Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Read online

  One can't really blame Hollander for some of his omissions. The historian Colin Jose, in a preface to his book on the ASL published in 1998, recalls:

  Back in 1969 I received from the American Soccer League of that time a list of the winners of the ASL championship. The list began with the winners of the 1933-34 season, the Kearny Irish-Americans. At the time I thought nothing about it, but imagine my surprise when, many years later, in searching through microfilm of the New York Times of 1925 for details of the United States versus Canada international of that year, I found details of the American Soccer League. How could this be, I wondered, when according to the American Soccer League, the league began operating in 1933?

  American soccer has been careless with its fragile history. Even official statistics for the country's first coast-to-coast professional leagues of 1967 have disappeared, while the US's early international record seems to have been worked out largely after the fact. In a 1994 book, Jose noted:

  In 1972 I wrote to Mr Kurt Lamm, then Secretary ofthe United States Soccer Federation, asking for a list of all the internationals played by the United States down through the years. Mr Lamm replied that, to the best of his knowledge, no such list existed.

  If all this seems rather peculiar for a game with such universal appeal, then the plight of British sports with North American roots is worth bearing in mind. Ice hockey has a longer history there than its marginalised status would suggest, and basketball is still treated largely as a curiosity by the press. Both face the same struggles that have plagued American soccer: under-investment, a shortage of suitable venues and overwhelming media indifference.

  I have never believed something needs to be achingly popular for it to be interesting, and to a soccer fan born in the wrong country at nearly the wrong time, few things are more fascinating than the peculiar rollercoaster the game in America has ridden across the decades. As far as I can tell, its story has never really been told - not from start to finish, and certainly not in the context of American sport in general - and that's something I hope to have achieved here. It has not been my intention to chronicle every famous player, team or match, or to use history for some sort of evangelical purpose. All I have set out to do is to tell the story as I understand it, from what I have read and heard, as well as what I have witnessed first-hand, occasionally in packed stadiums but much more often on windswept college fields and other modest arenas where the heart of American soccer kept beating - faintly, but persistently.

  1. A Game of its Own

  America's path to football isolation

  I believe in outdoor games, and I do not mind in the least that they are rough games, or that those who take part in them are occasionally injured. I have no sympathy whatsoever with the over-wrought sentimentality which would keep a young man in cotton wool, and I have a hearty contempt for him if he counts a broken arm or collarbone as of serious consequence when balanced against the chance of showing that he possesses hardihood, physical address and courage.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  o many Americans the United States is the greatest sports nation on earth. To many elsewhere it is merely the most insular. Few would deny, though, that its array of leagues, circuits and tournaments has become an indelible part of modern American culture. The zeal with which its television networks have harnessed the country's fiercely competitive psyche has transformed popular games into powerful brands and star players into potent commodities, while reinforcing their place in the heart of the average fan.

  On less glittering stages, the fascination with sport is deep-seated and pervasive. Competitions such as Little League baseball and high school gridiron are precious community institutions, as valued as good teachers and paved streets. However faintly, nearly every life seems to be touched by one sporting endeavour or another: the basketball team's trip to the state tournament, the company softball game, the hefty wager on the outcome of the Super Bowl.

  It's tempting to mock the American pretension to sporting superiority when so little of the country takes any interest in contests staged in other corners of the world. It should hardly be surprising that the winners of the Super Bowl are designated 'world champions' and baseball's showcase is known as the World Series (the popular assertion that the New York World newspaper once sponsored the event, and thus gave it its name, is completely spurious). Even basketball, whose recent surge in global popularity has helped to devalue America's Olympic currency from the unconquerable 'dream team' of 1992 to the bronze medallists of 2004, must still contend with the NBA's claims of world dominance.

  All this seems to suggest that Americans have built their formidable sporting pride on little more than ignorance and conceit. But other, more charitable, traits have also played a part: the country's obsession with progress and improvement, its independence of thought and spirit, and a deep-seated collective sense of identity. The onset of the television age and its accompanying juggernaut of bluster and hype may have intensified America's notorious self-obsession, but it scarcely created it. Virtually from the time of the first organised games, the United States has been much more concerned with establishing its own existence and playing by its own rules than in joining any international fraternity. And there is probably no better example of this than the attitude it has adopted towards its most cherished pastime, baseball.

  Until the mid-19th century, the most popular team sport in the United States was cricket. In 1860 the country could lay claim to about 400 clubs with perhaps 10,000 participants - sizeable numbers in an age when few sports had even agreed on their rules. Contests with Canada often attracted large crowds (10,000 were said to have attended a match in 1856) and an All-England XI drew 25,000 to a private estate in Hoboken, New Jersey, for a two-day match in 1859.

