Stoners’ 1100.

The team hoped to make a big splash in its first real match by hosting the NASL’s Chicago Sting on February 22 at Hoy Field. A week prior, Jim Gabriel had only had a chance to hold two practices for the expansion team but had begun having daily morning practices at Grand Canyon College leading up to their first match.

Four more players, bringing the total to 16, were signed the Tuesday before the match with Chicago. Forward Harry Redknapp was officially signed as a player and assistant coach. Redknapp brought goalie Kieron Baker out of semi-retirement to join the Fire. The pair had been teammates with Bournemouth. Baker had been the regular goalkeeper for most of that time, but was on the roster of Ipswich Town during the 1978-79 season. He never played for the first team and retired at the end of that season due to injuries.

Two more journeyman English leaguers were also signed. Defender Neil Hague, previously with Darlington, had also played with Redknapp at Bournemouth. And, forward Terry Shanahan had previously been with Aldershot.

Rounding out the roster were a trio of Americans. Tim Logush was the most experienced. The forward won the 1971 U.S. National Amateur Cup with Kutis S.C. of St. Louis and won two NCAA soccer championships in 1972 and 1973 with the Saint Louis Billikens. Logush was drafted by the NASL’s Seattle Sounders in 1975 but only saw action in four games. That same year Logush earned a cap with the U.S. Men’s National Team during a 4-0 loss to Poland on June 24. Logush went on to play in the ASL with the New Jersey Americans and Indianapolis Daredevils before joining the Phoenix Fire. Another young Saint Louis University player, Dean Shemeld, signed with the Fire after traveling from Milwaukee for an open tryout. Finally, backup goalie, Tom Lytle, had previously played with the Santa Clara College Dons.

That Friday, with an announced attendance of 9,809, the Phoenix Fire defeated the Chicago Sting in a 2-1 come-from-behind rally. Chicago’s German striker, Arno Steffenhagen, scored unassisted in the fifth minute after intercepting a pass. Neither team scored the rest of the first half as Phoenix put little offensive pressure on the Chicago goal.

Gabriel made tactical adjustments at halftime to play wider to the wings. He moved John Rowlands up from defense to take advantage of the player’s height and gave Terry Shanahan more freedom on the pitch. The changes gave more variety to the Fire’s attack.

With 25 minutes left to play, Steffenhagen was sent off for multiple fouls giving Phoenix the man advantage. In the 72nd minute, Shanahan crossed the ball from the left corner to Rowlands who headed the ball in from 18 yards out. Shanahan won the game in the 87th minute scoring a goal from 10 yards out on a centering pass from Tim Logush.

The Fire’s next match was a preseason game against fellow ASL expansion team, the Golden Gate Gales which were based in the Bay Area. Although the team was riding high after the game against the Chicago Sting, the Fire would be without the services of their starting goalie for two months as Baker had broken a knuckle during the match. But, backup goalie Lytle, handled the situation well and, on March 1, Phoenix defeated the Gales 1-0 at Hoy Field on a goal by Jimmy Rolland.

The Fire’s biggest challenge was yet to come. They were due to face the Mexico National Team on March 11 at Hoy Field. At this point, Mexico’s young superstar forward, Hugo Sánchez, was not only playing for his national team but also with UNAM of the Mexican Primera División and the NASL’s San Diego Sockers in the off-season.

A few days before the match, storm clouds began developing over the Phoenix Fire organization. Lesser stepped down as general manager of the team and the board of directors decided to take a more active role in the team’s management.

The Mexican National Team dominated the Fire 3-0 in front of 3,500 at Hoy Field. Jim Gabriel tasked the young Mesan, Ray Ochoa, to mark Hugo Sanchez. While Ochoa held his own in the first half, Sanchez outclassed the rookie in the second.

Jorge Malo Lopez put the Mexicans on the board in the 20th minute scoring off a rebound on an indirect kick. Sanchez received a pass from Juan Luis Gonzales from the right corner and scored in the 55th minute. And, with less than six minutes to play, Ochoa fouled Sanchez leading to a penalty kick that the superstar converted.

The Phoenix Fire had one more preseason match on March 14 at Hoy Field against the Sacramento Gold, 1979 ASL champions, before their first regular season began on March 22 at home against the Golden Gate Gales. Jim Gabriel had finalized his roster, a mix of experienced English league veterans and young Americans, that he hoped would contend for the 1980 ASL championship.

But off the field, the Fire was in trouble. Papers began reporting that sources inside the organization said the team was in financial crisis and unable to meet certain obligations. The Gold were promised $2,000 plus expenses for two preseason games but the team was unsure if the payment would be made. In addition, the ASL had ruled John Rowlands ineligible because the check used in the transaction to acquire the player could not be cashed by the San Jose Earthquakes. Rowlands could not play against Sacramento.

According to players and front office personnel, Leonard Lesser did not so much as resign but was removed by his fellow investors. The club had a letter of credit for $1.5 million over three years with $500,000 earmarked for losses each season. But, after finding out that Lesser had severely over budgeted the organization, the remaining investors stepped in to jointly operate the team until a new general manager was found.

Sacramento beat the Fire 1-0 on an Anselmo Vicioso goal from 30 yards out. Only 500 were in attendance to see the exhibition. Coach Jim Gabriel subbed himself into the match at the striker position near the end of a match. The move was a personal superstition Gabriel had to play a few exhibition minutes each season.

The ASL governors flew to Phoenix the day after the Sacramento preseason match in hopes of finding a strategy to save the Fire. Their main plan was to severely cut back on player salaries and promotions.

Lesser had inked some players to $35,000 contracts. And, with the average player salary in the ASL at $12,000 to $15,000, officials were uncertain how Lesser expected to pay such high salaries with only 14 home games. In addition, the Fire had spent $50,000 to expand Hoy Field to 15,000 seats from 9,000 even though no ASL team had ever averaged 9,000 fans. Lesser had already committed over $500,000 before the season even began.

Players were found to have not been paid and checks issued by the club bounced. Even though they had not been paid, the players agreed to play the second, newly scheduled preseason match against Sacramento on Sunday, March 16.

The Fire and the Gold drew 1-1 on Civitan Soccer Sunday at Amphitheater High School in Tucson. Arbaelez scored on a header from a Rolland pass in the 9th minute. And Mike Mancini tied it up in the 30th minute after intercepting a Phoenix back pass. But the 3500 in attendance saw a substandard affair caused by the narrow high school football field and, likely, disinterested players.

On March 18, four days before the Phoenix Fire played its first regular season game, the team’s PR director, Joe Daggett, intended to put out a press release about the organization’s status. He was unable to complete the task because a leasing company had taken back the team’s typewriters.

Lesser was still optimistic that the Fire would play its first match, but coach Gabriel and the investor group working to save the franchise were extremely pessimistic. Sources indicated that most of the essential office equipment was gone, the team had missed its payroll for players and staff, and was $100,000 in debt. Financial obligations such as rent and installation of bleacher seats at Hoy Field and travel costs to bring in foreign players had gone unpaid.

Players were unsure of their next move and even how they would get back home. Jim Gabriel planned to borrow money to move his family back to Bellevue, Washington and then sell his house there to start over. He had been contacted by the San Jose Earthquakes for a coaching position but was unable to negotiate while under contract with Phoenix.

“This team could have won the ASL,” he said. 

The next day, at a board of directors meeting for the club, Leonard Lesser resigned as president and member of the board, but retained his stock interest. Lesser then came up with $450 in cash, which Jim Gabriel split among the players at $20 a piece.

Even though the writing was on the wall, the Fire’s management refused to issue a statement concerning the official status of the club. With only a day before the opening game of the ASL season, the league and the Fire’s opponent, the Golden Gate Gales, had to assume the game was still officially on until formally told otherwise.

A group of fans quickly formed the “Friends of Soccer” group that set up a benefit game for the players to be played the same night as the all-but-cancelled league match at Hoy Field. The game would match the Fire players against an Arizona all-star team with profits going to help with players’ living expenses and travel costs back to their homes.

Phoenix College announced the field would not be available for either the Fire or the benefit game unless they were paid the $1708 rental still owed. And, while the Gales were still expected to arrive for their scheduled game, the ASL reported that the Fire had still only registered three of its players. If the Fire were to play the other players illegally, the game would be declared a forfeit and Phoenix would be fined $10,000. Neither the league nor the Gales nor even the Friends of Soccer could do anything until they had official word on the status of the club from the Phoenix Fire.

“We were taken in,” said an ASL owner. “It should never have happened.” - The Sacramento Bee, 21 March 1980

Phoenix Professional Sports released Phoenix College from its game day contract allowing the Friends of Soccer to hold its benefit game at Hoy Field. Phoenix College cut its normal rental fee by $1,000 dollars for the group. The league officially postponed the regular season opener, giving Fire officials until midweek to find new owners or investors.

The Fire players beat the team of Valley amateurs 5-0 in front of 660 paid spectators. After expenses, each player received $21.33. This was all the cash players had received since March 1.

Mel Shimek, one of Phoenix’s co-owners, was still working to get investors. The group had been able to come up with $40,000 but were still hoping to raise another $60,000 via small investors coming in under limited partnerships. Jim Gabriel was willing to stay if things turned around, but had to drive back to Bellevue with his family leaving Harry Redknapp in charge of the club. Redknapp didn’t mince words, placing the blame squarely on Lesser. He stated that Lesser had missed paychecks as early as January 15.

On Thursday, March 28, the Phoenix Fire’s ASL franchise was terminated by the club’s board of directors.

After the experience, Roger Verdi, estimated to have a salary of $35,000, was angry at both the club and the league. He dubbed the ASL “a nickel and dime operation” and vowed never to play for the league again unless they paid him up front.

A few months later, in July, Verdi was again the first player signed by a Phoenix expansion franchise. This time it was the Phoenix Inferno of the MISL. Verdi would play the entire 1980-81 season for the Inferno before retiring and moving into coaching.

Jimmy Gabriel borrowed $5,000 from friends to move his family back to Bellevue. Once there, he put his house up for sale in order to pay off debts accrued due to the debacle in Phoenix. In October, Gabriel would be hired by the San Jose Earthquakes to become their new head coach.

In November, Leonard Lesser was back in the news. In New York, he held a press conference to announce the formation of a 10-team U.S. Soccer League which would use only American-born players and begin in the spring. Later that week, Harvey Greenberg, a Phoenix investment counselor who would be the founder of the league’s Phoenix franchise, stated that he conceived of the venture and Lesser had only been invited because of his acquaintance with the NASL and ASL. Nothing came of the league as prospective members were hesitant to associate themselves with a venture connected to Lesser.

In January of 1981, Lesser was indicted by a Maricopa grand jury with conducting a fraudulent scheme, six counts of securities fraud, three counts of theft, and four counts of falsifying corporate records. County attorneys alleged that Lesser overstated the value of Phoenix Professional Sports in order to obtain investments and siphoned money from corporate accounts for his own unauthorized use. Lesser was also accused of falsifying corporate balance sheets and check registers to prevent investors from uncovering the true state of PPS’s finance and to cover his own thefts. Investors were alleged to have lost $200,000.

During the investigation, Phoenix police discovered that Lesser had also written a fraudulent check for the $200,000 down payment in the attempted purchase of the Memphis Rogues. The check bounced because the investigation found that the bank account never had a balance of over $50.

In August, Lesser was found guilty of defrauding investors but acquitted in 10 other criminal violations. That December he was sentenced to serve one year in Maricopa County jail and seven years probation plus 300 hours of community service after his release. He was allowed to remain free on a $10,000 bond pending his appeal. The verdict was upheld by the Arizona Court of Appeals in June of 1983.

- Dan Creel

IMAGES

OutOfShapeBowl: Feb 16, 1980, Arizona Republic

FireVsChicago: Feb 20, 1980, Arizona Republic

LesserResigns: Mar 9, 1980, Arizona Republic

Mexicans: Mar 11, 1980, Arizona Republic

FireRoster: Mar 14, 1980, Arizona Daily Star

FireExtinguished: Mar 28, 1980, Arizona Republic

VerdiQuote: Mar 29, 1980, Arizona Republic

Frank Borghi: The Keeper Who Held Off England

I’m a USMNT fan. In fact, I’d say I’m more of a USMNT fan than I am of any club team I follow, which helps when I’m writing about grassroots soccer for sure. I’m not a big fan of any specific club, so I cover them all. But one of my favorite things to do is to dip into USMNT history, which is mostly ignored, aside from a few big names. Especially when you move back further than 1990. The timeline is sparse and the names are mostly just names, without much background or context.

So allow me to give you some context on a player from the past, a goalkeeper by the name of Frank Borghi. If you want the short version of the story, Borghi was the keeper for the 1950 USMNT World Cup team, the team that famously beat England in the group stage. He was the man in the pipes in Brazil, sealing the victory for the team. Because of that win, Frank and the rest of the 1950 team were inducted into the National Hall of Fame in 1976. And if that’s all you knew, at least you knew something about that 1950 team. But there’s so much more to Frank Borghi.

Borghi was born in St. Louis on April 9, 1925. He grew up in a neighborhood in St. Louis called The Hill, a predominantly Italian part of the city, known for, as one tourism website puts it, “world-class athletes and Italian cuisine.” Famous baseball players of the 1950’s, Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola, were both from the area and much like those greats, Borghi originally wanted to play baseball.

He was good at baseball, really good. Good enough to play for the St. Louis Cardinals’ Double A team at third base. He only played soccer in the off season to stay in shape, because his real ambition was to play baseball professionally. He told the story in one interview that a scout had showed up to his mother’s doorstep to recruit him and she ran him out, yelling that her son would stay home with her forever.

Of course, in 1941, with World War II in full swing, many sons went off to war, Borghi among them. He would serve as a decorated medic in the war. He earned a bronze star and a purple heart for his service. There is a story that during his service, he actually treated Baseball Hall of Famer and eventual St. Louis Cardinals’ radio man, Jack Buck. Stranger things have happened.

When Frank returned home, he decided to play soccer full time, but made an important decision due to his own limitations. “I've got big hands and I was able to catch the soccer ball. Over the years, I never developed the kicking skills for playing soccer, so I had to play goalie.” According to David Lange, the coach was well aware of his limitations, as well as his strengths. “Borghi was a field player in his early soccer career, ‘but I had no ball skills or passing ability,’he said in the 2009 interview. When his team’s regular goalkeeper wasn’t available, Borghi asked his coach, Joe Numi, if he could play in goal. ‘I knew I could catch a ball and throw it 50 yards,’ Borghi said. ‘Joe says, ‘Yeah, go ahead.’ It worked out really good for me.’”

Borghi played in the powerhouse years of St. Louis soccer, with a club that would win two National Champion Cups, St. Louis Simpkins-Ford. Borghi was in goal for both Cups, in 1948 and 1950. The club won three Khoury League championships during the seven years Frank played with Simpkins. Borghi’s quality in the net would earn him a chance to play for the USMNT in their qualifying for the 1950 World Cup.

During the 1949 qualifying tournament between fellow North American teams, Mexico and Cuba, Borghi would be the keeper during the all important match up for second place against Cuba. The match was played in Mexico in front of 60,000 on September 21. The United States won handily, 6-2, qualifying for the World Cup.

In the World Cup, the Americans were drawn into a group that featured England, Spain, and Chile. In the first match, against Spain, the USMNT scored first, but surrendered 3 goals in the last 12 minutes to lose 3-1. How that would have affected Borghi heading into the next match against England, it’s hard to say, though he did joke that he hoped to not give up five prior to the match.

The English came out firing, prepared to put  the upstarts in their place quickly. In the first 15 minutes of the half, Borghie would face six shots, with two going off the posts. But, in the 37th minute, Joe Gaetjens would head the ball into the corner to give the USMNT a lead that Borghie would have to make good on. When the shot went in, he knew the English would be even more aggressive and is quoted as saying, “Oh my God, the roof is going to cave in.”

David Lange’s excellent article, written at the death of the keeper in 2015, describes the biggest moment of the 1950 World Cup showdown. “Perhaps Borghi’s biggest save came on a free kick just outside the U.S. penalty area late in the game. St. Louis center back Charlie Colombo tackled Stanley Mortensen from behind just outside the top of the penalty area... England’s Jimmy Mullen headed the free kick on the bounce past Borghi, but Borghi somehow reached behind and knocked the ball away. The British claimed they had scored, but the referee ruled the ball had not crossed the line entirely before Borghi reached it.”

Joe Gaetjens, the game’s lone scorer, being carried off the field.

When the match ended, with the US triumphant 1-0, Borghi and Gaetjens were carried off the field on the Brazilian fans’ shoulders. Brazil saw England as a potential rival and desperately wanted them to lose. When the USMNT delivered, they were instant heroes. Three days later, they would lose to Chile 5-2 and finish last in Group 2. While Borghi would continue to play club ball, his time with the national team was done.

After his World Cup time, Frank Borghi continued to live in St. Louis with his wife Rosemary, having seven children. After the end of his playing days, he ran a funeral parlor. In an interview in the St. Louis Dispatch, he was asked if he was a soccer legend. His response showed his character, that of a hard working man who used his talents of the best of his abilities.”I don't know about that. Let's just say I was very fortunate to have played with some outstanding players. They were my friends.”

Frank Borghi’s hand (image credit St. Louis Dispatch)

- Dan Vaughn

Sources:

https://explorestlouis.com/things-to-do/neighborhoods/the-hill/

https://everybodysoccer.com/even-the-goalkeepers-like-to/2015/2/4/frank-borghi

http://www.stlshof.com/frank-borghi/

https://stlouligans.com/archives/968

https://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/metro/life/between-the-posts-with-frank-borghi/article_55c359e2-2c38-5814-8e4a-a55d1315db71.html

Building a Winner: William H. Todd’s Brooklyn Soccer Legacy, 1918 – 1921

Be loyal to your men and they will be loyal to you - W.H. Todd

The Volunteer, a centerboard-compromise sloop, engineered by renown American ship designer Edward Burgess, defeated Thistle and won America’s Cup in 1887. The racing yacht was unfurnished below decks to reduce weight and was the first to be built with a steel frame and hull – her deck was made of white pine and she was an absolute pearl. Burgess had also designed the Mayflower, which won the America’s Cup just a year prior, however Volunteer was advanced in every way and skipper Hank Haff handily defeated the competition and took home the trophy. By the end of the 19th century, interest in yachting and ship building was at an all time high and due to the amazing progressions in technology, those wealthy enough to play in that arena could pour money into the sport and reap the rewards. Volunteer was retired from racing and sold for a considerable amount to John Malcolm Forbes, son of John Murray Forbes, the American railroad magnate who competed with the Vanderbilt family for money and influence.

Built in Wilmington, Delaware, Volunteer was a masterclass in both engineering and construction – she was assembled by the Pusey & Jones Corporation, which was founded in 1848 as a machine shop and rose rapidly to prominence after building sloops of war for the United States during the Civil War. Well-known for their top-quality work, Pusey & Jones was often subcontracted by competing shipbuilders to construct the engines and boilers for those vessels. One of the most well-regarded boilermakers at the corporation was James Todd, who brought his son to work with him as an apprentice. William Henry Todd, born in 1864, was 23 years old when he helped put Volunteer together for Pusey & Jones – his experiences working for a winning organization and understanding the value of hard work and craftsmanship would carry him through to high levels of success in everything he touched, both in shipbuilding as well as in sport.

William Todd first had a hand in “building a winner” with his hard work on the Volunteer while employed by Pusey & Jones.

In 1893, 29-year-old William Todd, left Wilmington in pursuit of more responsibility and challenge; he took a position at the Navy Yards in Brooklyn, New York. The United States was rapidly becoming one of the most influential economies in the world, exporting raw materials as well as manufactured goods to all corners of the globe. The US Navy was growing accordingly to ensure safe sea lanes were in place for the burgeoning American empire. Todd’s work was laid-out for him, and he was well-up for the challenge. Within three years, his authority and work ethic became infectious and again, he was ready for a new challenge – which he found in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn when he took a position as a foreman with Robins Dry Dock & Repairs Company.

“He began his work in private docks as a master mechanic; he was soon made assistant superintendent. His men looked up to him and his work was pushed ahead of others. He was learning to get things done and to get others to do them for him.” In 1909, when Robins’ founder, Mr. John R. Robins, was ready to step down and reinvigorate the company, there was nobody better suited to the task than the hard-working William H. Todd. Todd had some irons in the fire as well and shortly after the first World War broke out in 1914, his industry received an appreciated boost.  “Old bottoms were hustled out of mud banks and sent into mudbanks where little expense was spared to make them seaworthy. Everything that could sport a sail or had a half-workable engine room left was being set to work.” Todd Shipyards was born and working double-time to get ships out to sea and defend the shipping lanes from the Germans. Robin’s Dry Dock was put under the new Corporation as a subsidiary, along with Tietjen & Lang from Hoboken, Seattle Construction & Drydock and Tebo Yacht Basin Company of Brooklyn, New York which were all purchased by Todd and merged into the new, massive ship building and repair company.

