Playing for Uncle Sam Read online

  About the Author

  David Tossell has more than 20 years’ experience in sports journalism and public relations. Formerly Executive Sports Editor of Today, he is currently head of European public relations for the National Football League (NFL). He is the author of two previous books, including Seventy-One Guns: The Year Of The First Arsenal Double, published by Mainstream.

  PLAYING FOR UNCLE SAM

  The Brits’ Story of the North American Soccer League

  David Tossell

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licenced or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781780574721

  Version 1.0

  www.mainstreampublishing.com

  Copyright © David Tossell, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by

  MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING (EDINBURGH) LTD

  7 Albany Street

  Edinburgh EH1 3UG

  ISBN 1 84018 748 4

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without the permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast.

  Copyright permissions cleared by author. The author has tried to trace all copyright details but where this has not been possible and amendments are required, the publisher will be pleased to make any necessary arrangements at the earliest opportunity.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. An Uncivil War

  2. Staying Alive

  3. Man for All Seasons

  4. Bright Lights, Big Cities

  5. Southport’s Mighty Atoms

  6. Way Out West

  7. Welcome to Soccer City, USA

  8. Coming to America

  9. George and Rod’s Excellent Adventure

  10. Playing for Kicks

  11. Furphy’s Law

  12. Farewell to the King

  13. New Kids on the Block

  14. Death of a Salesman

  15. The Price of Success

  16. A Fistful of Dollars

  17. Strikers United

  18. We Can Be Heroes

  19. Who Shot the NASL?

  20. Beginning of the End

  21. All Over

  Postscript

  Appendix

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  One of the most enjoyable aspects of the preparation of this book was discovering how many people shared my enthusiasm for telling the story of the British involvement in the North American Soccer League (NASL). My huge gratitude is due to all of those listed as interviewees at the end of the book, many of whom were also kind enough to put me in contact with former colleagues. In addition, a lot of people opened doors through the sharing of telephone numbers and e-mail addresses or the delivery of messages, notably Mal Butler, Roy Collins, Christopher Davies, Roger Davies, Paul Donovan, Paul Futcher, Richard Green, Frank Juliano, Paul Mace, Alan Merrick, Mike Preston, Neil Rioch, Michael Signora, Paul Tinnion, Roger Wash, Dave Wasser, Phil Woosnam and Gary Wright.

  Special thanks are due to Bob McNab and Richard Whitehead, for their input and detective work, and to Vince Casey and Alan Merrick, who generously made their photographic collections available for my use. Jack Huckel and Colin Jose at the American Soccer Hall of Fame deserve mention for their assistance, while all of this would have been for nothing without the backing of everyone at Mainstream Publishing.

  Some people contribute in ways beyond the practical, like Sally, whose long-term support and organisation of family life have helped to make projects like this possible.

  To Pete Abitante, thanks for professional guidance and personal friendship. Lucy, this book could not have been undertaken without your encouragement, nor completed without your patient proofreading. Finally, thanks to my mum, for unwavering support in all areas of my life.

  Introduction

  The BBC’s Kenneth Wolstenholme may have declared famously that it was ‘all over’ as Geoff Hurst slammed the ball into the West Germans’ net for the third time, but for the North American Soccer League the emphatic underlining of England’s World Cup triumph was just the start.

  When Bobby Moore led the red-shirted English heroes into the Wembley sunshine on that memorable July afternoon in 1966, eight million viewers were tuning in on their televisions in the United States. Considering that they had either forgone their weekend lie-in if they were on the west coast or were fitting the game around their brunch arrangements on the eastern side of the country, NBC’s audience for the events being played out several thousand miles away was considered an outstanding success. And it offered final, indisputable confirmation of what several influential and wealthy American folks had been suspecting for a while: that their country was ready to embrace the world game of football. The nation’s long wait for a top-tier professional ‘soccer’ league was about to come to an end.

  The appearance of Alf Ramsey’s men on American screens could not have been better timed. The ’60s were a boom time for sport in the US, the pervading mood one of expansion and experiment. Improved communication and travel had opened up geographical areas until recently unexplored by the professional leagues, while increased and enhanced television coverage was giving sport more exposure than ever before. The American public had more disposable income and were keen to find ways of spending it. Sport offered a popular option and a welcome diversion from years of civil unrest, a debilitating war in Vietnam and a series of shocking assassinations of major political figures.

  In American football, the gridiron version, the established National Football League (NFL) had faced a challenge from the newly formed American Football League, forcing a merger that brought about the advent of the Super Bowl and pushed the league to heights of popularity no other US sport could match. Not that the others were struggling. The decade saw every major sports league increase by at least six teams as burgeoning cities lobbied for franchises. Into such a climate of pioneering came professional soccer, beginning a saga that, over the course of almost two decades, would mix high drama with comedy, sporting excellence with moments of pure farce.

