American Soccer's History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Distant Corners In the series Sporting edited by Amy Bass Also in this series: Zack Furness, One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility Michael Ezra, Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon Thomas Hauser, The Boxing Scene David Wangerin, Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America’s Forgotten Game Grant Farred, Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football Tommie Smith, Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith David Wangerin Distant Corners American Soccer’s History of Missed Opportunities and Lost Causes TemPLE UNIVERSITY PRess Philadelphia TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2011 by David Wangerin All rights reserved Published 2011 All attempts have been made to locate the owners of the photographs published in this book. If you believe you may own one of them, please contact Temple University Press so that appropriate acknowledgment may be included in subsequent editions of the book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wangerin, David. Distant corners : American soccer’s history of missed opportunities and lost causes / David Wangerin. p. cm. — (Sporting) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4399-0630-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Soccer—United States—History. 2. Soccer—History. I. Title. GV944.U5W359 2011 796.3340973—dc22 2010045075 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Contents Preface: Worthy Diversions vii A Note on Terminology xi Acknowledgments xiii 1 “Here They Come!” Pilgrims, Corinthians, and the “Foreign Game” as Invader 1 2 Foreign Bodies and Freezing Fans: The Births of the USFA and the National Challenge Cup 34 3 Bullets: Thomas William Cahill, 1863–1951 58 4 Mild Bill: Bill Jeffrey, Penn State, and College Soccer between the Wars 101 5 Dash, Desperation, and Deviltry: St. Louis and the “American Style” 136 6 California Gold: Remembering the Clippers 174 7 Shot Out in Jersey: NASL 1979—The Beginning of the End 208 Index 241 A photo gallery begins on page 89 Preface Worthy Diversions T SHOULD BE an upright headstone, the caretaker said; the trick will be finding it among the various blocks and gates. It’s a big cemetery. I But the sun was out and it was warm for April, and if I had to visit a graveyard, today was as good a day as any. I left my jacket in the car and made my way on foot to Section 28. In one sense, I knew why I’d come to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in East Hanover, New Jersey. I wanted to see Tom Cahill’s grave. There might be a date of birth on the marker, and maybe too some sort of epi- taph: how had he wanted to be remembered? It wasn’t as if I had made an enormous sacrifice to get here; East Hanover was hardly even a detour on my route from Newark Airport to the National Soccer Hall of Fame, 200 miles to the north in Oneonta, New York. But in another sense it was wholly irrational. Why would the burial site of a man I wasn’t related to and who’d died more than a half-century earlier merit an afternoon of my attention? There are websites—of course there are—that tell you which famous people are buried in which cemetery. One that I came across for Gate of Heaven yielded a handful of names: congressmen, mafiosi, a run-of-the- mill baseball pitcher, the tragic figure of Karen Ann Quinlan. But even narrowing my search from “very famous” to “somewhat famous” pro- duced no mention of Cahill, the “father of American soccer,” the man whose life I’d spent the last several months trying to piece together. It wasn’t a surprise. Only a few weeks earlier I had trawled the newspaper viii Preface archives for his obituary and found one under the headline Hockey Pioneer Dies. Finding his grave didn’t turn out to be difficult, even if there probably isn’t a more inconspicuous marker in the cemetery. But as I stood there, vaguely somber and uncomfortably self-conscious, it occurred to me that nobody aware of Cahill’s place in soccer history might ever have stood here before, at least not since the day they laid him to rest in 1951. After all, how many even knew who he was when the sport itself seemed to struggle with honoring his memory? As I walked back to the car, I remembered the minutes from the 1947 meeting of the United States Soccer Football Association, the last one Cahill attended. He was in his eighties, and they’d given him a standing ovation. A past president announced that a book would be written on Cahill’s life and he was “going to go to St. Louis to get it all down.” But he never did. I remembered, too, a letter Cahill had sent to Hap Meyer, the soccer obsessive from St. Louis in whose possession much of Cahill’s paraphernalia would end up: scrapbooks bulging with press clippings; box upon box of photographs, match programs, and reports; trophies and trinkets from Scandinavia; tangible evidence of a life unparalleled in the history of the game. “None of my family are interested in Soccer,” the letter said. “I would never part with any of what I am sending to you if my family would take good care of it after I passed away.” The family’s loss was Meyer’s gain. So, too, apparently, was a film reel of the 1923 National Challenge Cup final, footage Cahill had paid for out of his own pocket because no one else thought it worth the trouble. He promised Meyer he would ship it to him, but maybe he never did. Or maybe he never got the chance; maybe his indifferent family threw it out when he wasn’t looking. Certainly, when Cahill’s bequest—as well as Meyer’s own prodigious collection—was given to Southern Illinois Uni- versity Edwardsville, it was without any reels of film. MERICAN SOCCER has no Babe Ruth or Jack Dempsey; no Yankee Apinstripes or Boston Gardens; no Casey at the Bat or Monday Night Football. But it most certainly has a history, ill-preserved and half-forgotten though it may be. Ever since I discovered the curious path the game has traced across the country’s sporting landscape, I have wanted to chronicle it, to tell the story as best I can. The initial result, Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America’s Forgotten Game, was first published in 2006. But in my research for that book, I soon became aware that the broad story I was aiming to tell would need to leave out a lot of important details. The Preface ix more I thought about this, the more I realized that many of the details were actually themes in their own right—worthy diversions from the main narrative. Taken collectively, they, too, might tell the story of the game, in a less linear fashion. For me—and for many others, I suspect—the history of soccer in America is more a story of what didn’t happen than what did. It’s espe- cially true of its first hundred years, and it certainly applies to the seven chapters of this book, the notion of what might have been but couldn’t ever be: a glass-roofed soccer stadium in St. Louis, the Oakland Clippers touring the world, 100,000 for an Open Cup final, soccer burning brightly in America’s sporting firmament. There were those who thought it could happen. And yet when Landon Donovan scored in the dying moments against Algeria at the 2010 World Cup, America screamed itself hoarse. This wasn’t something it was used to doing for soccer, particularly for an event thousands of miles distant. All the same, much of the country had worked its Wednesday morning breakfast around the match or even taken the day off. Sports bars opened early to accommodate hordes of painted fans. People talked about the game in the office; they posted videos of their celebrations on YouTube and e-mailed, blogged, and Twittered just as they did for more familiar occasions. That the World Cup has caught on in America is now beyond question—and the time it has taken to do so has followed a resolute logic. People my age who were impressionable teenagers when Pelé appeared for the New York Cosmos were carting their kids off to soccer practice when the United States hosted the 1994 World Cup. By the time Dono- van was rescuing his team from elimination in Pretoria, some of us were looking after grandchildren. In the lifetime of our generation, soccer has changed from a sort of foreign perversity to a cause for national cele- bration. We are the first to have grown up with the game in much the way the rest of the world has been doing. This evolution—it’s certainly no phenomenon—would scarcely have been possible had the World Cup come out of nowhere, as it may seem to have done for many Americans. The tournament mattered so much in 2010 not just because it was bigger and the hopes of the United States were higher, but because the national team had appeared in each of the previous five tournaments, because twenty years had passed since Bob Gansler’s squad of raw collegians made it to Italy in 1990.