An early aerial illustration of Robins Dry Dock in Red Hook Brooklyn.

William Todd was a sporting enthusiast and a known philanthropist; he was a member of at least eight society clubs in New York, including the obvious ones like The Society of Naval Architects and Engineers and The Atlantic Yacht Club. However, he was also a paying member of the Crescent Athletic Club of Brooklyn and the New York Athletic Club. Though he was very likely aware of soccer as a competitive sport, as it was hard to miss at the time, Todd may have learned about the existence of Bronx United, Brooklyn Field Club, New York FC and their membership in the National Association Football League (NAFBL) from conversations with other patrons of his sporting society clubs. In addition to the NAFBL, there was the local metropolitan league and the La Sultana Cup, which pitted amateur teams from around the great state of New York against each other, as well. Todd understood how to build things; ships, businesses, and relationships with colleagues, as well as with his employees, and in 1918, as a means to keep morale high, Todd Field was built on the grounds at the Robins Dry Dock facility in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. 

Brooklyn was absorbed into New York City in 1898; within a decade immigration to New York from Europe had exploded and peaked in 1907, with 1.3 million people coming through Ellis Island alone. Hundreds of thousands of newcomers, who brought their old world culture, would make the boroughs of the City, including Brooklyn, their new home. They brought something else as well, an absolute love for soccer. However, the parks all around New York, which bore the name of the cultures carving out space for themselves, were not necessarily “brimming with soccer fields.” Soccer was being played, however, and there are mentions of “football” being played at the Parade Grounds in Prospect Park and at Dyker Park, but NYC Parks was unable to determine, a hundred years after the fact, which type of football might have been played.

Todd Shipyards added Todd Field to their primary grounds where Robins Dry Dock was located and teams from Robins, Tebo Yacht Basin, and Tietjen & Lang Drydock all played their home games.

A Brooklyn Annual Report from 1916 tells us “the popularity of soccer football in the park playgrounds is increasing each year” and public parks would organize local inter-park soccer tournaments. But this was far from the higher level of soccer being played in the NAFBL and La Sultana Cup, “As with several recreational pastimes, including golf and swimming, this is one area where the Parks Department wasn’t always the only game in town.  Soccer, perhaps more than other sports, was dependent on private associations. Naturally then, the New York men (and women too!) interested in soccer formed clubs that were privately run and often sponsored by the companies for which they worked. They also often played on fields furnished by the company.” William Todd was evidently not satisfied in simply encouraging his employees to play in local park tournaments, by assigning valuable property in a very compressed New York landscape to build out a soccer field, he was getting ready to add a team to the ranks to either the NAFBL, the New York State Football League… or both.

Tebo Yacht Basin, one of Todd Shipyards’ recent acquisitions, was well known for its work in assembling top-quality American yachts, and was just two miles away from Todd Field. Located at the end of 23rd, near the Bush Terminal, the neighborhood just east was incorporated into Sunset Park in the 1960s and is now considered a part of Greenwood Heights; however, at the time, it was all just considered South Brooklyn. Todd would authorize Tebo Yacht Basin to form a squad and join the Metropolitan league in New York in 1918; Tebo Yacht Basin FC started their season being drawn to play and lost to Viking FC in round one of the National Challenge Cup. A loss they would exact revenge for a few years later in the La Sultana Cup.

The 1918-19 National Challenge Cup (now the US Open Cup) also shows another Todd Shipyards subsidiary soccer team in the tournament, Tietjen & Lang, of Hoboken, New Jersey. They were battered in the first round 0-6 by The Scottish-Americans of Kearny, New Jersey. There’s no further mention of this club, however, and it might be assumed they began the same year as Tebo Yacht Basin, and their successful sister club, Brooklyn Robins Dry Dock FC. All three clubs likely played at Todd Field and it would be Tebo Yacht Basin FC and Robins Dry Dock FC who would begin the organization’s amazing haul of cups and league titles from all over the region in such a short span of time.

In an era bereft of transfer periods or window, Robins Dry Dock FC accumulated some of the era’s most talented players as their season progressed.

Robins’ first season began in the Autumn of 1918 as well, with entry into the National Challenge Cup - they won their way through the first round, into the second and defeated Bridgeport City FC of Connecticut to make it to the third round. Unfortunately they lost to eventual Cup Runners-Up, Patterson FC, but it took Paterson a replay to get the win. Robins’ roster was surprisingly well-loaded; the Great War had just ended in November of that year and it had taken its toll on the rosters, not just of soccer teams in New York, but of all sports anywhere. Young men from all over the nation were drawn into service for their country and that left many sports organizations scrambling, not only to fill their rosters, but to even compete. The NAFBL was forced to allow three teams to bow out before the season even began and a fourth club, the East Newark Scots-Americans, left the competition - drained of players after five games. Robins Dry Dock FC were allowed to join the league during week six, and assume the schedule of the Scots-Americans who vacated their fixture list. 

Robins finished fourth that season, followed it up by finishing third in 1919-20 and third again in 1920-21; while third place is a respectable finish for most clubs, it was the cup competitions where Robins Dry Dock FC really made their hay. In their three years of existence, they got laid up in the semifinals of the American Cup once and won the whole competition twice - beating Fore River and Bethlehem Steel respectively. Bethlehem Steel had won five of the previous six American Cup finals before getting knocked down a peg by Robins Dry Dock FC. Robins made it a double over Bethlehem Steel in 1919-20, by knocking them out of the National Challenge Cup (this even came on the heels of knocking Fall River out the round prior - Robins were a force to be reckoned with after only a couple years on the scene).

It was that 1919-20 National Challenge Cup semi-final which set something more in motion for Robins, while after all the noise they made beating storied clubs like Bethlehem and Fall River, they went out with a whimper to Fore River. William Henry Todd, owner of Todd Shipyards Corporation and sponsor of his subsidiary organizations’ soccer teams, did not like to lose. He had a track record of reorganizing and finding the best of the best to make things happen. Todd spent the 1920-21 season acquiring assets; he brought in an entire pantheon of soccer talent from the roaring twenties: Bob Millar was brought over from Bethlehem Steel, along with Thore Sundberg, George McKelvey and Harry Ratican.

Bethlehem Steel took a tour of Scandinavia, where they found Thore Sundberg, whom Todd in turn tempted over to his Robins Dry Dock project.

Hall of Famer Robert “Bob” Millar had two stints with Bethlehem Steel before signing with Robins Dry Dock in 1920, but this wasn’t his first time playing for a Brooklyn club - he had originally come over from St. Mirren in Scotland and became a bit of a journeyman, playing for 14 different American clubs (including a loan spell at Tebo Yacht Basin too). Sundberg, of course, was signed away from AIK Solna by Bethlehem Steel on a tour of Europe in 1919 - he was highly regarded as a “leading forward in Sweden” with a pair of caps for his country but extensive experience leading the line for AIK from 1916 until he was swept to the US to play in the American Cup. At some point Todd, or Robins coach JR Drysdale, liked what he saw and stole him away from Bethlehem.

George McKelvey had played for Bethlehem during one of their most impressive periods - winning their respective league five times, accumulating four National Challenge Cups and five American Cups with the legendary team. However, at some point in the 1920-21 season, McKelvey moved from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn to run the rule on the right side of the field for Robins. The most impressive jewel from this heist, however, was the addition of US National Team player and future US Hall of Famer, Harry Ratican. He won back-to-back NAFBL titles with Bethlehem and scored critical goals in both their National Cup wins over Fall River and Paterson, respectively. But Todd wasn’t done loading up his roster, he and coach Drysdale plundered Fall River for Fred Beardsworth and Neil Clark, then Scottish players Robert Hosie from Llydebank and Jack McGuire from St. Johnstone - this move for Scottish players would later become endemic of wealthy American clubs paying over the odds for talent, however, in 1920-21 the soccer wars were still in the offing and Todd had a dream team to assemble. Already there was another future Hall of Famer, goal-keeper Peter Renzulli, a New York Native, who made his debut for Robins Dry Dock FC in November 1919, but had established himself as a bit of a local legend playing in those local parks tournaments, then for the likes of St. Georges and Manhattan in the New York State League.

Without a transfer period, clubs could poach players at any time of the season. National Soccer Hall-of-Famer Frankie Vaughn, touted as never having played for anyone other than Ben Millers, actually transferred to Robins for the 1920-21 NAFBL season.

Unbeknownst to all eight clubs in the league at the time, the 1920-21 NAFBL season would be the last one on record - Brooklyn Robins finished 3rd on points (12) behind New York FC (17) and league winners Bethlehem Steel (23). It wasn’t the prize they were seeking, however, after going out in the semifinal of the 1919-20 National Challenge Cup to Fore River, Robins were seeking retribution. Especially so after seeing that Fore River lost in the final to Ben Millers 1-2. In the 1920-21 tournament, the Robins eleven would find their way past their opponents, round after round. On November 25th, it was a convincing win over Columbia Graphophone 3-0; they snuck past Erie AA in the 4th round after a replay. Robins ran into Fore River in the quarterfinals but exacted their revenge with a 3-0 thumping. Interestingly enough, they ran into their sister club Tebo Yacht Basin in the semifinals, but proved why they were the top club and won 3-0 again. On April 19th, 1921, Brooklyn Robins Dry Dock FC made it to the final of the National Challenge Cup to play the two-time winner of their own St. Louis Soccer League, Scullin Steel FC.

The USFA National Challenge Cup Final annually rotated to a new neutral site; in Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1918, Fall River, Massachusetts in 1919, St. Louis, Missouri in 1920 and Robins would take on the Scullin Steel eleven in the “City of Hills and Mills,” in the southwestern part of Massachusetts. The Final had returned to Fall River and according to the match report from the 1921 Spalding’s Guide to Soccer, “It mattered not to the fans of this section that the Fall River Rovers were not battling on the field that day. Fall River Fans rallied to the support of the game.” With an attendance listed at 8,000 it's easy to assume at least a few hundred made it up from St. Louis or New York for the final, but that level of interest from the neutral fans shows an immense level of interest in professional soccer at the time.

“Robins twice before had been a strong bidder for the highest honors soccer has to bestow in this country, but on both occasions had missed out when the achievement of their greatest ambition seemed imminent,” reports Spalding’s. It was even well-known at the time that Robins had been close contenders and those losses galvanized their sponsors, Todd Shipyards, to spend the money in order to win the prize. The money was well spent too, “Robins exercised the famous short passing style of play that is common to the team comprising kickers from across the water.” Scullin’s dependence on American grit and determination, the kick and run style of play, was no match for the fancy footwork and quick passing of Robins’ forward line. 

The score-sheet from the match report shows the game might have been slightly more interesting to begin with however, Scullin scored first with a goal from Charles Bechtold in the 15th and Robins’ Jack McGuire answered immediately in the 16th to make it even. Scullin Steel went ahead again just minutes later when Bechtold scored his brace. Unfortunately for Scullin, it was at that point that Robins took control of the match and three more players contributed to the win; Robert Hosie in the 29th, Peter Sweeney in the 64th, and George McKelvey finished off the evening with a fourth goal for Robins Dry Dock in the 71st. “Much credit must be given the speedy forward line of the brilliant Robins eleven. Their pace was remarkable. Sweeney, Hosie, McGuire, Ratican, and McKelvey - perhaps no swifter combination has been known to the soccer world of the present day.”

Todd, center, and his National Champion Robins Drydock eleven.

At only their third foray into the National Challenge Cup, Robins Dry Dock had wielded the buying power of their parent organization, Todd Shipyards, and brought the title home to Brooklyn. “The Robins Dry Dock and Repair Company Football Club of Brooklyn equalized in 1920-21 the earlier record of the Bethlehem Steel Company eleven by winning both the National Challenge Cup and the annual trophy of the AFA, next in importance, perhaps, to the national championship.” Robins had done the double. The same squad who knocked Fore River out of the National Challenge Cup in the quarterfinal then humbled them again with a thumping 5-2 defeat in the American Cup final. Harry Ratican, Hosie, Sweeney, Sturch, and McGuire all tallied in the match and Robins were arguably the best American soccer team in 1920-21.

Meanwhile, outside of soccer, the world was still recovering from both World War I as well as the Spanish Flu Pandemic. Complications from these two global issues triggered a sharp deflationary recession in 1920 which lasted until early summer of 1921. The United States was seeing an influx of Veterans which overwhelmed the civilian workforce while the demand for iron, steel, fuel, and especially wartime shipbuilding was in a downturn. It's difficult not to suspect this would have had an economic impact on Todd Shipyards Corporation - in addition to the three soccer teams they were sponsoring in three different leagues in and around New York, Todd’s first Pacific acquisition, the Seattle Construction and Drydock company, may also have been fielding a soccer team in Washington state. William H Todd, even in an economic recession, was immensely wealthy, but he was also a businessman and read the writing on the wall. The NAFBL’s collapse and subsequent rise of the first iteration of the American Soccer League, gave him the perfect opportunity to make his move.

Coming on the heels of Robins Drydock FC’s successes and Tebo Yacht Basin FC’s respective success (having won the La Sultana Cup of New York by defeating Viking FC 2-0) William Todd decided to merge the three, assuming Titjen & Lang’s team was still operating to some extent, and form Todd Shipyards Football Club. This must have come as a shock to the players of both of the corporation’s successful squads as both had planned on joining the newly formed American Soccer League (ASL) and now only one team would be financed by the parent company. Robins’ coach JR Drysdale would stay on as the Todd Shipyards coach and would take most of his national championship winning roster with him. By May of 1921, just a month after the National Challenge Cup Final, the ASL was planning its season and was including the newly formed Todd Shipyards FC in that plan - Todds was spending money on upgrading Todd Field for their first fully professional season and looking to add a few more players to their all-star roster.

By the Spring of 1921, the NAFBL was collapsing as the teams at the top were looking for something higher profile and the teams at the bottom couldn’t afford to keep going as they were. Todd completed the merger of Tebo Yacht Basin FC, Robins Dry Dock FC, and for what it's worth, probably Tietjen & Lang. Manager Drysdale was able to recruit William Whitehead, Adam Smith, James Campbell, and Bill Fryer into the new team and headed into their initial American Soccer League (ASL) season as favorites to make some noise. The ASL was a combination of the old NAFBL with teams from the Southern New England Soccer League and hopes were high. However, the league hit a few snags in the beginning, and despite throwing $6,000 ($79, 476.49 in today’s money) at their newly minted franchise, Jersey City Celtics folded. According to David Wangerin in Soccer in a Football World, “The remaining seven clubs lasted the season, but winter postponements and apathy toward meaningless end-of-season matches - particularly when visiting teams had little financial incentive to travel - meant some did not fulfill all their fixtures.”

The increased costs of competing in the expanded area of the ASL and the issue of dealing with incompetent fellow ownership groups became a burden on teams like Todds who, by all accounts were still well-funded. However, with the economic stresses of 1921-22 combined with the haphazard way the new league was run, Todd Shipyards would not return for another season. Which was a shame too, because despite all the ailments of the league, Todds, led by the “Mac Attack” of Frank McKenna, Jack McGuire, and George McKelvey were putting on lively displays of attacking prowess. After 24 games played in the league, Todd Shipyards finished 3rd behind Philadelphia FC and New York FC, but boasted a +19 goal difference and a return trip to the National Challenge Cup final - against none other than Scullin Steel FC.

Scullin Steel FC didn’t switch leagues; they weren’t bogged down with upgrading their facilities or spending funds on long-distance away days. By and large, Scullin Steel remained the same club that they were the year before and they leveled all competition on their way to the Cup Final in 1922; 2-0 over Johnston City, 3-0 over Ben Millers, 3-0 again beating Pullman FC, and thumping Caledonia FC 4-0 in the semifinal. Scullin hadn’t given up a goal in the entire competition. Todds’ path was a little rockier; 5-3 over NY Field Club, 4-1 over Philadelphia Field Club, cutting it close with a 1-0 victory against Harrison SC, and just getting past Abbot Worsted in their semifinal, 2-1. Todd Shipyards was clearly dealing with a bit of pressure to return to the final and juggle that with the inconsistencies of league play in the ASL.

On March 19, 1922 Scullin Steel FC met Todd Shipyards FC for a rematch of the previous year’s National Challenge Cup Final. Scullin had every reason to feel that they had this one in the bag and had done everything possible to get to High School Field in St. Louis, Missouri - in front of 9,000 spectators and in their very own backyard. According to the match report, “until fifteen minutes before game time the rain came down in torrents.” The pitch was a muddy disaster and for the first half an hour, the home team were anchored as Todd Shipyards came in with their tails up. Jack McGuire, with an assist from Ratican, scored the first goal of the contest in the 17th and just two minutes later, he doubled their scoreline. Scullin Steel were shocked it would take them until nearly the end of the half to get back in the match but once they did, they never looked back, “The youth and stamina of the Scullins started telling. And once the Eastern veterans started to tire, the Scullins were by far the better team. The forwards played as they should, while the halfbacks broke up the combination play of the drydock eleven.” 

After William Todd’s passing, the corporation sold off some assets while adding others, but his name remained on the letterhead until the 21st century.

Scullins unabashedly went very direct, and according to the 1922 Spaldings Guide to soccer, “The Scullins forwards gave an exhibition of the worth of the long pass. All three goals were made possible by the use of the strictly American style of play. Ability to beat the heavier and slower moving Todds to the ball also helped materially.” Cliff Brady pulled one goal back before the half, with an assist from Charles Bechtold. Once play resumed in the second half, Todds were done for - while they had 16 shots on goal in the first half, they only mustered 3 shots in the second half; they also managed to out-foul Scullins, a true sign they had lost their steam in the rain and muck. Elmer “Allie” Schwarz tied the game up in the 71st and the two sides went hammer and tongs for another quarter of an hour. “To Elmer Schwarz, center forward of the Scullins, went the honor of bringing the title back to St. Louis. It was Schwarz who in the waning moments of the second half booted the mud-soaked ball into the upper corner of the net for what proved the deciding point.”

And so it was, Scullins Steel had given everything they had to get back to the final and were happy to face a shadow of a team they had played just a year before. Todd Shipyards FC was devastated - the organization would never field a team in any east coast league again, professional or amateur. It had simply proved to be bad business for William H Todd and he found he could get the same level of competitive satisfaction from playing the stock market in the 1920s - until that also proved to be poor business, as the stock market crash of 1929 would prove. At the age of 68, in 1932, William H Todd passed away and by 1937 Tebo Yacht Basin had been sold to Sullivan Drydock. Todd Shipyards sold some assets and bought others while becoming one of the world’s most successful shipbuilders in the 20th Century. Vigor Industrial bought Todd Shipyards outright in 2011 and ended the story of the vision and effort of William H Todd.

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Sources used for this article:

https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/todd-triangle/history

https://img2.newspapers.com/clip/23324394/wh-todd-profile-shipyard-1917/

https://www.newspapers.com/clip/40784245/022622-boston-globe-abbot-worsted/http://worldwidesoccerstories.blogspot.com/2013/12/playing-in-states-early-edition-part-two.html

https://thecup.us/2019/08/06/us-open-cup-history-a-final-four-with-teams-without-a-title-game-appearance-is-rare/

https://www.ussoccer.com/stories/2020/04/global-pandemic-world-war-and-the-1919-open-cup

https://thecup.us/2011/09/30/the-open-cup-final-1914-present/

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1921/04/18/98672456.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tebo_Yacht_Basin_F.C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Robins_Dry_Dock

https://soccerhistoryusa.org/podcast/goals-goals-goals/

https://books.google.com/books?id=1mK2xw1E6dAC&pg=PA348&lpg=PA348&dq=todd+shipyards+seattle+soccer&source=bl&ots=FTRdjRf6fX&sig=ACfU3U3CXDnUi29g72sx61ftl8Ocz30k-A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjRj8HJxbDqAhViIjQIHT_xAMIQ6AEwD3oECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=todd%20shipyards%20seattle%20soccer&f=false

What's In a Name?

The history of soccer in the U.S. is inextricably linked with the country’s history of immigration. The game became the world’s sport in the early 20th century at the same time the U.S. was experiencing the peak years of European immigration. These newly-arrived immigrants brought the love of the game with them and they and their children made up the initial wave of players and fans.

In the U.S., the sport was played and watched by working class immigrants. From the beginning, there was a tension between the popularity of the sport and the ethnicity of the sports fans. In the early 20th century, the racial classification of many non-Western European immigrants as white had still not solidified. At this time, those of Irish, Italian and Jewish descent, for example, were still not fully seen as white in many parts of the U.S. population. While hugely popular in the early decades of the 20th century, soccer was seen as an immigrant game and largely never had much reach outside of the large urban areas where those populations lived.