  This book does not set out to be the definitive history of the NASL (a thorough examination of the reasons behind the league’s collapse could fill a volume on its own). Rather, it is the tale – much of it anecdotal – of the British players, coaches and administrators who were part of the league. And, whatever the headline during the NASL’s roller-coaster existence, the Brits were never far from the heart of the story.

  From the moment America opened its sporting borders to soccer, those from the British Isles were at the front of the check-in line. Some, like George Best and Rodney Marsh, would make the journey because they felt English football had nothing left to offer them. Others went to prove a point, like World Cup goalkeeper Gordon Banks, who demonstrated that it was possible to keep the best forwards in the world at bay with only one eye. But it was not just the big-name internationals that crossed the Atlantic to join up with their peers, Pelé, Beckenbauer and Cruyff. A whole legion of First Divis
ion players and lower-league journeymen extended their careers or forged new ones in the NASL. Men like Peter Beardsley, Peter Withe and Alan Brazil used it as a finishing school for great things back home, while some, like Alan Willey and Paul Child, virtually unknown in their homeland, stayed on to perform feats that rank alongside those of any of the NASL’s most recognisable names.

  Across the water they went, the celebrity and the unknown, the young and the old, the richly talented and the poorly appreciated. An 18-year procession of players lured by the opportunity to play in the land of Uncle Sam. This is their story.

  1. An Uncivil War

  As the bright, crisp sunshine of spring gave way to the hazy days of the summer of 1966, it was a good time to be a sporting underdog in America. Many of the nation’s headlines were being created by those who had previously been written off, counted out or simply ignored. The battle to crown the champions of the ice hockey world saw the Montreal Canadiens come from two games down to overturn the Detroit Red Wings in the final series of the Stanley Cup. Golfer Billy Casper was turning around an even greater deficit, making up seven shots on the final nine holes of the US Open in San Francisco before beating the great Arnold Palmer in a play-off. In tennis, 22-year-old Billie Jean King overcame former champion Maria Bueno at Wimbledon to win an overdue first Grand Slam singles title, three years after qualifying for her first final. Meanwhile, baseball underdogs everywhere toasted the descent of the mighty New York Yankees towards last place in the American League. Even the United States Soccer Football Association (USSFA), perhaps the biggest sporting no-hoper of all, was about to have its day.

  Dramatic events on the greens of California and the courts of south-west London had done little to quicken the sedate pace of activity in the New York offices of the USSFA. As Americans cheered Casper and King, the organisation’s part-time employees went quietly about their business, which consisted mainly of administering the national team’s hapless attempts to qualify for the World Cup finals and overseeing semi-professional competitions like the American Soccer League, whose clubs paid the USSFA a meagre yearly fee of $25. The prospect of a World Cup in which the United States was once again merely a distant spectator was not much more than an interesting distraction. That was, however, until letters began dropping into the USSFA’s mailbox from men with money to spend and the inclination to lavish it on an idea they felt could not miss: a new professional soccer league.

  Without having done a great deal to invite such attention, the USSFA suddenly had at its fingertips a scheme apparently so certain of success that three consortiums were fighting to win approval to put it into practice. Potential investors included major corporations like Madison Square Garden and the RKO General Corporation, while interested individuals included Lamar Hunt, the owner of American football’s Kansas City Chiefs, Jack Kent Cooke of the Washington Redskins and several others with controlling interests in major sports franchises. Professional soccer, so the theory went, would help to feed the public’s insatiable sporting appetite and enable the stadium and team owners to turn days when their buildings had previously stood empty into profitable trading opportunities.

  Rubbing their hands with considerable glee at this sudden surge of interest in what was still regarded largely as the ‘foreign sport’, the USSFA sprang into action. In conjunction with the Canadian Soccer Football Association (CSFA), its first response to the requests for permission to set up an officially sanctioned league was to demand from each consortium a franchise fee of $25,000 for every proposed team, plus a cut of gate receipts and television revenue. When disapproval was voiced at the level of the fee, USSFA committee member Jack Flamhaft commented, ‘It makes me laugh. Here come millionaires who own some billionaire businesses in other fields. Did they want a franchise for $25?’

  While the world watched the events in England in July 1966, representatives of the three competing groups travelled to San Francisco to plead their case to the USSFA’s annual convention. In the end, the choice was simple. The group led by Jack Kent Cooke, the only one to accept the USSFA terms, was given official recognition and prepared to begin play in 1968 as the North American Soccer League. But the two rivals, their conviction about the sport hardened by America’s interest in Geoff Hurst and his pals, decided not to go quietly. Joining forces to call themselves the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL), they announced that ten teams, with or without permission from the authorities, would begin play in the spring of 1967, thereby beating their rivals onto the field by a full year. The NPSL added that it was now prepared to accept the USSFA’s terms and produced a cheque for $250,000. By now, though, it was too late to find a place under the wing of the USSFA, which had given Cooke’s NASL group the exclusive rights to operate a professional league in North America.