In the early 1930s, while pro leagues were still found in a few areas such as St. Louis, Chicago and Los Angeles, the east coast-based American Soccer League was generally recognized as the most prominent at the time. After the fall 1933 reorganization of the ASL, the league was structured more like the modern NPSL and UPSL - a central, controlling entity of separate regional leagues. In the ASL’s case, the mid-Atlantic-based, Metropolitan Division, and the New England Division.

Much of the ASL’s reorganization was caused by the withdrawal of wealthy businessmen and corporate backing from the league. Almost all of the clubs operating in the ASL were teams formed by ethnic, religious, and civic organizations formed by immigrant communities. Metropolitan teams included the First Germans of Newark, Hispano and St. Mary’s Celtic of Brooklyn, Irish-American and Scots-American of Kearny, and German-American of Philadelphia. The New England Division included clubs such as Boston Celts, Portuguese S.C. of Providence, Lusitania Recreation of Cambridge, St. Michael’s of Fall River, Scandinavians and Swedish-Americans of Worcester, and Gremio-Lusitano of Ludlow.

The ethnic tensions of the sport came to a head based on the non-Anglo European group that likely was most fully integrated into whiteness at the time. German immigrants had migrated to the U.S. much earlier than those from most other countries. As such, the German community, even newer immigrants, were much more accepted by the dominant culture. But, world events radically changed that viewpoint.

In the late 1930s, authoritarianism and nationalism were radicalizing many parts of the world. Facism and nazism was on the march in Europe. It was inevitable that conflict would break out and that the U.S. would be pulled into it. In 1939, war officially broke out in Europe after Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1 and, while still not formally involved, the U.S. felt the pull. That year, the ASL’s new season was scheduled to start on September 10.

The prior year, the Metropolitan Division had added two new clubs - Deutscher S.C from Baltimore and Hungarian of Bethlehem - for the 1938-39 season. The former, an amateur team, renamed themselves Baltimore German S.C. after they joined the league.

After the Nazis invaded Poland, the Baltimore Germans, quickly decided to officially change their name. On September 6, the club announce the name had been changed to Baltimore Americans. At the same time, Bethlehem Hungarians moved to Allentown, dropped their ethnic nickname, and simply became Allentown S.C. A week earlier, another league club, Trenton Highlanders, had been taken over by Dover F.C. and became Paterson-Dover S.C.

The September 6, 1939 edition of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted:

“The changing of names has been urged with increasing pressure recently by those demanding the complete Americanization of the sport. While the players and the immediate management are in the vast majority Americans, the clubs were originally sponsored by and had affiliations with hyphenated fraternal and welfare societies.”

The initial wave over, the rest of the Metropolitan clubs, including Philadelphia Germans, held off on removing their ethnic nicknames through the next season. But, that soon changed. Prior to the 1941-42 season, Passon F.C. of Philadelphia (often called Passon Phillies) became the Philadelphia Nationals. In December of 1941, after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, the ASL initiated an official policy to Americanize club names. Scots-Americans changed their names to Kearny Americans and the Philadelphia Germans became Philadelphia Americans. Brooklyn Hispano simply became Brooklyn and the club’s long-time unofficial nickname, the Red Devils, was used more often.

And what of the New England Division? Those clubs never had similar transformations or the chance to do so. After the U.S. entered World War II, most of the New England teams had difficulty fielding squads due to the war duties of the players. The league never completed the 1941-42 season and faded away.

The transformation was complete when the Irish-Americans became Kearny Celtics for the 1942-43 season. During the war, the ASL was a 10-team league and fully half of them had patriotic names with the Philadelphia Nationals joined by four clubs called the Americans: Baltimore; Kearny: New York; and Philadelphia. The trend did ease somewhat in the short-term. Brooklyn quickly returned to the Hispano nickname and the Kearny Americans soon became better known by their unofficial nickname, Kearny Scots.

In the post-war era the nation’s patriotic fervor lessened and soccer became less popular in the mainstream sports landscape. In this environment, the ASL became an even less consequential enterprise and returned back to a league made up of teams with strong ethnic identities. So much so that, by the 1963-64 season, six of the eight clubs had ethnic nicknames. These included Ukrainian Sitch of Newark, New York Hakoah-Americans and Hungarian-American of New Brunswick.

But, as with most things in U.S. soccer, change is the norm. The launch of the fully professional North American Soccer League in the late 1960s brought a wave of Americanization to the game even beyond that of the World War II era. In an attempt to make the league more attractive to advertisers and the mainstream sports audience, the NASL had a formal policy that its clubs, made up almost exclusively of foreign players, should have the traditionally American team names similar to other professional sports. The ASL followed that wave and by 1971 only had one team, the New York Greeks, with an ethnic identity. The league fully purged ethnic nicknames for good when the Greeks became the New York Apollo before the 1973 season.

- Dan Creel

A New Golden Age?

Cultural commentators have noted that we are presently in a second Golden Age of Television. The combined quality, diversity and popularity of current television programming has resulted in an era where television, traditionally a formulaic medium, has replaced film as the prestige format for visual creators.

One important factor in that is the myriad of streaming services that emerged over the last decade. As diverse content was created, these platforms gave instant and far-reaching access to shows that may have simply had cult status in prior years.

Some cultural critics have even begun predicting that this Golden Age may be rapidly ending as media companies begin rolling out their own streaming services. Many envision that this will lead to content again being more costly, and thus, harder to access. As the easy access to a massive amount of content disappears so will the Second Golden Age of Television as viewership declines and content providers no longer see worth investing in as much prestige programming.

I have started wondering if we may be in a new Golden Age of U.S. Soccer. The original Golden Age took place in the 1920s when the U.S. joined the rest of the world as a soccer-playing nation and the fully-professional American Soccer League brought in huge crowds. For some time we have been living in the Modern Age of U.S. Soccer. The Modern Age is roughly understood to be from the 1994 World Cup, through the launching of MLS in 1996 to the present day.

I suspect that the Modern Era is ending or, perhaps, has already ended. Things are vastly better now than 20 years ago at the national level. MLS is a stable Division I league and has the highest number clubs of any top-level league in the world. The league is popular and can charge expansion fees in the $150 million to $200 million range. Also, the U.S. Soccer Federation is in the last few years of a lucrative marketing deal that has paid the federation more than $300 million in less than 20 years.

On top of that, the game has exploded at the local, grassroots level. The youth game, huge even in the pre-Modern Era, has continued to expand. Even more than that, the number of elite amateur, semi-pro and pro teams is larger than it ever has been. The game is no longer played at a high level in just a concentrated number of pockets. You can find high-quality soccer clubs in all parts of the country now.

In addition, the investment in the game is no longer happening just at the national level. The number of clubs with excellent front offices continues to grow. Clubs are doing a better job investing in operations, media and outreach. We continue to see the creation of enthusiastic communities of fans.

So, is this a Second Golden Age of U.S. Soccer? Given all of the above it seems one could make a valid argument for such. But, an important factor is still lacking.

A huge problem with the sport in this country is the continued attempt to shoehorn the game into the traditional U.S. league-franchise model. That has worked for the other major U.S. professional leagues (and their minor league affiliates), and may have been required to get MLS off the ground, but such a model will always hamper the sport of soccer.

With all the great strides being made, access to the game is still highly problematic. One of the vital aspects of soccer isn’t just the game itself, it is the interconnectivity of the sport. Soccer games, clubs, leagues and organizations are never isolated. They always operate within a larger system that spans levels, competitions and territorial boundaries. It is both an intra- and inter-organizational game. It is a local, regional, national and international game all at the same time.

MLS, and its formulaic version of top-level soccer, can, and likely will, continue to operate on its current owner-operator league-franchise model. But, as it is a soccer league, it will then always be capped as to its quality and popularity because it is inherently disconnected from the greater game. No matter how financially successful it is, it will always be hamstrung because It is not fully connected to the soccer community.

While MLS can survive, without that institution’s vast resources, the lower levels of soccer face even larger barriers due the lack of interconnectivity. Without the organization that is fundamental to the sport, the overall soccer environment in this country has been, and continues to be, chaotic. Without a community that provides stability and engenders innovation, many clubs struggle to find an audience or even adequate playing facilities. For the clubs who are doing well league hopping, or straight out poaching, is the norm as they outgrow their current situations. For fans, it is often hard to figure out the landscape at a grassroots level. Diehards will make great effort to seek out their local clubs but the average soccer fan will likely end up devoting their attention to a far away MLS, Liga MX or Premier League club because doing so simply makes more sense.

Even more troubling is the very real concern that a healthy burgeoning soccer environment will end even before it has a chance to begin. If the soccer powers continue to restrict access to the few and refuse to open the doors to a broader coalition then most of the innovators at the grassroots level will find it impractical to continue (or even attempt to join) the game. And, if that happens, then the U.S. soccer community will have access to an even-more limited version of the game controlled by a few moguls.

We can not and should not consider this a Golden Age of U.S. Soccer until the sport is fully integrated with the greater soccer community.

- Dan Creel

The Many Versions of the Soccer Wars

Readers may have noticed that a recent lawsuit brought by the USL against the UPSL for breach of trademark brought many soccer commentators to bemoan the return of new “soccer wars”. Why would a beef between leagues result in such an immediate and specific response? The simple answer is that a turf battle between soccer organizations helped doom the Golden Age of U.S. soccer. And, it is not hyperbole to say that the implications of that original “soccer war” continues to resonate until today. Sadly, top-level soccer in the U.S. seems unable to break a regular cycle of internecine wars. In order to give some background, in this article of Kicking Back we present a survey-style history course on American “soccer wars”.

1924-25: An Opening Skirmish

Following the 1923-24 season, the American Soccer League was on the ascendent. The league was stable and pulling in a good deal of fans. The league’s owners decided it was time to grow the eight-team league. They added three new clubs in New England (Boston, New Bedford and Providence) and brought in Fleisher Yarn, a top-notch Philadelphia amateur club.

The added clubs meant more games and the league pushed the schedule from 28 to 44 games. League owners began negotiations with the U.S. Football Association concerning their clubs’ ability to play in the National Challenge Cup (now called the U.S. Open Cup). ASL owners claimed that the additional league games would make it difficult for the clubs to schedule National Challenge Cup games during the season. But, a more practical reason for the disagreement was that the USFA made most of its annual income from the cup by taking a relatively high percentage of the gate receipts. And, after the association took its cut, the pro clubs found it not worth the loss of money when playing in front of smaller audiences when they had to play smaller clubs in the early rounds.

A month before the league season started the ASL voted to withdraw from the NCC. The country’s other major pro league, the four-team St. Louis Soccer League, also voted to withdraw. These moves led to Bethlehem’s local newspaper, The Globe, to announce “Looks Like A Soccer War” in its August 11, 1924 edition.

The leagues hoped to hold a replacement tournament but their different schedules made the idea impractical. Instead, the ASL held a league cup in the spring with the winner, Boston S.C., playing the American Pro Soccer Championship against the winners of the St. Louis league, the Ben Millers. Boston took the three-game series two games to one.

The USFA blinked first and, at their May 1925 annual meeting, they decided to lower their percentage of the NCC gate receipts by over half. This made the competition more palatable for the pro clubs and both pro leagues re-joined the cup in the next year.

1928-29: The Soccer War

Even though a truce was called after the 1924-25 season, the ASL and USFA continued sniping at each other as each regularly threatened to sever relations with the other. In the summer of 1928, the ASL voted Nat Agar as its delegate to the USFA’s annual meeting. Agar was empowered by the league to get the USFA to agree to keep the National Challenge Cup from disrupting the ASL schedule or the league would again withdraw its clubs. Agar, manager-owner of the Brooklyn Wanderers and long-time major domo of New York soccer, was a prime mover in pushing the ASL to flex its muscles. Another such owner was Charles Stoneham who owned baseball’s New York Giants as well as the ASL’s New York Nationals. Stoneham wanted the ASL to become the preeminent U.S. soccer organization. Stoneham’s Nationals won the 1928 NCC. After that victory, he pledged that his club would never play in another USFA tournament, and he called for other major league pro baseball owners to form or acquire ASL clubs to grow the league.

Stoneham’s biggest idea was a push to have the ASL’s champions to be named the champions of the East. In addition, he recommended that a new western league of baseball-owned clubs be created, whose champions would be named champions of the West. Under this plan, the eastern and western ASL champions would meet for the national soccer championship. At this point, the NCC was the preeminent soccer competition in the US and, via that tournament, the two finalists were considered the champions of the east and west with the winner considered the national champions. Stoneham’s proposal would shake up the power structure of U.S. soccer in a major way including greatly weakening the position of the USFA.

Agar came back from the July USFA meeting without a compromise and, in mid-September 1928, two weeks into the ASL season, the league voted to withdraw from the NCC. While the league owners voted to withdraw from the cup, three clubs decided to reject the boycott. Bethlehem Steel F.C., New York Giants S.C. and Newark F.C. ignored the league edict and registered for the tournament. These clubs saw financial benefits from playing in the cup and also rejected the Stoneham plan, in part because the league he wanted to create was a closed franchise model that would cap the number of clubs allowed to take part in his proposed national championship.

On September 27, the ASL suspended the three clubs from the league and fined each $1,000 for entering the NCC. On October 2, the USFA suspended the league. The grandfather of all soccer wars had begun in earnest.

On October 8, the three former-ASL clubs and five other eastern clubs quickly formed a new professional soccer league, the Eastern Soccer League, with the sanction of the USFA. The ASL felt the effects almost immediately. Due to the suspension, the ASL was operating as an “outlaw league” outside the sanctioning of the USFA and FIFA. Any player who played in such a league could also find themselves banned from signing contracts with sanctioned leagues domestic as well as international. As such, many foreign players decided to leave their ASL clubs rather than risk such a ban.

Stoneham’s New York Nationals were the hardest hit. On October 12, ten Nationals players quit the team before a match against the Wanderers due to the USFA’s suspension of the ASL. Most of these were former SC Hakoah Vienna players who joined the league after that club’s 1926 tour of the U.S. The Nationals played an impromptu exhibition with the Wanderers but had to cancel their next two games while they signed new players. In addition, a month later, the club moved from the Polo Grounds to the much smaller Innisfail Park in the Bronx.

While most of the non-ASL clubs were semi-pro outfits, one, the Hakoah All-Stars, was a new club made up primarily of the former ASL Hakoah Vienna players. The first game of the new ESL was held on October 13 between the New York Giants and Bethlehem Steel.

The ESL included several teams from the Southern New York State Football Association. The SNYSFA saw the ESL as an encroachment on its territory and the Association’s president, Dr. G.R. Manning, resigned in protest. Nat Agar ascended to the SNYSFA’s presidency and withdrew the organization from the USFA.

The two pro leagues battled for fans during the fall. On December 23, the clubs from the ASL and the SNYSFA formed the American Soccer Association with the intention to challenge the authority of the USFA. In the spring, following the ASL regular season, the ASA held a cup for all the clubs in the ASL and the SNYSFA. As a counter, the USFA formed a new New York State Football Association and all the ESL teams entered a cup competition of the newly organized NYSFA.

Both pro leagues completed their 1928-29 seasons and moved forward with 1929-30 seasons. The ASL launched relatively early in mid-August in hopes of getting ahead of their rival. But the soccer war and the late-summer recession severely strained the finances of all clubs involved. As the soccer season began, it became glaringly obvious something needed to be done and the parties began formal negotiations.

On October 22, most of the ASL clubs were reinstated by the USFA. While the ESL continued play, the ASL suspended operations as the parties worked toward forming a new league. Two days later, in the middle of these negotiations, the “Black Thursday” stock market crash signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. “Black Monday” struck on October 29 and the Atlantic Coast Soccer League officially formed in the immediate aftermath. The first games of the merged league were played on November 9.

1932: Everyone for Themselves

The 1931 American Soccer League (the ACSL was reorganized and renamed in the summer of 1930) season was the last one that it could be recognized as a true, stable major professional league. At the end of the ASL spring 1931 season, Nat Agar’s Brooklyn Wanderers’ sat in second place behind the New York Giants. Agar protested the championship results due to the Giants having one more game scheduled than Brooklyn. The protest was disallowed. Agar hosted a friendly at Ebbets Field against Glasgow Celtic for the next weekend. The USFA suspended Agar due to some issue with this game and he was forced to sell his interests in the Wanderers.

Numerous franchise moves and foldings over a short amount ended with most of the old guard of owners out of the league by late 1932. The loss of stable finances and leadership led to a chaotic situation for professional soccer. As touched on in an earlier Kicking Back, the remaining New York contingent of ASL clubs withdrew from the league before the spring season began in an attempt to form a new, but ultimately doomed, competitor to the league.

And there were even more battles during that year. After the tumultuous spring season, the USFA began plans to take control of pro soccer in the U.S. by directly promoting and organizing regional leagues. The governing body relied on the National Challenge Cup for income but the funds received were not enough and it was looking to the pro game for new funding sources. The state associations balked at the notion of the USFA circumventing their jurisdictions with rumblings that clubs could leave the USFA and operate as independents. The ASL responded to the USFA’s plan by electing the still-suspended Nat Agar as their new president.

Rather than embark on another protracted battle, the two sides decided on peace. The USFA reinstated Agar and the ASL agreed to allow its teams to enter the NCC. A few weeks later, Agar settled with the newly-formed National Soccer League by reinstating the New York Americans and entering a second New York club into the ASL.

1933: The End of the Golden Age

While the USFA and the ASL had an agreement, this understanding was not welcome at the state level. ASL secretary Sam Fletcher, former Providence F.C. player and owner, moved to organize a separate New England Division of the ASL. He was unable to field enough New England teams, and the ASL moved forward with only its four-team Metropolitan Division for the spring 1933 season.

During that summer, Fletcher met with strong opposition from the New England state associations who disapproved of the ASL’s move to form a separate pro league that would not allow its clubs to take part in non-USFA cup competitions. With the fall season still not settled and hoping to stave off the ASL’s influence, the state associations attempted to form their own professional league but were not able to come to an agreement. Included reorganized ASL franchises in Boston, Fall River and Pawtucket, Fletcher managed to form a nine-team New England Division in time to start the 1933 fall season.

With the New England Division finally a reality, the USFA and ASL had aggregated control of the professional game on the East Coast. One more step solidified that control. On October 16, 1933 Nat Agar retired as president of the ASL and the organization reorganized. The two divisions, Metropolitan and New England, would operate as separate leagues under the umbrella ASL organization which was controlled by a three-man board. Even though the two divisions were the competitive leagues, it was American Soccer League, Inc. that formally held the affiliation with the USFA and given the sole right of interstate professional competition.

The original Soccer War badly destabilized US soccer governance at the national and league level. In addition, the Great Depression massively impeded the financial capacity of soccer owners. These two factors led to the scope of the American Soccer League eroding through the early 1930s. And, as the reach of the ASL narrowed, any hopes of a national soccer system forming during the mid-20th century also expired in part due to the continuing power struggle and lack of cohesion between the USFA and the state associations.

1966-67: The Silver Age

While the rest of the world embraced the modern game, the lack of direction in the U.S. doomed the sport to decline and obscurity in all but a few pockets of the country. Two major factors changed that. First, the 1960s was a period of change and expansion in the North American major sports league landscape. During the decade the American Football League and American Basketball Association were formed as competitors to the established National Football League and National Basketball Association. Also, the National Hockey League began a rapid period of expansion. Second, within that context, the 1966 FIFA World Cup held in England ratcheted up interest in the game to a new level in large part because the event was broadcast live on color television for the first time.

In the spring before that World Cup, FIFA met in New York City. Three North American groups were represented with an interest in forming a major league. The World Cup, held in July, was a massive success.

That summer one group named themselves the North American Soccer League and planned to begin play in 1968. The other two groups merged to become the National Professional Soccer League. For the most part, the ownership of these new teams were made up primarily of groups who already owned teams in the other major league sports.

In August, the NASL received sanctioning from the U.S. Soccer Football Association. Merger talks occurred over the next month with the NASL planning to have all-star and European teams playing in each city in 1967 and a full league to start in 1968. The NPSL ruled out the merger, moved forward with plans for a 1967 season as a 12-team “outlaw league”, and landed a $1 million television deal with CBS.

Later in 1966, FIFA attempted to mediate a merger between the newly-organized leagues but failed to come to an agreement. In late December, FIFA officially sanctioned the NASL as the only U.S. major soccer league. Football associations in various countries warned that their players would be suspended if they signed with the non-sanctioned NPSL.

Wanting to avoid a failure, in February 1967, FIFA stated that players who signed with the NPSL would not be banned for life. In addition the organization urged the USSFA to immediately sanction the NPSL. While most domestic clubs, FIFA and other European clubs wanted the merger, the major stumbling blocks were the NPSL’s low television contract and the NASL’s exclusive 10-year sanctioning.

Because of a lack of a true professional game in the U.S., both leagues needed to look abroad for players. The NPSL opened their season on April 16 with 10 teams made up of mostly foreign players. A month and a half later, the 12-team United Soccer Association (renamed from the NASL that March) opened their “mini-league” with full imported foreign teams playing under contract to the domestic clubs. Merger talks continued to be held during the season.

The USA ended their “mini-league” on July 14 when the Los Angeles Wolves (represented by the Wolverhampton Wanderers) defeated the Washington Whips (represented by Aberdeen F.C.) 6-5 on an own-goal in sudden death overtime to win the 1967 Final before 17,842 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The NPSL completed their season on September 9 when the Oakland Clippers won the second-leg of the final against the Baltimore Bays 4-1 before 9,037 at Oakland-Alameda Coliseum taking the championship with a 4-2 aggregate.

A merger between the leagues was reported to be announced the day before the NPSL final. But, it never materialized when, the day after the final, the NPSL filed an $18 million trust suit in federal court against the USA, USSFA, FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Football Association alleging a conspiracy to drive it out of existence. The suit alleged the groups blacklisted foreign players who signed with the NPSL and that USSFA officials who approved the sanction were given jobs in the USA. The suit also sought to enjoin the USA from fielding teams until the NPSL was recognized.

Merger talks continued between the leagues while the case moved forward. In mid-November a federal judge ordered organized soccer to show cause why it should not be ordered to end its boycott of the NPSL. With the lawsuit pending, the two leagues formally agreed to a merger on December 7 with the new league taking the USA’s old North American Soccer League moniker. The NPSL dropped its suit soon after.

The battle was a costly one for all involved. It was reported that none of the teams in either league made money. The Baltimore Bays, owned by the Baltimore Orioles, lost $400,000 and the NPSL’s Philadelphia Spartans, owned by the Rooney family, lost $500,000 and folded after the merger. The PIttsburgh Phantoms of the NPSL had the worst of it losing $900,000 and also folded.

The 1968 season was similar to the prior one. The league was popular enough to continue but attendance wasn’t large enough to offset the costs and clubs continued to lose money. The league imploded, dropping from 17 teams to five for the 1969 season. But a more conservative approach allowed it to survive through the early 1970s until renewed interest led to a period of rapid expansion in the latter part of that decade.

2009-11: The Soccer Warz

In August 2009, Nike sold its interest in the United Soccer Leagues to NuRock Soccer Holdings instead of a conglomerate of USL First Division owners. These clubs plus a few others broke away from the USL, formed a new North American Soccer League and applied to the USSF for Division II sanctioning.

The USL issued press releases claiming the breakaway clubs may have been in breach of contract and the league could seek litigation to protect its interest. The USSF found that three of the breakaway NASL teams had binding contracts with the USL for 2010, but that left neither league with the minimum number of teams to be sanctioned for that season. In December the USSF stripped sanctioning from the USL First Division and refused to sanction the NASL for 2010. After weeks of negotiation, the USSF announced it would run an interim Division II league for the 2010 season made up of the 12 NASL and USL clubs.

Following that 2010 season, the NASL formally admitted all the breakaway teams and, with enough members, was given provisional Division II sanctioning in November for the 2011 season. The USL ceded the Division II tier to the NASL and reorganized the remaining USL First and Second Division teams into the Division III USL Pro league for the 2011 season.

2015-18: The End of the Modern Era

A new order had been established but one that none involved appeared happy with. The truce between the parties always seemed temporary and the status quo quickly disintegrated.

In September 2015 the NASL accused US soccer of antitrust violations if the USSF went ahead with the adoption of a new set of criteria for professional league sanctioning. The league accused the federation of colluding with Major League Soccer to protect the Division I league’s monopoly. The USSF ignored the NASL and adopted its new Professional League Standards.

During the 2015 and 2016 seasons, the Division III USL (rebranded from USL Pro) doubled in size in large part due to a multi-year agreement with the MLS where the MLS Reserve League was integrated into the league. By the 2016 season, the USL had ballooned to 29 teams of which 21 were affiliates or partners of MLS clubs.

In January 2017, the USSF granted USL provisional Division II status for the 2017 season and only granted the NASL provisional sanctioning due to its membership dropping below the newer 12-team minimum. In September, the USSF revoked the NASL’s sanctioning completely for the 2018 season leaving the USL as the only remaining Division II league.

The NASL responded by filing an antitrust suit in federal court seeking to prevent the USSF from revoking the leagues Division II status and to strike down the federation’s Professional League Standards and other divisional rules. The court ruled against the league’s motion and, in February 2018, the appeal court denied an appeal. In the wake of those rulings, the NASL announced a cancellation of their 2018 season with clubs moving to other leagues.

With the demise of the NASL, Major League Soccer and it’s partner, the USL, gained complete control of the U.S. professional league system. As of the publication of this article, there are 74 teams in the three professional divisions with 44 of them owned or affiliated with MLS.

- Dan Creel

The John F Kennedy Cup: The Legacy of an International Cup Competition on the West Coast, 1960 – 2018

The 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was an avid sportsman; he played American Football and was a member of his high school swim team. From the onset of his political career, Kennedy made regular visits to baseball as well as basketball events and even valued the physicality and endurance of Soccer. President Kennedy was also a veteran of World War II, and naturally found value in being in tip-top condition. “We are under-exercised as a nation” he said while speaking at the NFL Hall of Fame’s 1961 black-tie event, “we look instead of play, ride instead of walk.” The remedy, Kennedy concluded, “lies in one direction… that is, in developing programs for broad participation in exercise by all of our young men and women, all of our boys and girls.”

Canada was also interested in the benefits of improved physical fitness—at least their soccer federation was. The Canadian National team participated in their first world cup qualifiers leading into the 1958 affair. Mexico dominated the qualifiers and represented the continent in Sweden later that year—but the Canadians finished second in North American qualifying and ideas for a new international cup tournament, which would pit the best of Canada’s Pacific Coast Soccer League against the highest caliber amateur sides from leagues in Washington, Oregon, California and even Mexico, were bubbling as early as 1960. Despite the length and breadth of Canada, the top players had been drawn regularly from the PCSL in British Columbia—and it was the unofficial hotbed of soccer there.

The Province took the Kennedy Cup seriously and gave Vancouver Firefighters the headline in 1962.

The cup competition made it’s debut in 1961, guaranteeing the participation of players from the entire west coast of the United States and President Kennedy lent his name to the trophy as a component of his physical fitness campaign. He had established a Council on Youth Fitness as early as 1956, but, once he was president, Kennedy retitled the program as The President’s Council on Physical Fitness. The Cup is unique, in that it is the only sporting award President Kennedy ever put his name to. The cup competition, known as the Pacific Coast International Championship, ran from 1961 to 1967 and was largely dominated by the Mexican Select sides – Vancouver Firefighters won the tournament twice in its initial run, in 1962 and ’66; However, it was the story book Victoria O’Keefe’s Cup run in 1967 which landed them in both the Victoria Sports Hall of Fame as well as the BC Sports Hall of Fame.

The club better known as Victoria United, who added the O’Keefe’s as part of a sponsorship with a beer company of that name, won the cup “with aplomb” in 1967. To even qualify from the PCSL was no easy task, Victoria had to fight against clubs like two-time Kennedy Cup winners Vancouver Firefighters and foes Vancouver Columbus. O’Keefe’s coach Frank Greely recalls that the competition was stiff, but “these were intelligent, smart players. I always believed in attacking soccer, and sometimes I almost enjoyed so much what I was watching with this group that I forgot that I was coaching.” According to the Victoria HOF article, O’Keefe’s won 19 of 21 matches in their league and went on to host the Kennedy Cup – however, it was on Vancouver Island, instead of on the mainland in Vancouver, and they packed their stadium with only interested locals. They beat Los Angeles FC 3-1 in the Semis and then hosted the finals, shocking a visiting Mexican Best XI in front of 6,000 fans. Sadly, they would be the last winners of the cup for more than 20 years—the competition was shuttered at the end of the 1967 tournament.

Victoria United—The O’Keefes, show off their cup haul from 1967. Including the Kennedy Cup in the final year of its initial run.

Not coincidentally, the NASL was formed the following year, which served as a national soccer league in the United States and not too long afterwards, in 1973, Vancouver Whitecaps, from British Columbia in Canada joined – becoming the main soccer attraction in British Columbia and effectively starving the PCSL of fans and revenue. The city leagues merged to survive and it wouldn’t be until 1989, after the PCSL restructured again, that the Kennedy Cup would make a glorious return. Vancouver Columbus, one of the region’s most dominant sides of that era, added the JF Kennedy Cup to their very full trophy cabinet. Having been formed in 1953 as Sacred Heart, they changed to Columbus in 1957 and by by 1964 won a national title; PCSL title in ’68; the Province Cup and the Canadian Challenge Trophy—they would have won the Kennedy Cup that year too, had it not been shut down.

Columbus was one of the few local sides to survive the NASL era of the 1970s and early ‘80s; by 1989, they had outlived the flashy national soccer era, joined the restructured PCSL and won both the league and Kennedy Cup Tournament. However, according to Jason Beck, Curator and Facility Director at the BC Sports Hall of Fame, The Kennedy Cup, last won by Victoria O’Keefe in 1967, had not actually been in a trophy cabinet after all. “As last winners, they were never required to return the trophy,” Beck says. “Dave told me the trophy remained in his garage in Victoria for several decades before he decided to donate it to our hall, where people could see and appreciate it.” Dave Stothard, captain of the cup winning O’Keefe’s in 1967, handed over the cup, measuring five feet tall, to the BC Sports Hall of Fame in 2009 and the competition was reborn with a new trophy.

(Left) The J F Kennedy Cup, Retired in 1967. (Right) The Kennedy Cup, Revived in 1989—but has not been seen since 2015.

The competition would go on to be dominated by Washingtonian teams like four-time winners FTI Seattle and legendary four-time winners Seattle Hibernian & Caledonian Saints. Hibs-Caley Saints, originally formed in 1990 as Transients Football Club, started accumulating silverware right away and have won very nearly everything an amateur side could win during their era—indoor, outdoor, local, state, and regional competitions; including their first Kennedy Cup in 1995, and three more after that, in ’97, 98’ and 2001. David Falk of GoalWa.net says “they were an authentic football club in a time when soccer in Seattle was marked by the pre-MLS United Soccer Leagues’ Seattle Sounders. They were talented male and female amateurs who, by their play, represented an era of soccer in our region.” Seattle’s Hibs-Caley Saints eventually went on to add the 2005 USASA National title to their list of accomplishments.

Vancouver United, long-since having dropped the O’Keefe portion of its surname, returned to dominate the PCSL and would win the renewed Kennedy Cup competition four more times; 1996, 2002, 2004 and 2005. United, who won their first cup in 1967, were formed in 1904 as part of a merger between Victoria Association Football Club and Victoria Capitals—when the club dissolved in 2014, it left a legacy as one of the oldest sporting organizations in North American History. Another couple of clubs in British Columbia won the trophy, Vancouver Explorers and Surrey United—it wasn’t until 2003 when an Oregonian team finally won the competition, Kells Swoosh FC. Just two years later the Kennedy Cup would discontinue again.

Seattle Hibs-Caley Saints won it all in 2001, including the fourth of their John F Kennedy Cups.

The J F Kennedy Cup Competition has been on-again, off-again since then; however, as does happen, the modern era has been dominated by one side, IPSFC/Marathon Taverna. The team from Portland, who most recently made a deep run into the US Open Cup qualifiers and won the Oregon Premier Soccer League’s 2018 Fall title in some style, won their first JFK Cup in 2010. They won again in 2012, then back-to-back in 2014 and 2015. Sadly, the John F Kennedy Cup seems to have been scuppered once again. “Unfortunately, since 2016, we have been unable to find teams from the US to compete in a Kennedy Cup Tournament,” David Collard, President of the modern Pacific Coast Soccer League says. “The PCSL would be happy to host a JFK Cup Tournament in 2020.”

John F Kennedy’s sporting legacy, the Kennedy Cup, may be on yet another hiatus, but the sport’s popularity is at a fever pitch on the West Coast. There’s no way soccer fans, clubs, and players don’t revive this competition once again. There are already new teams which didn’t exist just a few years ago when the Cup itself disappeared—surely once it shows up in the hands of PCSL once again, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon can continue its pursuit of the longest running regional competition in the Pacific Northwest.

International Portland Select FC/Marathon Taverna have dominated the modern era of the John F Kennedy Cup.

- Joshua Duder

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Sources used for this article:

https://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/kennedy-encourages-americans-to-get-active-dec-5-1961-084582

https://www.si.com/more-sports/photos/2013/11/22/john-f-kennedy-and-sports#21

https://www.gvshof.ca/inductees-2/all-inductees/19-soccer.html

https://pcsl.org/prev

https://goalwa.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/hibs-caley-saints-and-the-wayback-machine/

http://www.opsl.org/KennedyCup

Pre-Modern Indoor Soccer

It is common knowledge that indoor soccer was a creation of the seventies and eighties. The sport was the inevitable result of the U.S. soccer fan’s need for a faster-paced, higher-scoring version of the game. When the old NASL self-destructed, indoor soccer was there to take its place as the only form of the game that Americans would find palatable.

But, that anecdotal version of the sport is woefully near-sighted. The history of indoor soccer stretches back into, at least, the early part of the 20th century. Other than cup ties, the winter months are usually a slow time on the soccer calendar. That was especially the case in the northeast during the early years of the game due. Inclement weather often made play impossible on snowbound or icy pitches. Even back then, clubs and owners looked for ways to fill open dates and indoor soccer was one of the experiments.

A Boston Globe article from December 30, 1909 notes that Amos Alonzo Stagg, at the time coach at the University of Chicago, planned to try indoor soccer. The notion was that professors and students could try out the relatively new sport indoors during the winter months.[“Stagg to Try Indoor Soccer”, The Boston Globe, Dec 30, 1909, page 7]

On May 1, 1926, an indoor soccer doubleheader was held by the Empire State Football League in Manhattan. The first match was between picked teams from the Empire State and German-American leagues. The second match was between Vasco F.C. of the International League and Galicia F.C. of Spanish Leagues. A reported crowd of 1,000 was on hand to watch Vasco defeat Galicia 3-1.

A photo of St. Louis Arena in 1929. (image courtesy of St Louis Post-Dispatch)

The first indoor night soccer game staged in St. Louis was held at the St. Louis Arena in late December of 1929. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted that it was the first time an attempt was made to play indoor soccer with 11 players on each side. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle later opined that, while there was plenty of action, the small size of the field led to a “mob scene”. The article notes that the indoor game could not sold the cold weather problem because there were no fields of standard size in the U.S. to play pro and cup soccer matches. It also states that Cleveland had held an indoor soccer tournament “with some success” but that the game was played seven-a-side. A final quote is prescient: “But that is a strictly American product, for the Old Country boys would turn up their noses at anything so radical as seven-man soccer.” [“Indoor Team Is Soccer Problem”, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec 29, 1932, page 2C]

On March 31, 1932, two American Soccer League clubs, Boston S.C. and Pawtucket Rangers, played an six-a-side match at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence. At the time, both clubs were already out of the National Challenge Cup. And, with only four teams in the league due to the withdrawal of three New York-area clubs, the ASL itself was at the tail end of a shortened six-game spring schedule. The two New England clubs attempted to shore up their schedules, and bottom lines, by taking the game indoors.

The exhibition had three 15-minutes periods with no corner kicks and unlimited substitutions. Boston took the match 6-5 with inside forward, Johnny Ballantyne, scoring a hat trick. The Boston Globe noted that the game was the first ever indoor match staged in Rhode Island.

The endeavor was successful enough for Pawtucket to hold another six-a-side indoor match. On April 20, a few days after then end of the ASL spring season, the Rangers hosted the New Bedford Whalers at Rhode Island Auditorium. After three 20-minute periods, Pawtucket prevailed 11-10 over New Bedford. Robella scored six goals for the losing side.

In the late 1930s, indoor soccer was popular enough in New York that the State Football Association began sanctioning a six-a-side indoor tournament during the winter months. Following the association’s lead, other metro leagues put on their own indoor soccer tournaments. In January 1939, 40 teams took part in the annual New York State Football Association’s six-a-side indoor championships held at the Second Naval Battalion Armory.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle (February 11, 1941)

On February 10, 1941, indoor soccer made its debut in Madison Square Garden when the four New York clubs of the American Soccer League played a tournament. The first two games were played with 20-minute halves. The winners of the opening bouts played in the final that evening. That game had 15-minute halves.

In the first matches, Brooklyn Hispano defeated the New York Americans 3-1 and Brookhattan beat Brooklyn’s St. Mary’s Celtic 2-0. In the final, Brookhattan and Hispano battled to a 1-1 draw. Nearing midnight, a five-minute overtime was unable to break the tie.

The 10,000 fans in attendance were presented with a helping of soccer combined with hockey when the Brookhattan and Celtic match broke out to a scrum. Brookhattan’s goalkeeper, Johnny Bryndza, got the worst of it coming out of the tussle with a swollen eye and needing four stitches before he could resume the match.

The biggest culprit wasn’t the players but the playing surface. The matches were literally played on the terrazzo concrete surface of the Garden’s floor. Players were constantly slipping, sliding and falling. Fergus Hunter, the Celtics goalkeeper, broke a finger sliding for a ball and needed hospitalization for that and other arm injuries. Brookhattan’s center forward, Rudie Kunter, limped off after a bad kick to the leg and was out of the lineup for weeks. More seriously, Mike Briscoe, Brookhattan’s left halfback, needed to spend the night in hospital due to concussion sustained during a scrum.

These games were a real success and a double-header between ASL clubs was held the evening of May 6 at Madison Square Garden. Brooklyn Hispano took on St. Mary’s Celtic which was followed by the ASL champions, Scots-Americans of Kearny, N.J., meeting an all-star team made up of the New York Americans and Brookhattan clubs.

The clubs learned their lesson from the winter exhibition and installed a rolled dirt surface over the Garden’s hard flooring. In addition, padded walls were added for further protection. Competitive rule changes were also made. The penalty area and offsides were removed and unlimited substitutions were allowed.

Celtic defeated Hispano 4-1 in a game marred by a three-minute fight. In the second match, the Brookhattan-New York Americans aggregation defeated the Scots-Americans 3-2. Around 9,000 were in attendance to watch the festivities.

While smaller indoor soccer tournaments continued, big-time indoor soccer never took hold in the mid-twentieth century. But it wasn’t lack of interest that caused the downfall. Experiments to come up with a coating for the Madison Square Garden flooring were unsuccessful. And, plans were indefinitely put on hold because rubber matting was unobtainable due to war-time rationing. Without an answer, American Soccer League clubs were not willing to play on the hard surface because of the risk of injury.

The popularity of the indoor game wasn’t limited to New York. In spring of 1950, the amateur National Soccer League of Chicago held a 13-week indoor soccer season between the six top Chicago clubs. Three games were played each Sunday afternoon and were televised on channel 4 by WBKB, the local CBS affiliate.

While other amateur leagues held indoor tournaments or leagues, the NSL’s competition was the most successful indoor soccer league at that point in the history of the game and regularly drew crowds in the 1,000 to 2,000 range. After the first couple of years, the number of clubs grew to over a dozen and the league was split into two divisions with promotion and relegation between them. Games continued to be broadcast Sundays on WGN-TV. The NSL’s indoor league lasted at least through the mid-1960s.

It wasn’t until March 1971 that the old NASL got into the indoor soccer game when they held the “1971 Hoc-Soc Tournament” at the St. Louis Arena. Four clubs took part: Dallas Tornado, Rochester Lancers, St. Louis Stars, and Washington Darts. The fifth active club at that time, the Atlanta Chiefs, did not join. The league called their variant of indoor soccer “hoc-soc” due to the combination of hockey and soccer rules. The arena’s NHL hockey rink, including surrounding dasher boards, were the dimensions and the surface was covered in AstroTurf surface. With 5,060 in attendance, Dallas defeated Rochester in the final 3-0 with the St. Louis Stars taking the third place game 2-0 over Washington.

A few years later, in February 1974, the Soviet Red Army of Moscow club took part in three exhibition games with NASL clubs: a NASL All-Star team; the St. Louis Stars; and the then-champion Philadelphia Atoms. While the Red Army clubs crushed their opponents, the interest in the game was high with crowds close to 12,000 for each games.