  The NPSL, dubbed the ‘outlaws’ to the NASL’s ‘in-laws’, pushed on with its plans, buoyed by a television contract with CBS, yet facing a potential recruiting problem. The lack of local talent meant that the bulk of the players would have to come from outside the United States. However, any player signing with the renegade outfit faced the threat of being placed on a FIFA blacklist. One bizarre rumour even began to circulate that any player going to play in America was liable to be drafted into the army and sent to fight in Vietnam.

  One of the first players signed by the NPSL was a 31-year-old English forward, Ron Newman, whose 12 seasons in the Football League had taken him finally to Gillingham, where he was waiting for news of a possible coaching post in South Africa. ‘I knew my career was coming towards the end and I had itchy feet,’ he recalls. ‘Before my legs gave out I wanted to go to an exotic place. While I was playing for Gillingham and waiting for things to develop in South Africa I started reading about an old friend of mine, Phil Woosnam, who was going to coach a team in Atlanta. I knew Phil from when I moved from Portsmouth to Leyton Orient. I moved into his old house after he had gone to West Ham and I kept getting his bloody post! Phil contacted me and asked me to go with him instead of going to South Africa.

  ‘The way I heard it was that there was another league that had been given authenticity and we were classified as an outlaw league, so I called the players’ union in England and asked if there was a problem. Their reply was, “If you have permission from Gillingham and are not breaking your contract there is no problem.”’

  Newman was to find out that he had been given false information when the NPSL’s lawyers asked him to volunteer to be a test case at the end of the season. ‘There were law suits going on like crazy and I was asked if I would write to the Football Association to be reinstated. That letter became a major tool in the legislation. The FA wrote back and said I was quite welcome to come back – as soon as I had sat out a one-year suspension! I thought that was bullshit. It was diabolical. The idea had been to see if I was going to be punished for playing in the NPSL, so the answer from the FA was the one the league’s lawyers wanted.’

  While the NPSL had set about stocking its teams with men like Newman, the NASL, stung by its rival’s determination to launch first, decided to act. The league’s name was changed to the United Soccer Association, allowing it to revel in a patriotic acronym and avoid confusion with its similarly titled rival. Then plans were announced to kick off in 1967 after all. Unable to sign players of sufficient calibre at the eleventh hour, the USA opted for the novel solution of simply contracting 12 teams from around the world to spend the summer playing in the United States in a different guise.

  As the winter of 1966 approached, Kenneth Wolstenholme, England forward Jimmy Greaves, ex-Nottingham Forest striker Roy Dwight and London businessman Jim Graham were called in to help with the recruitment of teams from the British Isles. With plenty of money to spend on the USA’s behalf, their Christmas shopping list consisted of three teams from England, three from Scotland and one from each side of the Irish border. So it was that Wolverhampton Wanderers traded the Black Country for California to become the Los Angeles Wolves, while Stoke City left the Po
tteries to become the Cleveland Stokers and Sunderland were re-invented as the Vancouver Royal Canadians. From Scotland, Aberdeen journeyed to America’s capital city to become the Washington Whips, Dundee United were to play as the Dallas Tornado and Hibernian prepared for life as Toronto City. After Linfield turned down their invitation because of the possibility of having to play games on a Sunday, Glentoran accepted the chance to represent Northern Ireland and play the role of the Detroit Cougars. The Republic’s Shamrock Rovers inevitably went to the Irish-dominated city of Boston to play as the Boston Rovers.

  The process of allocating the teams to cities was based largely on ethnic demographics, although most of the pairings stretched that point rather thinly and some franchises were undoubtedly left feeling that they had been short-changed for the $250,000 each was paying to its imported club. Some of the better sides targeted by the USA had been unavailable, such as Pelé’s Santos in Brazil, leaving the field to be filled by Uruguay’s Cerro (New York Skyliners), Brazil’s Bangu (Houston Stars), Den Haag of Holland (San Francisco Golden Gate Gales) and Italian side Cagliari (Chicago Mustangs).

  Instead of a couple of weeks on the beach with their families, what lay ahead for the players was a 12-game schedule that would last almost two months and take in most corners of North America. In modern times, such a proposal would cause uproar among leg-weary and well-travelled players, not to mention their agents and medical advisers. But Aberdeen goalkeeper Bobby Clark, in the early stages of a career that would bring him 13 Scotland caps, recalls the tour as the opportunity of a lifetime.

  ‘Players weren’t spoiled back in those days,’ he says. ‘We were a lot happier about things like that. We were a young side, looking to get better, and this was an opportunity to play against good teams like Wolves, Sunderland and Cagliari, who were champions of Italy a couple of years later. We were about to play in Europe so it was a chance for us to experience playing against different types of teams.