These matches against the Red Army team are commonly seen as the stimulus for the modern age of indoor soccer. The next year the NASL launched the first league-wide indoor soccer tournament and held three more smaller tournaments over the next four years. It was then in the 1979-80 offseason that both the NASL and the newly-formed Major Indoor Soccer League began holding full indoor soccer seasons.

While received wisdom might tell us that indoor soccer in the US began with those two eighties leagues, a deeper understanding shows that the sport stretches back well over a century. Those modern leagues didn’t arrive out of the ether but were the next evolution of a long-standing game.

- Dan Creel

These Days in Soccer History

Dan Creel, for those that don’t know, came to our staff several months ago and instantly threw himself into writing about soccer history. There was a gap in our staff focusing on that and he filled it, expertly. Today’s Kicking Back is a new idea Dan came up with, what if he picked some random days in the past and looked at the matches, then gave some context and feedback. The resulting piece is a great snapshot of American soccer in different eras and regions. We think it’s well worth your time. - Dan V

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9 November 1918

At Bethlehem Steel Field, Bethlehem Steel F.C. defeated New York Shipbuilding Corp. F.C. three goals to nil in the first round of the 1918-19 National Challenge Cup. Originally to be played during October, the game was delayed because of quarantines put in place due to the second wave of the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic.

Based in Camden, New Jersey, New York Ship F.C. was one of a number of soccer clubs that was created in the U.S. by shipbuilding companies during wartime. The club played in the South New Jersey league during their brief existence and folded soon after the end of the war.

On the other hand, Bethlehem Steel was probably the greatest team of this period in U.S. soccer. The team was the the current national champions having won the 1917-18 National Challenge Cup, and had won three of four losing the other in the final. The club has also won four of the previous five American Cups.

But the 1918-19 season may have been the best of all. Their roster was littered with a veritable who’s who of players, including: full backs Jock Ferguson and Sam Fletcher; inside forward Fred Pepper; outside forward Tommy Fleming; and center forward Harry Ratican.

In April, the club went on to win the 1919 National Challenge Cup by defeating Paterson F.C. 2-0 in the final, and then the 1919 American Cup a week later over the same opponent and by the same score. Bethlehem Steel then took the “treble” in mid-May by clinching the National Association Football League professional championship.

13 May 1934

The end of the initial season of the reorganized American Soccer League’s Metropolitan Division was only a couple of weeks away. The league was due to finish at the end of May only the top two clubs in running for the championship. At the end of April, the Irish-Americans of Kearny, New Jersey were well clear of second place New York Americans. But the New Yorkers had a number of games in hand while the Irish had basically finished their league season.

With the race all but over, the rest of the league played their final league games that day and the following Sundays of May. The Irish-Americans were in the middle of making a run at the New Jersey State Cup. They had won their semifinal the previous Sunday and the final against Caledonian F.C. of Paterson was scheduled for the following Sunday. During the break, they scheduled an exhibition on May 13 against the Scranton Miners at the latter’s home pitch.

The New York Americans needed to piece together a string of wins during May to win take the league championship. That day they defeated bottom-dwellers the German-Americans of Philadelphia 3-2. The next Sunday they defeated Brooklyn Hispano 3-0 at Commercial Field in Brooklyn while, on the same day, the Irish-Americans won the New Jersey State Cup by blanking the Caledonians 2-0. The New Yorkers’ victory meant that a final match on May 27 at home at Starlight Park against the Irish would decide the league. But the New York Americans’ momentum didn’t last and the Irish ultimately took the championship.

13 February 1987

The Minnesota Strikers defeated the San Diego Sockers 3-2 in the middle of the 1987-88 Major Indoor Soccer League season. The teams were among a handful of clubs that had survived the collapse of the North American Soccer League in 1985 by moving to the indoor game. Indoor soccer was the most popular form of the game in the U.S. at this transitional time of the sport’s history.

Both clubs ended up winning their respective divisions, but while the Strikers lost in the divisional finals, the Sockers won the championship by defeating the Cleveland Force 4 games to none in the best-of-seven game series. The Sockers were the most dominant indoor team of the eighties and were in the middle of a staggering run of 10 championships in 11 seasons.

5 March 2008

In their first game of group play in the Algarve Cup, the U.S. Women’s National Team defeated China 4-0 at Municipal Stadium in Albufeira, Portugal. The USWNT had won four of the past five invitational tournaments and had no trouble at that year’s group stage. Two days later they blanked Italy 2-0 then, on March 10, shut out Norway 4-0.

The final on March 12 was not as easy. Their opponent, Denmark, had also topped their group without conceding a goal. But, unlike the high-scoring Americans, the Danes had ground out three 1-0 victories against Germany, Denmark and Finland. The final was also a low-scoring affair with Abby Wambach breaking the 1-1 deadlock with a goal in the 50th minute. The U.S. held on to the 2-1 lead to take home their sixth Algarve Cup.

- Dan Creel

The Post War Sports Boom and the Birth of the North American Professional Soccer League

After the end of the Second World War, the U.S. began to transition from a war-time to a peacetime society. One immediate reaction to this change was an enormous surge in interest in professional sports. New leagues sprang up to satisfy this need and to challenge the more established leagues. In late 1946, the All-America Football Conference and the Basketball Association of America both played their first seasons as direct competitors to the National Football League and the National Basketball League respectively. The sport of soccer also saw a rise in interest and, earlier that same year, the North American Professional Soccer League began play. [Editor’s note: The league is now more commonly known as the North American Soccer Football League.]

April 20, 1947 Chicago Tribune Article.

The league was the brainchild of Fred Weiszmann, who played football in his native Hungary as a youth. By 1945, Weiszmann was a restaurant manager and owner of the Chicago Maroons soccer club. But, he had grand aspirations for soccer both in the U.S. and worldwide. Weiszmann dreamt of an international soccer league where the top teams from each region would play each other in a super league. With Phil Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, as the Maroons sponsor, Weiszmann applied for membership in the American Soccer League, the only real professional soccer league in operation. The ASL denied the club admission but, in November, gave Weiszmann tentative permission to launch a Midwest Division of the league.

Weiszmann began discussions with midwestern amateur clubs about forming the new ASL division, while, at the same time, the Inter-state Professional Soccer League, another proposed regional league, was in the works. While the ISPSL never materialized, Weiszmann was able to raise $75,000 to launch his new endeavor and gained rights to all the open dates at Wrigley Field for his club.

In January 1946, the proposed ASL Midwest Division announced it had a roster of teams: the Maroons; the Chicago Vikings; Morgan Strasser of Pittsburgh; and John Inglis of Toronto. All of these were successful amateur clubs in their metropolitan leagues and Morgan Strasser had been one of the clubs in talks to join the ISPSL. A few weeks later the U.S. Soccer Football Association (recently renamed from the U.S. Football Association) gave the new league permission to operate and took up an internal discussion about its possible affiliation with the ASL. The league’s affiliation with the ASL never occurred and Wieszmann launched his organization as a fully-independent league. Originally planned to start in April, the league’s season was pushed back to an early June opening. In the interim, the league gained a new club in the newly-organized Detroit Wolverines, and Morgan Strasser and John Inglis were rebranded as the Americanized, Pittsburgh Indians and Toronto Greenbacks respectively.

The Liverpool FC squad that crushed the Maroons in 1946.

On June 2, the Chicago Maroons played an exhibition match against Liverpool FC at Soldier Field and were crushed 3-9. But, while official attendance numbers aren’t known, the crowd may have been large enough to bring new investment into the league. A few days after that match, it was announced that Leslie O’Connor, general manager of the Chicago White Sox, had purchased a half-interest in the Chicago Vikings and that the club’s home grounds would be Comiskey Park.

The league began its eight-game home-and-home summer schedule on the weekend of June 6. On opening day, the Chicago Vikings and Detroit Wolverines drew 4-4 at Comiskey Park with center forward, Gil Heron, scoring a hat trick for the Wolverines. Born in Jamaica in 1922, Heron moved to Canada and then the U.S. with his family as a teenager, eventually landing in Detroit. When war broke out, Heron, as a British subject, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. Following the war he returned to Detroit to work at an auto plant while also playing soccer. In 1945, playing for Venetia in the Detroit District Soccer League, he scored a staggering 44 goals in just 14 games. Recognized as the first black player in a pro U.S. soccer league, Heron continued to shine scoring 15 goals in eight starts. Heron was easily the league’s top offensive star with his goal totals nearly double the next-highest seven scored by Roscoe Anderson of the Vikings, Pete Matevich of the Maroons, and Harry Pitchok of Pittsburgh.

With 11 points, the Wolverines edged out the Greenbacks by one point to take the inaugural season championship. During the season, a post-season playoff series had been planned but was called off.

Although crowds weren’t as large as hoped, attendance was regularly in the 2,000 to 4,000 range and the league was seen as a modest success. In the December meetings, Fred Weiszmann stepped down as President of the league in order to spend more time as general manager of the Maroons. Leslie O’Connor was named president of the league and Weiszmann named vice president. The league received applications from a number of new organizations and set an expansion franchise fee of $5,000. The Detroit Pioneers, a top amateur club, and the newly-organized St. Louis Raiders were admitted to the league on January 27, 1947. In addition, the league approved a split schedule for 1947: a first half in the spring; and a second half in the fall.

April 6, 1947 - Chicago Tribune

But, as the league looked to expand, it also began to contend with a need to tighten their finances. During those same meetings, Martin Donnelly withdrew his champion Detroit Wolverines from at least the first half of the season. Donnelly spent $40,000 (over $500,000 adjusted for inflation) during the 1946 and was unable to field a team in time for the spring session. The last straw for him was an impression that the league was not living up to the promise of being a big league sport. The Wolverines’ franchise was held open pending a decision if Donnelly was going to field a team for the second half. In addition, both Chicago clubs moved out of their major league grounds and decided to share a high school stadium in Winnemac Park. The St. Louis Raiders had initially planned on using a major league venue, Sportsman’s Park, but decided to use the 3,000-seat Public Schools Stadium instead.

One more hit during the off-season caused the league’s future to seem more wobbly than at first glance. The Chicago Tribune published a front-page story which revealed that Fred Weiszmann had signed a number of players as amateurs, but had, in fact, paid them. One of these, Pete Matevich, was being paid $100 per game which made him the highest paid player in the league. In contrast, Gil Heron, the undeniable star of the league on the pitch, was paid $30 dollars per game. Even after being sold by the inactive Wolverines to the Maroons in the off-season he was still only making $5 more.

The Maroons’, and Heron’s, second game of the 1947 season against the Raiders was also the first professional game in St. Louis since the St. Louis Soccer League disbanded in 1938. A newspaper report before the match noted that Heron would be only the third black player ever to appear on a St. Louis soccer field. Half-back, José Leandro Andrade, one of the greatest footballers of his generation and member of the Uruguay world champion squads, visited St. Louis during Nacional’s 1927 U.S. tour. And, top scorer at the 1938 World Cup, Leônidas, played there when his Botafogo squad played two matches against the St. Louis Shamrocks during a 1936 tour of Mexico and the U.S.

Gil Heron

In Chicago, Heron found a bigger venue than Detroit, but also more abuse on and off the field. As the only black player in the league, fans, even those at home, would hurl taunts and racial epithets at him. Opposing players often kicked, pushed and roughed him up. That July Ebony featured Heron in a piece titled the “Babe Ruth of Soccer”, but often injured and harassed, Heron’s play suffered and he only scored four goals in the first half of the 1947 season.

The league’s schedule for that first half called for a 10-game home-and-home series among the clubs beginning in April and running through June. It was another close one with Pittsburgh and Toronto ending the half at 14 points each. Bad weather caused a number of postponements and, with mounting financial difficulties, league officials met in June to discuss whether it was feasible to play the fall schedule. The discussions ended with an understanding that no team would drop out of the league, the Detroit Wolverines would rejoin, and a fall half would be scheduled.

March 22, 1947 - Detroit Free Press (Bottom right corner)

By the end of August things were looking more bleak. A six-game fall schedule was tentatively approved, and play began the first weekend of September. But, when the second half got underway, the Wolverines never returned, the Vikings quit the pro game and the Maroons folded. The Chicago Maroons franchise was transferred to a new club, the Chicago Tornadoes and it was decided that the Tornadoes would get the best players from the Maroons and Vikings. This new club was owned by the men who had previously financed the defunct Maroons, but Fred Weiszmann was not part of the new franchise. As play began, the Detroit Pioneers dropped out before playing their first scheduled league game against Pittsburgh. The league was, for all intents and purposes, down to three active clubs with an additional one attempting to quickly organize.

After a few games for each active club, the league took a pause to play a previously unscheduled best-of-three series to determine the first half champions. Pittsburgh twice beat Toronto 3-2 on October 11 and on October 12 to take the series. The league announced that the playoffs were taking place during a break so the four remaining league teams (the Tornadoes, Indians, Raiders, and Greenbacks) could prepare for a reconfigured second half. But, just over a week later the league declared it was suspending operations and officially declared Pittsburgh the champions. The Tornadoes never played a game and the remaining active clubs (the Vikings, Pioneers, Raiders, Greenbacks, and renamed Morgan Strasser) returned to the amateur ranks.

In postwar United States, the country had emerged as the most powerful country in the world. A new world order was quickly forming with America as the primary bulwark against the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc. The “American way” was no longer just a lifestyle, it was now undeniable proof we were on the right side in the burgeoning Cold War.

The moment the NBA was born. Image courtesy of WBUR.

At the end of three seasons, the BAA merged with the NBL to form the National Basketball Association. The end of the 1949 pro football season saw both major leagues struggling financially. That December, the AAFC effectively merged with the NFL when three of its seven teams, the Cleveland Browns, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Baltimore Colts, were admitted into the older league. Both of these post-war pro leagues have had a major impact on the American sports landscape.

The narrative of the American Dream tells us that, with all things being equal, anything can be achieved through hard work. Through that lens, the league’s collapse can be seen as a failure of league officials and team owners to understand the market for pro soccer in the late 1940s. A failure that would continue to haunt the sport for the next half century with league after league.

But, in retrospect, what if all things weren’t equal? What is the legacy of the NAPSL then? It is a legacy of a sport that is not American enough. It is legacy of a league whose brightest star was too black. A legacy that Americans can be comfortable that soccer is a failure because it is not good enough, and that soccer is not good enough because it is a failure.

Gil Heron played the next few years with amateur clubs Chicago Sparta and Detroit Corinthians. In 1949, his first wife, Bobbie Scott, and he had a son. In 1951, Celtic F.C. toured the U.S. and Heron was invited to an open tryout. He left his wife and young son for Glasgow and, after a trial, and was signed by the club, becoming the first black man to play for the legendary Scottish club. In his debut for the club, he scored two goals in a League Cup match but was released the next year after only a handful of first team appearances. Heron spent then next two years as a journeyman in the UK and eventually returned to Detroit and a new life.

Gil Heron did not meet his first son, Gil Scott-Heron, again until the famous poet, musician and activist was 26 years-old.

Brooklyn Wanderers: What's in a Name

In this article of Kicking Back we dig into one of the classic club names of U.S. soccer, the Brooklyn Wanderers.

The original version of the club was formed in early fall of 1894. The club played two preliminary matches: on September 23 against the Red Stars of Harlem; and on October 7 against Centerville A.C. of Bayonne. By the beginning of October, the club had fully organized by electing officers and a board of directors and had both first and second teams. The club also had its initial grounds in South Brooklyn (now just a block of rowhouses in lower Sunset Park near the Belt Parkway) with plans to soon have enclosed grounds.

At the time, that term “wanderers” was often used for itinerant people, vagrant or the homeless. In the sporting vernacular, teams that were playing on the road were sometimes informally called wanderers in the same vein as they might be called the visitors.

If they had grounds, why did they call themselves the Wanderers? It is likely because in late 19th century, the Wanderers’ nickname was in fashion related to the official name for sports clubs. A seminal example is Wanderers F.C. of London who won the first F.A. Cup in 1872 and four more over the next six years.

The club began playing a semi-regular schedule of games against other non-league clubs in the New York metro area with a new home grounds a couple of blocks away. During this period they played teams such as Sylvia A.C. of Jersey City Heights, the Bayonne Rangers, and Americus A.A. of West Hoboken.

On December 15, the New York soccer world evolved when the most prominent association football clubs from New York and New Jersey joined to organize the National Association Foot Ball League. Over the next month and a half, the league drew up bylaws and elected officers, with the Wanderers’ manager, W. Southern, elected president. The league was in discussion with over a dozen clubs about joining. By January 30 had settled on five clubs (Americus A.A., Scottish-Americans of Newark, Centerville A.C., New Rochelle F.C. and the Wanderers) and arranged an eight-game spring schedule that ran from March 3 to May 5.

Sunset Park (58th and 1st Ave) is now a mostly industrial area of Brooklyn.

The Wanderers moved to their permanent home grounds of the Varuna Boat Club at 58th Street and 1st Avenue and finished third out of four teams (New Rochelle decided ultimately to not take part in the league) in that first NAFBL season. The club spent the next three seasons in the league but never managed to win the championship.

The club lost its first two matches of the 1898-99 NAFBL season. On December 4, 1898, the Wanderers failed to play their third league match scheduled at home against the Arlingtons of New Jersey. The December 5th edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted that the club had abruptly disbanded and withdrawn from the league “[o]wing to dissensions in the ranks…” The league followed quickly behind, suspending operations in 1899 partially due to the post-Spanish-American War economic recession.

Starts and Restarts

The National Association Football League reorganized as a fully-professional league and resumed operations starting with a 1906-07 season. Until the 1912-13 season, Brooklyn was represented in the league by the Brooklyn Football Club. For that season, Brooklyn F.C. entered two teams into the league which would alternate home dates at Suburban Oval (which is now a block of rowhouses a block east from the Ditmas Avenue station). On October 6, 1912, the newly-formed Brooklyn Wanderers opened their NAFBL season with a 0-5 loss at Jersey City. The club lost again the next week 1-3 to the True Blues in Paterson, New Jersey. In the first round of the American Football Association Cup they managed to draw the Scottish-American F.C. of Newark 1-1 in their first home game, but lost the replay 1-3 at Harrison Oval the next week.

Béla Guttmann (1925) was a Hungarian national team player who would go on to play for several ASL clubs including the Wanderers.

For a handful of games, the new club continued to struggle on the field. In late December, the team reorganized and many players moved back to Brooklyn F.C. A final game, scheduled for December 22, may have been played by the Wanderers against Brooklyn F.C. But, following that, the club disbanded for good.

A decade later, Bay Ridge F.C. of Brooklyn decided to field two teams in the fall of 1922. One team continued under the Bay Ridge F.C. name in the First Division of the amateur New York State Association Football League. The other team was a reorganized Brooklyn Wanderers F.C. created to play in the semi-professional New Jersey State Soccer League. The NJSL was newly-organized for the 1922-23 season as a replacement for the NAFBL that had shut down at the end of the 1920-21 season. The home pitch for both teams was Hawthorne Field.

During that fall the Wanderers played a handful of NJSL matches and won their First Round National Challenge Cup replay match against Yonkers Thistle F.C. But, on November 5, 1922, the club lost their Second Round match 1-2 against Brooklyn F.C. The next week, the club’s fortunes changed dramatically. The Wanderers were admitted into the American Soccer League at a special meeting of the league.

The ASL had played their first month with only seven teams as, until the Wanderers joined, the league had failed to replace Todd Shipyards F.C. that had disbanded in the off-season. The club’s owner-manager was Nat Agar, a long-time mainstay of the Brooklyn soccer world. Their home grounds for that first year was Hawthorne Field and they ended that first season in sixth place. But, that summer, the club did manage to bring home the Southern New York State Football Association Cup by defeating league rival and current cup-holder, New York F.C, in the final.

The club moved into the brand-new Wanderers’ Stadium located at Nostrand Avenue and Sterling Street for most of the 1923-24 ASL season. But, by the end of the season they had returned to Hawthorne Field for good. The club finished the league in fifth place and would remain a mid-table fixture for the rest of their history.

Brooklyn Wanderers beat the Giants 3-1 on New Year’s Day 1927. (Image courtesy of Covehurst.net)

Agar reorganized and reinvested in the team during the offseason before the 1926-27 season. He brought in six internationals, including four from Vienna’s Hakoah S.C. which had a highly-successful 1926 tour of the U.S., and Mick O’Brien, English League veteran and captain of the Ireland national football team. But even with that influx of talent and a regular schedule of games at Ebbets Field to capitalize on the interest in the former Hakoah players, the club again finished mid-table at seventh out of the 12 teams.

The Soccer Wars Era

At the beginning of the 1928-29 season, the “Soccer Wars” broke out as the American Soccer League boycotted the National Challenge Cup. The U.S. Football Association suspended the organization making it an “outlaw” league and launched the Eastern Soccer League, its own major professional soccer league. The Wanderers stayed loyal to the ASL which formed a new American Soccer Association to be a direct competitor to the USFA. With the ASL schedule now split into two halves, the club managed to come in second in the first half just one point behind Fall River. In the second half, even with a dilution of talent caused by the creation of a second major pro league, the club reverted to their old form and finished fifth out of the nine teams in the league.

It was obvious that the soccer landscape could not support two rival east coast professional leagues. As the 1929-30 season got under way the USFA and ASA began negotiations to end the war. The negotiations culminated, just before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, in the reinstatement of the outlaw clubs and the creation of the Atlantic Coast Soccer League, a new, merged league formed from the ASL and the few former ASL clubs who had joined the ESL

One interesting fallout of the merger was that, there were two rival Hakoah clubs operating at the time both formed from former Hakoah S.C. players. The Eastern Soccer League’s Hakoah All-Stars were based at Starlight Park in the Bronx and the American Soccer League’s Hakoah F.C. was based in Brooklyn. This latter club’s formation was the biggest hurdle as it was created by Nat Agar as a second team under his control. While a struggling ASL in the middle of a turf war was okay with an owner controlling two teams, the more stable single ACSL wasn’t going to allow that in their league. Agar merged his two clubs and the ESL Hakoahs joined the ASL a week into the ACSL’s season.

In that 1929-30 season, the Wanderers struggled in the stronger ACSL finishing ninth out of eleven teams. In addition, they only managed to fare better than the two teams who had withdrawn from the league during the season.

That fall the league reorganized and renamed itself the American Soccer League. The Wanderers had yet another middling season finishing seventh out of the nine-team league. At the beginning of 1931, the effects of the Great Depression affected the club and the league as both seemed to be languishing.

1931 match report. Image from newspapers.com.

The Wanderers began the year in a round-robin with other New York teams for a spot in the National Challenge Cup quarterfinals. But the club came bottom of the four teams and failed to advance. In fact, over its history, the Wanderers never had much success in the competition  only making the Eastern Semifinals twice.

The first half of the 1931 American Soccer League season was a reversal of fortune as the Wanderers battled the New York Giants for the league lead. At the end of the half, the Wanderers finished second one game down to the Giants. But, the club lodged a protest with the ASL because the Giants had been scheduled to play one more game than the Wanderers.

The league did nothing. That disrespect seemed to be the last straw for Nat Agar and he disbanded the Brooklyn Wanderers before the beginning of the fall ASL season. Agar soon became president of the league. But a tradition had been created and the Brooklyn Wanderers name didn’t disappear for long.

Rebirth

The American Soccer League began to disintegrate in earnest at the beginning of the 1932 season. The seven-team league lost three New York teams on its opening weekend due to the financial difficulty of scheduling one New England game per road trip. The Hakoah club also wanted to withdraw but was prevented by the league. The four remaining teams played a truncated six-game round robin in the first half.

Before the fall season, the ASL attempted to plug their increasingly leaky dike by adding a few new clubs. To keep a foothold in the New York area, at the beginning of September, just a few short weeks before the season opener, the league granted P.J. Flannery a franchise for the Brooklyn territory. The new club named themselves the Brooklyn Wanderers and, as tradition would have it, shared Hawthorne Field as their home grounds with Hakoah F.C. Also, as tradition would have it, the club ended the fall yet again mid-table finishing fifth out of nine teams.

The first half of the 1933 American Soccer League season saw a complete separation between the New York and New England clubs. The Wanderers finished third out of four teams in a six game round robin season. Any pretense that the ASL was a major league had now disappeared.

Before the second half of the 1933 ASL season, the league went through a major reorganization. Nat Agar was removed as president and the league formally split into two separate organizations: the Metropolitan and New England Divisions. While still a professional league, this restructured ASL ran on a lower level in terms of both scope and finances.

Only three clubs remained in the New York-based Metropolitan Division: Brookhattan; New York Americans; and Brooklyn Wanderers. The Metropolitan Division returned to a more traditional late fall to late spring soccer schedule and, during the fall, began adding clubs to bolster their ranks ending up with a full complement of eight clubs by late December 1933.

The borough of Brooklyn had two teams in the league that fall: the Wanderers and the Celtics. Brooklyn Celtic F.C. was a newly organized club that, confusingly, had the same name as an older club that was competing in the amateur Metropolitan Soccer League. The ASL Celtics’ home ground was Commercial Field (now Hamilton Metz Field in the Wingate neighborhood) while the Wanderers continued to call Hawthorne Field home.

The league’s winter break started after matches scheduled for December 25. The Wanderers lost their game to the New York Americans 1-2 at Starlight Park and had compiled a record of four wins, two draws and six losses. Over the break, most ASL teams played their first round National Challenge Cup matches but the Wanderers were absent from the tournament.

Josef “Pepi” Schneider scored 11 goals in 27 matches for Brooklyn in 1931.

At some point before the American Soccer League resumed its schedule on January 21, 1934, the Wanderers merged with the Queens-based Hispano F.C. (once a member of the “Soccer War”-era Eastern Soccer League). The merged club was renamed Brooklyn Hispano F.C. and took on Hispano F.C.’s dismal 0-0-7 league record rather than the Wanderers’ much more middling record. The new aggregation shared a home grounds at Commercial Field alternating dates with Brooklyn Celtic.

Brooklyn Hispano played much better in the second half but, burdened with Hispano’s seven losses, ended their first ASL season next to last in the standings. The club remained a stalwart of the league through the post-war years. Hispano won a few league championships and two National Challenge Cup championships during this time, including a “double” in 1943.

A bit of background is helpful to understand the history of the next version of the Brooklyn Wanderers. Brooklyn Celtic played three seasons in the American Soccer League but was expelled after the 1935-36 season for failure to pay fees assessed by the league. That August, Brooklyn’s St. Mary’s Celtic Soccer Club joined the ASL to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of Brooklyn Celtic F.C. For a couple of years, Brooklyn Celtic attempted to be reinstated to the league through legal means but ultimately failed.

St. Mary’s Celtic had a fairly successful run during its time in the league. While it never won the ASL championship it did lift the National Challenge Cup in 1939. But, the club struggled financially during the 1941-42 season and the franchise was sold that summer to former referee, Bob Graham.

Graham quickly named the club Brooklyn Wanderers and invested in renovating Celtic Park, St. Mary’s home grounds, which was renamed Brooklyn Oval for opening day. The Wanderers were a good team during these post-war years but never managed to take home any hardware.

The End of the Wanderers

Near the end of the 1947-48 season, Bob Graham died suddenly. The club found itself needing to find new ownership before 1948-49 season. Two games into that season, the Graham family sold the Wanderers franchise to Brooklyn’s Hakoah A.C. A member of the amateur National Soccer League of New York, Hakoah quickly withdrew from that league, dispersed all the club’s current players to other teams, and restocked the club with their own players. The club dropped the Brooklyn Wanderers name in favor of their own Hakoah A.C. name.

Hakoah lasted in the American Soccer League through the 1955-56 season but, like the Wanderers, never won anything. Before the 1956-57 season, Hakoah merged with the New York Americans. The new Hakoah of New York aggregation was a juggernaut and took the league championship in their first three years of existence. The club disbanded after the 1963-64 season.

While the clubs carrying the Brooklyn Wanderers name were never highly successful on the field, the important soccer tradition that the name carries shouldn’t be denied. The Wanderers were a vital part of the early U.S. soccer landscape and should remind us that the connection between a club and the community that supports it is just as important as wins, losses and draws.

- Dan Creel

Colombo: A Forgotten Season of Excellence

The 1950's were a tumultuous time for soccer in the United States. The only professional league was the American Soccer League and it had a turnover of teams that one would expect from soccer between its two heights of popularity in the thirties and seventies. Confined to the Northeastern hotbeds of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, the league drew crowds of one to three thousand and few paid much attention to it.

In 1959, a team called Colombo, based out of Staten Island, NY, joined the ASL. For the three seasons before, New York Hakoah won the ASL championship. For the four seasons after, the Ukrainian Nationals of Philadelphia won the ASL Championship. Between these periods of single team dominance and led by veteran player-coach Jack Hynes, Colombo would win the league in 1959-60, their only season of play, go on tour of Italy and subsequently disappear.

Jack Hynes

A Brief History of Jack Hynes

Jack Hynes played in the ASL for 23 seasons. Born in Scotland, his family moved to the United States when he was 13. He began playing professionally for Brooklyn St. Mary's Celtic in 1935 at the age of 15. In the 1938 National Challenge Cup (now the U.S. Open Cup) final, Brooklyn St. Mary's Celtic by Chicago Sparta 3-0 in Chicago with Hynes coming on late for Brooklyn when he was only 17.

He joined the US Army during World War II and was injured in the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. That injury left him with shrapnel in both legs and no feeling in his left calf. After leaving the military in 1946, he returned to playing soccer again.

In 1949, Jack was the key piece for the attack of the New York Americans. He led the team in goals and helped them advance to the ASL championship where they lost to the Philadelphia Nationals. Jack was also a pivotal part of the United States World Cup qualifications in 1949. The team was in group nine with Mexico and Cuba. Jack played the full ninety minutes in each of the four matches helping to advance to the 1950 World Cup, but was left off of the World Cup squad when he criticized the team selection for the qualification matches.

He continued to play in the ASL after his National Team fall out. In 1956 he received the ASL MVP award at the age of 36 while playing with Brooklyn Hakoah. In the fall of 1959, he joined Colombo as a player-coach.

Colombo: 1959-1960 Season

Colombo was a dominant team. In a league that contained US National Team greats like Benny McLaughlin, they finished the season after 18 games with 15 wins and a +45 goal difference. Their team contained Americans and international players from Europe and South America.

Anthony Bonezzi was an Argentine midfielder that played for both the United States and Israel's national teams in 1961. Carlos Bustamente was a US striker that teamed with Bonezzi on Colombo, Brooklyn Italians, and Israeli teams. In 1959, just prior to joining Colombo, he was a part of the Montreal Canadian Alouettes FC which won Canada's title, the Carling's Red Cap Trophy. These players would go on to finish second and third in goals, with teammate Mario Zelaschi placing fourth. All three combined for 35 goals that season when the league average was 34.7 goals. Of the ten teams, those three players out scored eight of them.

During this time, the ASL gave two points for a win and one for a tie. Colombo finished in first with 31 points and Ukrainian Nationals finished with 26 in under 20 matches.

Other notable players: 

• Joe Corbo (Germany)

• John Comazo (Italy)

• Peter Tagios

• Luiz Sansone (Argentina)

Manager: Peter Castelli

Owner: Luigi DiFilippo

Final Standings G  W T  L GF GA  PTS

Colombo 18 15  1 2 70   25 31

Ukrainian Nationals 16 12  2 2 49   21 26

New York Hakoah 16  7 4   5 31 22    18

Brooklyn Italians 15  7 1   7 30 25    15

Baltimore Pompeii 13  6 1   6 34 27    13

Fall River SC 13  5 3   5 26 27    13

Galicia SC 16  4 5   7 32 40    13

Newark Portuguese16  5 2   9 24 39    12

Falcons SC 16  3 3  10 25  52 9

Uhrik Truckers 17  2 2  13 26  69 6

ASL Leading Scorers (Through March 20, 1960)

M. Noga, Ukrainian Nationals 16

Ch. Bustamante, Colombo 14

A. Bonezzi, Colombo 12

M. Zelaschi, Colombo 9

William Silva, Fall River 9

M. Dellatorre, Brooklyn Ital. 8

Swinsky, Baltimore Pompeii 8

P. Peppe, Newark Portuguese 7

R. Sneddon, Newark Portuguese 7

Italy Tour

After the season ended, the team took a playing tour of Italy. Not much can be found about the tour.

Colombo Is No More

Information on why the team was disbanded is hard to find. Jack Hynes retired at he end of the 1959-60 season and became a successful coach as he led Monsignor Farrell Lions to not lose a single match during the seasons from 1987-1994. Bonezzi and Bustamente went to play for Beitar Tel Aviv in Israel. They were banned after playing their first match due to Israel’s no foreign players rule but were later reinstated. In 1967, they were both in an accident which left Bustamante permanently injured and killed Bonezzi. Mr. DiFilippo continued his tailoring business in New York for the next 45 years.

- Andy Rittenhouse

What can only be described as “Soccapocalypse”

One of the great things about digging into the history of U.S. soccer is that there is so much there to uncover. Because it’s not a well-trodden path, hidden gems are always just waiting to be uncovered. But, if you do it for any amount of time, an underlying theme occurs over and over again no matter the era.

U.S. soccer has seemingly never been able to build a stable and substantial club league system. Time and again soccer in this country has swung from a patchwork system of under-resourced grassroots organizations to a top-heavy setup where one big league controls the entire sphere of influence. Club league soccer in the U.S. has always historically been in a tenuous situation and it is easy to name all the leagues and clubs who failed from not building things the “right” way. But, we shouldn’t also assume that all these failures are based entirely on the incompetence of those league and club leaders because succeeding in an unsound system is sometimes next to impossible. The original United Soccer League is a textbook example of a league trying to find a better way but ultimately failing due to the circumstances they found themselves in. The outdoor professional game after the 1983 season was in dire straits. The North American Soccer League was down to nine teams; less than half of its size in 1980. And many of those teams were barely hanging on. The American Soccer League continued to be the only lower league.

Formed in the early 1930s from the ashes of the first major U.S. pro soccer league, the ASL spent most of its history as a semi-pro regional league made up of ethnic clubs from the northeast. In the 1970s they followed the lead of the NASL and went through an era of rapid expansion and “Americanization” to, by 1976, become a national league with clubs spanning the country. But, for a league with severely limited resources, this over-expansion was unsupportable and, just a few years later, the league was back to being only made up of teams based in the eastern U.S.

In the winter after the 1983 season, the ASL was down to six active teams and one team, the Rochester Flash, planning on re-activating after spending the prior season inactive. Going into the January meetings in Atlanta, league officials, based on inertia if nothing else, planned to continue for another season in 1984. Early on at the meetings, the Pennsylvania Stoners decided to go “dormant” for the 1984 season with club president, Dr. Bill Burfeind, also resigning as league president.

Things quickly went from bad to worse as a dispute over the league’s expansion franchise rights in Fort Lauderdale sparked a revolt. Ingo Krieg, owner of the Jackson Tea Men (who jumped to the ASL after the NASL’s 1982 season) and chairman of the league’s expansion committee, granted a local group, led by former Fort Lauderdale Striker, Ronnie Sharp, the Fort Lauderdale ASL franchise. But the rights to South Florida, belonged to the owner of the dormant New York United franchise and the dormant Miami Americans franchise, Jimmy Sorrentino.

By this point in time, the ASL was plagued not only by chronic underfunding, but also by a league structure that kept power in the hands of members who no longer had active teams in the league. The league had a mechanism that enabled clubs to go “dormant” but still allowed owners of those clubs full privileges like any active club. During the league meetings in January 1984, two active clubs went dormant: the Stoners; and the Oklahoma City Slickers. That brought the total number of dormant teams to 11 (including the technically still-dormant Flash) and only four active teams considering continuing for the 1984 season: the Tea Men; the Carolina Lightnin’; the Dallas Americans; and the ASL version of the Detroit Express.

Seeing a broken situation, Krieg and the Bob Spears, owner of the Dallas Americans, took their clubs and established the United Soccer League over the weekend during the ASL meetings. Sonny Van Aarnem, the owner of the Express, and David Fraser, former owner of the Slickers, quickly joined the new league along with the new Fort Lauderdale Sun franchise owned by Sharp. The new league also hoped to add a franchise in El Paso and was in talks to convince the Tampa and Tulsa NASL franchises to join. All this left the ASL with one returning franchise (Carolina), one returning from dormancy (Rochester), and four expansion franchises (New York, Fort Lauderdale, Cleveland and Orlando).

By late February, with the writing on the wall, Bob Benson, owner of the Carolina Lightnin’, bowed out and new Charlotte-based club joined the USL. The Charlotte Gold had basically the same operations as the Lightnin’ but under different ownership. Similarly the USL’s Oklahoma City Stampede, owned by David Fraser, was in effect the old Slickers organization transferred to a new club. The Flash also soon fled the ASL for the new league along with three new franchises: the Buffalo Storm; the New York Nationals; and the Houston Dynamos. In April, the Express ultimately decided against joining the USL due to its being unsanctioned by the USSF, but the club never rejoined the ASL and quickly dissolved after not finding a home in an indoor league. The ASL, without any active teams, never launched their 1984 season and faded into history.

The USL began its inaugural 1984 season with nine teams in three divisions: Northern; Southern; and Western. The league’s philosophy was based on financial austerity and slow growth. While club budgets were higher than those in the ASL they were much lower than the NASL’s rampant spending. The season ran from mid-May to mid-August with teams playing a 24-game schedule. Playoffs were held at the end of August.

The league had a similar shootout and points system as the NASL. Although the Sun and the Stampede ended the season with similar 15-9 records, the Stampede edged out top honors with 127 points, 5 more than the Sun. But, the Stampede was knocked out of the playoffs in the semifinals by wild card winner Houston. On September 1, the Fort Lauderdale Sun took home the first USL championship by winning a shootout in the third game of the finals against Houston. When all was said and done, the first USL season was a success. With crowds in the low four figures, a modest success to be sure, but in 1984, any successful season for a professional outdoor soccer league was something to be proud of. All nine teams completed their full schedules and none of the franchises had folded before the league’s winter meetings.

Two big changes occurred after the season. In September, the Sun’s owner, Ronnie Sharp, was forced to sell the team to a group of local investors due to the consequences of his involvement in a drug smuggling operation. And, in December, Fraser moved the Oklahoma City club to Tulsa and renamed the team the Tulsa Tornadoes. But massive changes were soon to come.

During February 1985, the USL and NASL held discussions of a possible merger. The NASL’s financial situation was desperate and only a handful of teams were interested in fielding an outdoor season in 1985. The USL was interested in the financial backing the NASL owners were able to offer. The merger talks ended unfulfilled and, in early March, the Buffalo, New York, and Rochester clubs had not met the USL’s financial requirements and dropped out of the league. Rochester went dormant yet again, but never returned. At the end of March, the NASL suspended operations. In quick succession, Jacksonville folded. Charlotte, who had been trying to join the NASL, also folded. And Houston withdrew from the USL and decided to play as an independent club in 1985.

With the addition of the expansion El Paso/Juarez Gamecocks, the USL was down to a four-team league. And with little time before the start of a new season, the league had to quickly come up with a new game plan. In a fascinating parallel to the 1969 NASL season (where the number of teams in the league had plummeted from 17 to 5), the USL decided to split the 1985 schedule into two parts. The first part was the exhibition USL Cup series where each team would play a home and home series against each other for a six-game series. The USL Cup series would from mid-May to late June. The second part was the regular season USL Championship which would start a week later. In the Championship, each team would play home and away twice for a 12-game regular season. Other reports had the clubs playing three additional games versus non-league teams that would count in the standings for a 15-game regular season. Playoffs were scheduled for the week of August 19 where the top two teams would meet in a best-of-three game series.

The rebranded South Florida Sun added an additional wrinkle called the Invitational Cup. This cup was a series of eight (later cut down to six) home exhibition games to be held on off dates during the USL Cup and championship series, against touring international teams and possibly the Toronto Blizzard and Minnesota Strikers; the two remaining inactive NASL teams. The known scheduled opponents at the beginning of the season included the Strikers, the U.S. Men’s National Team, the Bermuda Men’s National Team, and a team of Strikers All-Stars when the season started.

The Sun took the USL Cup series with a record of 4 and 2 by winning their final game of the series 1-0 against the Tornadoes on June 15 before a sparse 2,324 crowd at Lockhart Stadium. The Tornadoes had to forfeit their previous week’s cup game at Dallas (as well as an exhibition game against Dallas at Tulsa scheduled to be held two days before that game) when coach, Brian Harvey, and the players refused to play due to not receiving their prior week’s paychecks. In addition, the team had fallen behind on its payments to use University of Tulsa’s Skelly Stadium. Ownership was transferred to new investors who provided the resources to keep the team afloat for the final game of the cup. The Sun never received the actual cup at the game and interim league commissioner Kalman was not on hand to congratulate the Sun. Csapo was the former head coach of the Stoners and joined the USL at its vice president. He was named interim league commissioner when Burfeind resigned just as the cup series got underway.

“There ain’t no cup”, said the Sun’s player-coach, Keith Weller, after the game.

“There is a cup, I saw it,” said Jeff Sarkin, the Sun’s general manager who said that the team would receive the USL Cup from Csapo at their next home game. The Sun’s next home game would be June 22, the opening games of the league’s regular season. That day the Sun beat Dallas 3-1 at Lockhart Stadium to take the first game of the regular season. It’s not known if the cup materialized. The other opening day match scheduled for that  that night in Tulsa with the Gamecocks was postponed due to a dispute between the Tornadoes’ new owners and the stadium. Unknown to most outside league officials, the Gamecocks’ team president and owner, Pedro Meneses, had dissolved his relationship with the club a few days before opening day of the regular season. Meneses had paid all the club’s bills, including salaries, through the end of the month and released his players. The league attempted to find new investors for the club while the team continued to get ready for the season opener. Also around this time, the Dallas Americans needed to give the team’s players a stock participation program in order to pay overdue salaries and have enough finances to keep the team going.

The next scheduled league match was a June 26 mid-week game between the Gamecocks and the Sun at Lockhart Stadium. On June 25, the game was postponed indefinitely and that evening, with the El Paso/Juarez and Tulsa franchises in severe financial difficulties, the league voted to suspend the rest of the 1985 season with hopes of putting together another tournament for the clubs able to continue. The Gamecocks were disbanded with Tulsa and Dallas following soon behind.

With no league, the South Florida Sun continued as an independent club and decided to play its scheduled exhibition games along with more hoped to come. In the short term, the exhibitions were needed in order to make up the club’s overdue payroll. But, in the long term, the club desperately wanted to keep professional outdoor soccer alive both in South Florida and the U.S.

The exhibition against the U.S. Men’s National Team on July 2 was replaced by a match against the Topez-Haitian All-Stars of Miami on July 4. The Sun beat the visitors 4-3. But, this was destined to be the last game played by the Sun. A day before that match, the exhibition scheduled for July 6 against the Minnesota Strikers was cancelled because the Sun was unable to raise the $6,000 necessary to pay for the Strikers’ airfare and hotel accommodations. A week later the owners of the Sun shut down the club due to its ongoing financial difficulties. Keith Weller attempted to continue to arrange exhibition matches for the former Sun players who remained in the area, but to no success.

While the United Soccer League ended up having little to no legacy on the future of U.S. soccer we can point to two things that the USL can hang its historic hat on. First, while the Houston Dynamos left after the 1984 season, it managed to continue after the league itself folded (the only USL club able to do so). The team survived two seasons as an independent club before becoming the primary founding member of the Texas-based Lone Star Soccer Alliance, one of the handful of regional outdoor soccer leagues that formed in the late eighties. The Dynamos lasted in the LSSA until 1991 and spent their last season known as the Houston International. The club folded after the 1991 season and the league itself folded after the following season. And, you can’t escape the fact that the name of the MLS’ Houston Dynamo is in some ways based on the Dynamos.

But the second, and much more important, point of pride for the USL must be that during the first half of 1985 it was the only U.S. professional outdoor soccer league in existence. The Western Alliance Challenge Alliance began that summer just after the end of the USL Cup series and didn’t become a fully-fledged league itself until the following year.

The USL is relegated to a discouraging footnote of U.S. soccer history and, in comparison, it truly does not have the pedigree of other, more well-known lower-level leagues. But, I think the league  should not be forgotten as it represents an important part of the transitional era of the mid-eighties.

- Dan Creel

The National Soccer League of 1932

The one-two punch often offered as the main cause of the demise of the original American Soccer League are the organizational and structural instabilities spinning out of the U.S. “Soccer Wars” and the Great Depression. Because the battles between the ASL and the U.S. Football Association tend to be more dramatic, most of the historical focus of that time tends to be on the “Soccer Wars” rather than the more consequential ongoing and long-term financial impacts of the Great Depression. One often-forgotten footnote of those impacts was the creation of the National Soccer League. And “creation” may be a strong term for the nascent league as it only existed for a few weeks in October of 1932.

Let’s differentiate this NSL with the other, better-known leagues with the same name. Currently a recreation league, the semi-pro National Soccer League of Chicago was formed in 1938 from a merger between the Chicago Soccer League and the International Soccer Football League. The National Soccer League of New York was also formed in 1938 as a new amateur league. That league joined the New York metro area soccer landscape alongside the ASL (at that point fully reorganized as a semi-pro league), the Metropolitan Soccer League, and the German-American Soccer League. That NSL eventually merged into the GASL in 1974 and that league was renamed as the Cosmopolitan Soccer League in 1977.

So, what the hell was the National Soccer League of 1932?

A bit more background will be helpful. In the fall of 1929, the “Soccer Wars” ended with the creation of the Atlantic Coast Soccer League, a new, merged league created from the top professional teams from the ASL and the Eastern Soccer League. In the fall of 1930, the ACSL was reorganized and resumed the title of the American Soccer League. Separate from the organizational and franchise changes, the professional soccer circuit itself was relatively stable between late 1929 through the end of 1931. The cracks were beginning to show, to be sure, but in 1932, the wheels really began to fall off.

Image courtesy of Boston Globe Archives.

Per usual, at the beginning of the year, the ASL clubs took part in the opening stages of the National Challenge Cup (now the U.S. Open Cup). In February, the league clubs met to settle pending issues for the 1932 season including a schedule opening on the first weekend of March. A few days before the season started, the four New York clubs (the Americans, Giants, Hakoah All-Stars and Newark Americans) announced that were refusing to take part in the opening weekend schedule and were in talks to create a new eight-team Metropolitan League. That weekend the New York teams don’t play their scheduled games and offer to withdraw from the ASL due to the financial inability to continue the schedule of playing one New England team per road trip (the clubs preferred to play two games on those road trips).

A couple of days later, three of the teams officially withdrew from the ASL Hakoah’s offer to withdraw was refused and the ASL continued as a four-team league along with the Boston, New Bedford and Pawtucket team. The reduced six-game home and away spring schedule ran through April.

The New York clubs were unable to get their new league off the ground and filled their spring dates playing a variety of exhibition games. These included a Newark City club that either replaced the Newark Americans or was a reorganized version of the Newark Americans. Hakoah joined the exhibition schedule in May after requesting that the ASL not schedule any more games for them.

The fall season of the ASL began the weekend of September 17 with six total teams, the five teams from the spring season plus new clubs in Brooklyn and Fall River. As a side note, the New Bedford club at this point was Sam Mark’s franchise that was previously the Fall River club by way of the New York Yankees.

At the same time, the New York Americans and the New York Giants, along with the Queens-based Bohemian Americans, began playing exhibitions as warm-ups for the opening of the National Soccer League on October 2. The league was announced to have eight total members. Two games took place on the opening day of the NSL: the New York Americans and New York Nationals played to a 4:4 draw at Starlight Park; and the Bohemian Americans defeated the Newark Rangers at Clark’s Field in Newark.

Who were these two new teams? And what happened to the Giants and Newark City clubs? To answer the first, on October 1, Charles Stoneham sold the Giants to D.W. Bremmer of the Indiana Flooring Company and the team was renamed the New York Nationals. Perhaps already the most confusing sports club naming history somehow got even more confusing! The Indiana Flooring F.C. joined the ASL in 1924 and was bought by Stoneham in 1927. Stoneham was the owner of the New York Giants baseball team but, because there was already a team with that name in the ASL, he renamed them the New York Nationals. In 1930, the Giants renamed themselves the New York S.C. so Stoneham renamed the Nationals the New York Giants. And, became the Nationals again the day before the NSL debuted.

The Newark Rangers are more of a mystery. It’s not know if they are a continuation of the Newark City club noted above that took part in exhibitions against the New York Americans and Hakoah clubs or a completely new club formed for the NSL.

Other than those two games, no other NSL games were played on the opening day but news reports noted that four other teams from Brooklyn, Westchester and Astoria were supposed to enter the competition next when when the eight-team schedule was completed. But, the next Sunday, only one NSL game is reported to have been played: the Bohemian Americans and the New York Americans played to a 2:2 draw at Starlight Park.

And, after only three games, the NSL was over. On October 12, the New York Americans and a new club, the New York Field Club, joined the ASL and the NSL folded. New York F.C. was made up of many of the players from the Giants/Nationals team. But the club was unable to play its first scheduled game that weekend because the owner was unable to sign the players in time for the match. The club began its season in earnest the following weekend. It is unknown what happened to the Newark Rangers club.

The addition of the two New York teams made the ASL an eight-team league. But, after only one game, Sam Mark’s New Bedford club folded. Two weeks later, the club was replaced by the Bohemian Queens franchise. The new Fall River club took the fall season championship.

In 1933, the ASL reorganized yet again by creating formal Metropolitan and New England Divisions with the New England teams seemingly not taking part in the league at all during the spring half. And with that, the fracturing of the first major U.S. soccer league into lesser regional semi-pro leagues was basically complete.

- Dan Creel

Cover photo of Brookhattan FC, courtesy of the club.

Detroit, Soccer, and Expressing Yourself

2019 will be a momentous year for Michigan soccer and its return to a higher level of play, fueled by Detroit City’s participation in the NPSL’s Founders Cup and Lansing Ignite’s role as a founding member of USL League One. With the state’s already dynamic soccer scene returning to a more professional level, we want to take a look back at one of the early figures in Michigan’s professional soccer history.

The Detroit Express played in the North American Soccer League (NASL) from 1978 to 1981 and American Soccer League (ASL) for several seasons after a shift in ownership. The club won its only league title in ’82 roughly one year after joining the ASL. Playing at the Pontiac Silverdome, which no longer stands, the club was actually the NASL’s second club in Detroit after the Detroit Cougars, who were short lived and only lasted one season.

Brandishing a roaring car as their badge, the club consistently finished third or higher in the NASL’s central division but failed to earn anything significant in the playoffs. This lack of silverware didn’t stop the club from earning a variety of interesting connections to the global soccer world, ranging from their ownership by Jimmy Hill, a former Fulham player who was also chairman of Coventry City, and two expedition appearances by Manchester United and Northern Irish legend George Best while touring Europe.

Despite its end in the mid 80’s, the club, like much of the original NASL, has managed to survive as an idea and inspiration. The club’s badge and merchandise has appeared in modern American TV shows like How I Met Your Mother and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and perhaps most importantly helped sow the seeds of soccer in a state and a city that have shown that not being in MLS isn’t an excuse to be missing from the conversation of soccer in the US. The Great Lakes conference of the NPSL has some of the league’s biggest clubs, the likes of Detroit City and AFC Ann Arbor, and Michigan is set to play a major role in the NPSL Founders Cup and USL League One.

The fact that the Detroit Express weren’t at the level of the more successful NASL clubs is perhaps a fitting fact, as it may have set up the region for becoming the amateur and independent soccer hotbed it is today. Instead of a relationship with soccer that circles around trophies and being at the top, Michigan stands out as one of a few states untouched by the upper tiers of professional soccer and instead is full of communities that enjoy soccer and soccer culture. Michigan soccer, which is admittedly a term too broad and stereotyping than the clubs it refers to deserve, has become a corner of US soccer where people can truly express themselves, turning away from the temptations of glory hunting or the dangers of enfranchisement.

It is impossible to know how much the Express truly affected soccer in their home city or state, but their brief life as a club who put a decent product on the pitch for anyone who cared surely has helped plant the roots in a state that is now a burning core of the independent soccer movement in this country.

- Dominic Bisogno

Matthew J. Boxer: The Story of Mercury AC and Boxer Stadium at Balboa Park (SF), 1917 -1992

For most of Europe, the Great War ended in 1918, but the after effect carried on for years—this upheaval in social and economic stability caused individuals and families from all over Europe to find their way to the United States looking for a fresh start. For US cities, this meant an influx of immigrants and with them, their cultures and heritage. San Francisco was no exception, and while soccer had been established as early as the 1890s in the Bay Area, this wave of immigration brought an injection of enthusiasm and talented young players. By the mid-1920s The SFSFL (San Francisco Soccer Football League), founded in 1902, had so many new players that they had to restructure the league into divisions with promotion and relegation to accommodate all the clubs.

New teams like Viking AC, Teutonia, Rovers, and Mercury AC mixed it up with the established clubs like Union Iron Works, Olympic Club, Thistle FC and Vampires. It was in 1923 that one of these new clubs, Mercury AC, was founded by three Russian immigrants; Alex Belely, Fred Garbachoff, and Gene Sarabun, who left Europe during the Bolshevik uprising and ensuing Russian Civil War. That same year, 5,600 miles away in Irkutsk, Siberia, Matthew Jacob Boxer was being spirited away from his home—first by ox-cart, then by foot and finally by train to escape the Russian Civil War, which had finally caught up to the region. The “Reds,” who were the uprising minority had taken it upon themselves to shoot anyone on sight who they felt were “whites.” Typically, the whites would be considered the officers, bourgeoisie, and obvious anti-Bolshevik political groups but sometimes it was also just groups who felt the reds were too drastic.

Advert in local paper for Mercury AC’s next match against Olympic Club (CSU newspaper Archives)

Matthew’s parents, Jacob Paul Boxer and Hannah Abramovna Granitsky, were targets of the reds and were forced to leave their home with only the clothes on their backs. It took 9 months for 10-year-old Matt and his parents to arrive in Shanghai, and to the best of our knowledge, he lived there for nearly 7 years before heading to San Francisco, on board the vessel Shanyu Maru, in 1930. Matthew likely settled into life in The City, found employment and made friends with other immigrants and refugees playing soccer in the various places it was available. Places like Old Central Park at 8th & Market, Tobin Field at 12th & Mission, USF Field on Parker & Turk or Memorial Field on Van Ness and Hayes Street. Sometimes a team would have to take a ferry across the bay to catch a match in Oakland or even in Alameda. In 1932, Boxer joined up with Mercury AC, which was very likely the neighborhood club for him—its imaginable that when his family arrived from Russia, by way of China, they sought out people like themselves and Mercury AC were very well supported by the Russian community of San Francisco.

Multi-Purpose Fields off Van Ness (Photo: SFSFL Social Media)

Mercury AC and Matthew J Boxer became inexorably linked—one was synonymous to the other and that would go on for over a half-century. During this time, Mercury was the longest-running side in San Francisco to operate under the same name; they became a powerhouse due to the financial support from the Russian community. In just his second year with the club, they swept through the second division and earned promotion to the first in San Francisco. Just a couple years later, he met his sweetheart Marjorie C. Teffault, and on July 15, 1939 he married her. Matt played a few more years for the club, during which time they were always competing for the top but never won it—in the early 1940s, he quit playing, graduated from Heald Business School, and took up managing both Mercury AC as well as his own small appliance shop in the city.

Matthew Boxer (front row, suit and tie, hand on the cup) and his SFSFL Championship winning team of 1947-48 (Photo: SFSFL Social Media)

Early on, Boxer built the team around young players and encouraged established players to take on the role of leaders and on the pitch trainers. Guys like Fred Albright, Otto Krawets, Louis Silber, and Carl Wolters helped Mercury AC earn their first SFSFL title in 1947-48. Things were great, that same year his wife Marjorie gave birth to his son Perry Matthew Boxer. Thanks to the ongoing support from their tightly-knit community, Boxer and Mercury were able to drum up finances to keep the club operating in the black; holding fundraisers at their Mercury Hall Clubhouse. They won the league again in 1955-56 and this time on a beautiful field, which would eventually have his name on it, at Balboa Park.

Grand Opening Program for Balboa Park Soccer Stadium (SFSFL Social Media)

From the moment he arrived in San Francisco, Boxer saw that the playing conditions for the league were poor and inconsistent from location to location. Additionally, the sport was growing in massive popularity outside of the city, in places like Sacramento, San Jose and even in Southern California, it would be great to have a facility which they could call home and one that met the standards high enough to host state tournaments or even international friendlies. Matthew became an advocate for a soccer specific stadium in San Francisco and helped push for just such a building at 166 Havelock Street. In September of 1953 the Balboa Park Soccer Stadium opened and concrete bleachers were added after $150,000 Proposition G passed just a couple months later; likely he had a hand in that too. As time would go by, Matthew Boxer would become well-known for his ability to advocate for his sport and help get projects underway.

Advert in local paper for an international friendly between Swedish club AIK Solna vs San Francisco’s Best XI (CSU Newspaper Archives)

By the end of the 1950s, Boxer had been appointed President of SFFA (San Francisco Football Association), CSAN (California Soccer Association North) and even selected as an administrator for the USSF (United States Soccer Federation); sources differ between “Junior Soccer Commissioner” or simply “Vice-President.” Whichever title it was, Matt had earned promotion after promotion in the world of US Soccer and was duly inducted in the US Soccer Hall of Fame in 1961, he was 44 years old. He still worked for Mercury as well, as the owner and operator of the club at this point; unfortunately, by the end of the 1960s and into the 70s, the ethnic community began to blend into the diverse fabric of the city. Less talented young players were available, maybe more of them pursued American Football, which was fast becoming king, baseball or even local basketball programs might have attracted the youth players. The financial support also waned and in 1980 a decline was painfully obvious.

Matthew Boxer serving as an administrator welcomes players and dignitaries to Balboa Park Soccer Stadium (Photo: OpenSFHistory.org)

With a lack of investment and talent, Mercury AC fell through to the bottom of the second division and by the end of the 1984-85 season, they found themselves relegated to the third division. It was at this point that they packed it up, and the club ceased operations. Matt wasn’t ready to quit his career in management though; that same year, he ran for and won the office of Mayor of Millbrae, California, which was about 12 miles south of San Francisco. He and Marjorie had been raising their family in the town of about 20,000 and he was already involved in the community as president of the Lion’s Club. He served in this capacity for just a couple of years but was still connected to the league too.

1991 should have been a year of celebration, San Francisco’s department of Recreation and Parks renamed the Balboa Park Soccer Stadium in his honor; tragically though, his son Perry died that same year at just 42 years-old. No more than a year later, Matthew J Boxer passed away in 1992—he was 75. Marjorie passed away in 2003 and they were survived by their daughters Paula and Pamela and 7 grandchildren. His legacy endures at Matthew J Boxer Soccer Stadium in Balboa Park, which continues to be the spiritual home of SFSFL and most soccer in the city—some city sides like Olympic Club and SF Vikings still play their soccer there. Some former SFSFL teams have moved up to larger, national leagues, like El Farolito and East Bay/Oakland Stompers (formerly San Francisco Stompers) but still play league matches at the stadium from time-to-time.

The Department of Recreation and Parks manages Boxer Stadium (Photo: SF Dept Recreation and Parks)

After over a century of soccer in San Francisco, the future looks as bright as ever, and it very well may involve this legendary soccer specific stadium. The United States Soccer Federation has won the bid to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup and San Francisco is looking to renovate one or two sites to host a visiting national team or two and provide training grounds. The historic Kezar Stadium, a century-old American Football stadium and Boxer Stadium are at the top of the list for high-end upgrades. The neighborhood surrounding Kezar has voiced opposition due to concerns over parking and noise issues. However, Boxer is well-regarded because its infrastructure and layout has always been soccer-specific—less work will have to be done to create a modern soccer complex in the heart of The City. I’m sure if Matthew was alive, he’d be in attendance to any committee he could to advocate for this to happen, let’s hope the officials San Francisco has now have the same passion for the sport and the city that Boxer had.

- Joshua Duder

The rolling hills and iconic neighborhoods of San Francisco can be seen from the main stands of Boxer Stadium (Photo: SFSFL Social Media)

Sources:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Soccer-fever-in-S-F-is-not-new-outbreak-2830188.php

https://www.sfgate.com/sports/slideshow/Bay-Area-sports-landmarks-178600.php

http://opensfhistory.org/

http://www.ussoccerhistory.org/national-soccer-hall-of-fame-biographies/national-soccer-hall-of-fame-builders-biographies/matt-boxer/

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/86465663/matthew-jacob-boxer

http://www.sfexaminer.com/district-supervisor-hopes-renovate-boxer-stadium-time-2026-world-cup/

https://sfrecpark.org/destination/boxer-stadium/

http://www.sfsfl.com/

1923 - 1924 National Challenge Cup: Looking Into the Past

It’s dangerous to talk history sometimes. Those that love the subject are passionate about it and if you screw up, they will let you know about it. So I’m prefacing this short piece by saying I’m not an expert, just a guy who loves history, particularly American soccer history. Also, and this is sincere, if you’re a historian, we welcome your two cents.

The footage isn’t that great, honestly. It’s presented without commentary or sound (sound wouldn’t come to movies for another 3 years) - just barely over 30 seconds of video. It begins with a marching band crossing a field, a large crowd in the background. The next shot is of the Vesper Buick soccer team, standing in line with a line judge (flag in hand). That’s followed with a similar panning shot of Fall River, their kits stitched with the “FR" for their hometown. In the back, you can see a gum-chewing Findlay Kerr (he’s easily identified in his white sweater, traditional wear for keepers in that era ). A crowd shot, showing a large group of people (reports from the time give the attendance as 15,000), mostly men dressed in the era’s style - suits, hats of all sorts, overcoats. Then some game action - which is certainly slower than the modern game, the players more stationary and the ball in the air more than the ground. Then a quick bit of action in the box that (according to wikipedia) shows a hand ball that resulted in the first goal of the match (though the PK isn’t shown). And that’s it.

It’s been talked about on Deadspin, MLS.com, and a host of smaller sites. What it is is the oldest surviving footage of a soccer match in the United States.

Perhaps the oldest extant professional U.S. soccer footage--snippets from the 1924 U.S. Open Cup final, played on March 30, 1924. Fall River Marksmen, champions of the American Soccer League, travelled to St. Louis to face Vesper Buick, champions of the St. Louis Soccer League.

You’ve probably seen it before, but if you haven’t, take 30 seconds and watch it. Then watch it again. That’s soccer royalty right there. That 1924 National Challenge Cup final marked the beginning of an impressive run by Fall River, who would win four over the next seven years (1924, 1927, 1930, 1931). But both these clubs were short lived in their dominance and lifespan.

Vesper Buick is certainly the shorter lived of the two, only playing four seasons in St. Louis. Much has been made of the St. Louis soccer scene and the history goes back into the first decade of last century. In 1924, Vesper Buick won the Saint Louis Soccer League in a shortened season of only 13 matches, going 9-2-2. Their path through the Challenge Cup was smooth sailing until the final, winning the matches with a combined score of 18-3. The teams they beat are a throwback to the era: Scullin Steel, Harmarville Consumers, Goodyear Tire FC, Bricklayers and Masons. Going into the final, Vesper had every reason to feel confident, considering their track record of demolishing opponents. And while we know the history of Fall River now, this was their first entry into the National final.

The Marksmen would only exist for 10 dominant years before being renamed, then moved, and eventually collapsing in the 1930s. But this year’s club was at the height of their excellence. Much like Vesper Buick had cut through their competition in the National Challenge Cup, Fall River’s path through the competition was almost as impressive. Their big challenge was in the quarters and semis. In the quarterfinal, they played Abbot Worsted (also known as Forge Villagers), a club that always contended (though never won) for the National Challenge Cup during the 1920s. Fall River beat them 2-1 and advanced to a semifinal matchup with a club they knew very well, Bethlehem Steel. Fall River and Bethlehem Steel were the dominant teams in the American Soccer League. When Sam Mark took over Fall River, he swiped Bethlehem’s keeper, Findlay Kerr, and several other players in an effort to gain dominance in the league. This matchup of two giants took place on March 9th, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York. These clubs played many matches against each other in the ASL regular season, but this matchup was a big one. Reported attendance for this match was 20,000, though that figure has been contested by some historians. Needless to say, beating their arch rivals 2-0 to advance to the Cup Final was a big deal.

The final was a high-scoring affair, with the first half ending 1-1. Fall River had jumped out to a quick lead with a Fred Morley goal, but a handball by defender Alex Kemp led to an equalizing penalty kick by Tom Harris. The second half began the same way the first had begun with another Morley goal. A minute later, Vesper Buick equalized. Fall River would complete the scoring with a goals from Johnny Reid and Harold Brittan. The 1923-1924 National Challenge Cup ended with Fall River taking home the trophy 4-2.

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The goal of this article was to share that footage, but also to give context to it. Viewed without connection it loses some of its shine. Hopefully this article helps fill some gaps in the story. The fact that a clip from this match actually exists is impressive. Consider that soccer would soon fade from national interest and the clubs and leagues involved would collapse. Of course, the National Challenge Cup would rebrand and continue, but preservation and maintaining the history of the sport was ignored until it was too late. No doubt there was much more footage from this match, but let’s be thankful for the 30 seconds we got! The rest has faded into history. It’s a window into the past and fleshes out the boxscore. It should be cherished, celebrated, and canonized. It’s a look into a past when soccer dominated the sports landscape in this country.

If you are a family member of a player from the past and would like to share your photos or stories, reach out to us at contact@protagonistsoccer.com. We value the history of this great game.

If you are a historian, we’d love to hear from you as well. This clip wouldn’t be public without the work you do. Shoot us an email and give us what you have! We’d love to share the knowledge you have with our readers.

Thanks to The Cup.US who do amazing work and helped shape this article.

- Dan Vaughn

Doris Clark’s Eleven

Oak Park was Sacramento’s first suburb, sub-divided and developed in 1887—by the 1910s it was connected directly to Downtown Sacramento by multiple streetcars and attracted the California State Fairgrounds. It became a destination neighborhood by boasting “no city taxes” and had a thriving social scene at the titular park on 8th and Sacramento Boulevard. In 1913, according to Sacramento Union archives, the city appointed a young Miss Doris Clark to become its Student Assistant of Parks, at a pay rate of $510 a year.

Scouring the online archives of the Sacramento Union, a defunct local newspaper, shows as many posts about her social activities as it has regarding her successes on the pitch. For the first few years as a Parks Assistant, she oversaw archery events, hiking, track and field, as well as helping to set up popular outdoor music events in Oak Park. Miss Doris Clark even participated in these events from time to time as a member of a quartet. It seems that by late 1915 or early 1916 she had earned herself a promotion and moved north three miles to McKinley Park on the corner of Alhambra and McKinley Boulevards.

The Gateway to the Oak Park neighborhood near Sacramento, California

It was here, at McKinley Park that she really took off and by all accounts, she was very well regarded; even her vacations to Yosemite in 1916 and to Lake Tahoe in 1917, would eventually be newsworthy. However, it was her continued efforts in her local park position that earned her the most attention. Even Spalding’s 1919-20 edition noted her efforts in a piece titled Women Taking Up the Kicking Game, “Soccer Football is about the most strenuous of athletic games. Its forty-five-minute halves are marked by practically continuous action in which every member of each team is on his toes, but that doesn’t seem to keep the girls out. In Sacramento, California, Miss Doris Clark is the manager, and a very successful one, of the McKinley Park Football Club. The only lady manager of a club affiliated with the United States Football Association.”

In their book, Women’s Soccer: The Passionate Game, Barbara Stewart and Helen Stoumbos tell us that “Women were on the periphery of soccer from the beginning. In part, because public schools were for men only, but as well, polite society at the time frowned on women who engaged in strenuous exercise. Doctors believed such activity could injure the reproductive system or simply make women too manly to have children.” From the sources available, there’s no evidence to point to Doris Clark having experience on the pitch but once she moved from Oak Park to McKinley Park, she took up the role of managing the competitive soccer team associated with that neighborhood. Stewart and Stoumbos go on to tell us, “At any time when women’s team sports such as baseball and hockey were being played across America, women’s soccer made inroads. Women were being accepted as part of the game, and several colleges picked it up as a regular sport. In 1920, a woman named Doris Clark became manager of the McKinley Park Football Club in Sacramento. She was the first woman to hold such a position with a sanctioned team.”

Excerpt from Spalding’s Soccer Football Guide, 1919-1920

From 1916 to 1919, Doris continued to organize seasonal and social events at McKinley Park, and she also managed the young men’s soccer team there. They dominated teams called Acorns, Grass Valley and Rovers—they even travelled to San Francisco to compete in the state cup. One Sacramento Union article from December 19, 1918 tells us, “Despite adverse conditions of weather and facing influenza, soccer is in full swing with spirited contests each Sunday… On Christmas day, the McKinley team will clash with Grass Valley… Miss Doris Clark, who has the local club in charge, expects her boys to win, although, she says the Grass Valley boys can play some football.”

While there are several notes and articles to share from the Sacramento Union’s archives regarding Miss Clark, it’s important to note that Stewart and Stoumbos’ assertion Clark took up the position in 1920 is incorrect—she resigned in 1919 after six years working between Oak and McKinley Parks. There’s no reason given, but the last piece I can find speaking to Doris’ activities says she “has tended her resignation to superintendent George Kim, to take effect July 20 (1919). Miss Clark has been very active in her work and was manager of the winning soccer team there last season. Before going to McKinley Park she served at Oak Park Playground.” Judging from her vacations spent in the outdoors and her success at throwing events at the parks, I can only venture to guess that she moved on to a similar parks position somewhere else; perhaps someday we’ll find an ending more befitting the first USSF sanctioned woman manager.

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- Joshua Duder

The Importance of Memory

You know what scares me? Spiders, sharks, snakes, and bears, obviously. But more from an existential angst angle - being forgotten. Regardless of your belief about what happens when you die, we can look around this world and see what death will bring for all of us. At first, your family and friends will mourn your passing and feel the absence you have left, but over time you will fade from their thoughts. Soon, you will be a name on a family tree, grandchildren will scratch their head when they spot you in pictures, not sure who you are. Eventually, those pictures will fade, of course. And in 100 years, you will be gone. Very few of us make a mark large enough to outlive the darkening that comes with passing time.

And this is not to say that this process is bad. It is what it is.

But that thought, of eventually being nothing more than a lost memory, terrifies me. In my own life, I have see this process. I had a younger brother, David. He was my best friend throughout my early life, particularly during my teens. I did nothing that David was not a part of. Then, when I was 21, in college, my brother, 19, died suddenly. It was a gut-wrenching experience. But after the shock of his exit, a numbing occurred - life had to go on. Classes and girlfriends, work and friends, each item took a bit of focus and blurred the absence of my brother. Now, some 20 years later, I often say that he is as dead as George Washington - meaning that he is a name and a face, but not much more than that. The years have layered memories that obscure his passing. It was inevitable.

Every person reading this article has gone through this experience or will someday. People die. Other people live.

I’ve written before about the Fall River Marksmen and the old American Soccer League several times, but, for those unfamiliar, here’s the elevator pitch. The ASL was the dominant soccer league in the northeast United States from 1921 to the early 30’s. Clubs like Bethlehem Steel and Fall River dominated the league and the National Challenge Cup (eventually renamed the US Open Cup). The best players in the country played in this league. It outdrew baseball teams at the time. And then, it all ended.

In preparation for this column, I’ve been researching a player from that era. While I am not going to be talking too much about that process (there will be an article eventually), I do want to scrape the surface to make a point. Because Fall River Marksmen is such an interesting story to me, I decided to pick a player to research. As I dug into this player’s life, I realized how little is known about these players. They came and went from the soccer world. Like all professional players, they eventually retired and went on to live their lives, had families, got day jobs - they moved on.

And the country moved on as well. Other sports began to dominate the conversation. The rise of the NFL, MLB, and the NBA relegated soccer to a marginalized space. Sure, people played the sport but it no longer dominated headlines. The names of players from the ASL era were almost completely forgotten. And sadly, USSF seems completely unconcerned about preserving this history. MLS has become the dominate brand of the sport and the only focus of those in power. Leagues that came before are almost entirely ignored, as if soccer began in this country in the mid 90s. In fact, American soccer might be the only major sport that refuses to celebrate its history in any meaningful way.

This indifference has meant that memorabilia, memories, the players are almost all gone. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to be the dominant player of a generation and then to be forgotten for the rest of your life. We see athletes struggle with adjusting to regular life all the time, but this group of players has been almost entirely erased from soccer consciousness. The old black and white photos cry out for attention, but for many time has erased any memory of the players beyond box scores.

I have been known to question the methods and style of Pro/Rel advocates online, but that group should be celebrated for its focus on the rich soccer history of this country. Focusing on that history is important, even vital, for the long-term success and sustainability of the game in this country. Pretending that MLS is something without precedent ignores the lessons that could be learned from the leagues that came before. The success of the NASL in the late 60s and early 70s dwarfs the crowds that MLS regularly draws now, even 25 years since founding. Go back and watch the videos of the Cosmos from that era, you see a league that captured the imagination of the country. This should be celebrated, not ignored.  And, more importantly, lessons should be drawn to replicate that success.

So this column is a chance to fight the dust of age. If you’re a fan of soccer in this country, it’s time to become a historian as well. It’s time to celebrate the clubs of the past because they contributed to what we have today. We’ll be doing that here at Protagonist (just wait till you see some of these stories!), but it’s time to for the entire American soccer community to begin preserving the past. If the Federation won’t, then we will. We will not forget.

-Dan Vaughn

Vampire Association Football Club

If you enjoy this article, check out the rest of Protagonist Soccer’s Halloween Week Special, Cracking the Crypt.

Gothic Horror made its way into popular fiction as early as the end of the 1700s with works by English authors Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis—by the mid-19th century, serial pieces and novels by Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens were readily available throughout western culture. Vampirism was very much an early component of Gothic writings with pieces by John William Polidori (The Vampyre, 1819) Rymer and Prest (Varney the Vampire serials, 1845-47), or Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire work (Carmilla, 1871-72). This creature of the night was fast becoming one of Gothic Horror’s most well-known archetypes.

Often, a literary goal of working with these archetypes (Scapegoat, Villain, Temptress) was more meaningful than simply telling a spooky story, there was an element of revealing darker sides of humanity to the reader, almost with a didactic sensibility. As these works of fiction became increasingly available, they also became increasingly influential for new waves of writers as well as readers. By the 1890s, the word vampire had taken on a meaning beyond that of a literary sense and began to permeate everyday vernacular. Even in the farthest-flung cities of western civilization, like San Francisco, creatures from Gothic writings were now portrayed in daily media.

In regards to an issue we can relate to in modern times, this 1882 political cartoon portrays the landlords of San Francisco, as Vampire bats, looking to drink the tenants dry. These Vampires, of course, ate and drank merrily; however, ended up in hell for squeezing every last cent out of their renters. At a certain point, those privileged enough to be in a position of this level of mockery, begin to own it—they would rather on-board the titles of “Scrooge” or “Vampire” than succumb to social pressure and give up their positions of leverage. Calling oneself a Vampire in these terms becomes a bit of self-scathing or sardonic humor, and maybe simultaneously allows them to explain away not knowing how to sleep at night.

The game of association football, or soccer, had been played in Britain for centuries, but had only been codified for a relatively short period of time--1863. As Britannia spread their literature and financial system around the world, they brought with them the laws of their exciting new sport; wherever sailors travelled, be it to continental Europe, South America or even the port cities up and down California, they brought with them the game of football and all of its glorious Victorian Era laws. While sailors came and went, the clerks, merchants, bankers or property managers might stick around longer and since they might have been members of Cricket Clubs or Yacht Clubs back home, this budding white-collared class set up similar clubs in their respective new locales.

Organizations, such as the San Francisco Yacht Club or the Encinal Yacht Club were forming as early as 1890, all around the San Francisco Bay. They would throw elaborate social events and parade their decorated yachts for onlookers to see. Popular destinations around the bay to sail to were fellow Yacht Clubs like San Leandro, Redwood City and San Francisco’s Corinthian YC. Simultaneously massive athletic clubs, like the Olympic Club in San Francisco or the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club were assembling to provide common areas for athletic competition and fraternization. As football became a larger part of life in the late 19th centuries, these existing athletic organizations added soccer teams to their organizations in the late 1890s. From this you get some of the most historic clubs in Bay Area soccer history: Pastimes, Pickwicks, Thistle, Albion Rovers, Pacific Wanderers, and even a club from Alameda calling themselves the Vampire Association Football Club.

Initially, there were only four clubs, we know of, founded as early as 1892 and played a bit of a round robin for two years; however, the economic boom of the gilded age (1870s to end of the 1880s) came to a screeching stop just before 1894, in what is referred to as the “Panic of 1893.” These clubs didn’t stop playing soccer, it was just more intermittent for several years; they would have to find competition against teams of visiting sailors or travel by rail to play clubs some distance away. Shortly after an economic recovery,  Vampire Association Football Club was formed in either 1896 or 1897—it very well could be 1896 and they simply didn’t play their first matches until the following year.

Unlike some of the bigger clubs in San Francisco, Vampires were based out of Alameda, about a 45-minute drive from The City nowadays; however, the Bay Bridge wasn’t constructed until 1933 so in order to play away matches, they would have to take a ferry off the Alameda Mole to cross the bay. VAFC seem to initially have hosted their home matches at the Alameda Cricket Club grounds and a few of the cricketers played for the new football side. Other members of the Vampires team came from the San Francisco Yacht Club and most of the team were English expats. “… and they generally had money,” Brian Bunk tells us in his SoccerHistoryUSA podcast, “… this makes them a bit different than most of the soccer hotbeds in the United States, where the players tended to come from more blue-collared type occupations. The Vampires, on the other hand, were mostly white-collared workers; clerks, bankers, and accountants.”

They came from Yacht Clubs, Cricket Clubs, Athletic Clubs and the white-collared business professionals who brought with them the understanding of football, were privileged enough to have had access to some of the aforementioned Goth literary classics during their formative years. Vampire Association Football Club were established, perhaps, shortly after Bram Stoker’s seminal novel Dracula had been published in May of 1897. Rudyard Kipling’s Poem, The Vampire, was also released in 1897—which makes the year an oddly influential year for Gothic Horror and vampirism. Considering the players for Vampires, were clerks, bankers, accountants and independent business owners, it’s likely they ran in the same circles as landlords and property investors—those who would laughingly take ownership of the socially derogatory expression “Vampire” and use it as a mascot for a newly formed football side. There’s no way to know if this is true, but its as good a guess as any. There’s also the likelihood that they came to consensus, while inventing a name for their side, that Vampires just sounded good and scary.

According to The History of Soccer in the San Francisco Bay Region website, maintained by David Litterer, “… soccer first made its appearance in Northern California in the late 19th Century; soon the California Football League, Western League and other circuits were founded, which eventually led to the formation of the California State Football Association in 1902.” Just two years later, the State FA would launch the State Cup as well as the Bellis Perpetual Trophy. Vampires were amongst the early powerhouses of these competitions, along with names like Union Works, Burns, and of course, they’re local rival, the Barbarians—who can boast having won the State Cup three times and the Bellis Trophy once. Litterer provides the lists of silverware in the Vampires’ case: State Cup in 1907, 10, 14 and the Bellis Trophy 1910 and 11… and looks like they did the triple in 1910.

In their centenary celebration, the San Francisco Soccer Football League released a 20-page document, making a list of the league winners available. The Vampires from Alameda managed to win the league in both 1908 as well as in 1910… Barbarians only managed to win the league once, in 1923. Sean McGeever, author of a lengthily bit of history content provided in the league document, tells us “Founded in 1902, the SFSFL is, in fact, one of the oldest semi-professional leagues in the United States… One of the early teams in the league, the Vampires, sported a bat on their jerseys, and rumor has it, drew first blood every game!” This, and the few remaining team photos, can confirm the jersey recreations by Brian Bunk are accurate (Shown above, courtesy of @SoccerHistoryUS).

Prior to the turn of the century, the ethnic composition of San Francisco’s immigrants, and by default, soccer teams, was primarily of English or Scottish descent; however, “The 1920s proved to be a pivotal decade in the establishment of a new generation of soccer teams due to the influx of immigrants from Germany, Russia, France, and other countries where the Great War had caused cataclysmic changes,” says McGeever. These newly minted Americans looked to form their own Athletic Clubs and soccer teams too—so much so, that a second division had to be added to the SFSFL. While the Vampires won their second State Cup in 1909-10 and won it again in 1913-14, ten years would go by before another of the region’s founding clubs would win the league title. McGeever tells us, “The Vampire’s State Cup success in 1914 proved, in retrospect, to be the end of an era.” The Vampires would not win any more titles for their remaining ten years in the league, and in 1924-25 they were replaced in the league by Unione Sportiva Italiana, the “Soccer Champions.”

Vampires’ 1923 season was a disaster, according to J.N. Young’s report in Spalding’s Soccer Football Guide of 1923, “From the start, the competition was keen and Olympic and Union Iron Works were generally considered as the most likely contenders. Yet it could not be said that they dominated the other teams which, with the exception of Vampires and later Burns, kept well in the fighting line...” The club from Alameda finished dead last, they showed no fight all year and were bottom of the table with no wins and gave up thirty more goals than they scored. On the other hand, they fought hard in the State Cup, forcing replays in the first and second rounds, as well as in the semi-finals. After each draw, they would follow up with a win in the replay. Vampires even, somehow, forced a reply in the Cup Final, drawing newcomers McKinley Park 3-3 away. On the home leg, they lost the final 1-3 and that may have been the proverbial stake in the heart for the Vampires in the City.

If the club vanished into thin air or put itself to rest in a coffin, Vampire Association Football Club was not mentioned in any available sources after 1924. For a short while, however, the frightful club from Alameda California haunted the football grounds of the Bay Area and even made a meal of their competition. There is every chance that several of Vampires’ players were not done playing soccer just because the team didn’t show up for any more seasons in the SFSFL, and they might have found somewhere else to play. The San Francisco Soccer Football League is still up and running, with many current clubs who can trace their lineage back, through mergers and moves, to the clubs of yesteryear and maybe… just maybe there was a vampire or two who played for them too.

- Josh Duder