  But by the end of the Civil War in 1865 cricket had fallen into decline, and by the 1920s it hardly existed at all. During the 1840s, the juvenile diversion of baseball had been adopted by a haughty, genteel New York City social group known as the Knickerbocker Club, the first organised team about which anything is known. In a matter of years, the game took the country by storm. Livelier, easier to understand and requiring hours rather than days to complete, it was also perceived as more American, even if it did bear more than a passing resemblance to the English game of rounders. As America's time and tolerance for sport grew, so did baseball. By 1856, one New York publication claimed that every patch of green land within ten miles of the city had given way to enthusiasts.

  From the outset, the press waved a star-spangled wand over the new game. Baseball, it maintained, had triumphed over cricket because it was more suited to the American temperament and a better representation of its national character. It was surely intolerable that such claims could be made of an activity with roots in the old world. Yet well into the new century, historians continued to ascribe the origins of what was now firmly embedded as the 'national game' to rounders. By 1907 this had become a severe enough irritation to the baseball patriarchs for them to form a commission to settle the matter. The version they proceeded to treat as gospel - the hazy, 68-year-old recollections of a solitary elderly gentleman that General Abner Doubleday of the US Army had invented the sport in Cooperstown, New York, in 1839 - even the most myopic historian now accepts as absurd. Yet it proved startlingly enduring. Elaborate centennial celebrations were duly held in 1939, including the opening of a Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. As late as 1952 a US congressional report decreed baseball to be 'a game of American origin'.

  Cricket had not disappeared from the American sporting landscape because it was inherently foreign, dull or confusing, or even because its matches couldn't be completed in an afternoon. It disappeared largely because it had remained the domain of middle-class Anglophiles who were determined to keep it that way. Baseball proved more openminded. Its appeal rapidly spread from the gentlemanly haunts of the Knickerbocker Club to working-class neighbourhoods, rural homesteads and everything in between. The penchant for developing and embracing 'Ame
rican' games was not confined to baseball, and by the end of the 19th century the seeds of another indigenous sporting institution - gridiron football - had been sown by men equally determined to clear their own path.

  Charting the peculiar course of soccer in America will require more than a passing reference to its distant and violent cousin. The fact that gridiron has come to be known as `football' when so little of its play has anything to do with the feet illustrates better than anything how closely intertwined the histories of the two games are, even if they no longer bear even a passing resemblance to each other. For most of the 19th century the lines were too blurred to separate one from the other - or from other, less enduring versions of football.

  If America, like any other part of the world, claimed to be playing 'football' during the early 19th century, it was a game only marginally related to its descendants. Unbounded by much in the way of rules, most of which weren't written down and varied according to occasion, ball games of various descriptions had been played in America long before someone thought to brand them with a name. Often they were discouraged by a populace still largely governed by attitudes that had sailed into Massachusetts with the Pilgrim Fathers. Sport, especially in places like New England, was associated with gambling, drinking and other sinful pleasures. In the south, where a less morally exacting Protestantism held sway, the presence of a landed gentry helped to advance a more indulgent culture, but one that favoured other pastimes, particularly horse racing.

  Nevertheless, as early as 1685 an English traveller claimed to have witnessed a 'great game of football' between young men on a Massachusetts beach and there is evidence to suggest that George Washington encouraged his troops to take part in 'games of exercise for amusement', a form of football among them. But it was only during the industrial revolution that such activities emerged as a truly popular form of leisure in the teeming new cities.

  It was the universities that led the way in encouraging sport and - as with the English public schools - organising it. As far back as 1734, freshmen at Harvard were requested to provide 'the rest of the scholars with bats, balls and foot-balls' as part of their campus initiation duties. Life at most American colleges in the 18th century was tediously rigid and dull: endless Greek and Latin recitations, twice-daily visits to the chapel and bans on frivolities such as dancing and playing cards. Eventually, rebelling - or just letting off steam, with a ball or otherwise - came to be tolerated. In the words of one scholar: 'Even a rigidly religious faculty could likely see that it was less harmful, and maybe even beneficial, to allow a certain degree of indecorous physical mayhem on campus than try to subdue it completely.' Initially, this mayhem consisted of 'rushes' between classes, with beleaguered freshmen in particular being ritualistically wrestled, punched, kicked, trampled, submerged and otherwise manhandled in the name of scholarly high jinks.

  Fortunately for future applicants, the student body would come to feel the need for a more collective form of thrills. In England, Oxford and Cambridge had given birth to university sport in 1827 by playing cricket at Lord's. In 1852, 23 years after the first Boat Race, Harvard and Yale rowed across Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire in what is generally regarded as America's first intercollegiate sporting event. A thousand spectators saw Harvard win, even though its crew had practised only a few times for fear of developing blisters on their hands.

  Attitudes changed after the Civil War. In 1869 Harvard sailed to England to race Oxford University's crew on the Thames, having trained for an entire month (they still lost). Rowing emerged as the most popular of the early college sports, though by the 1870s there were plenty of other pursuits in which a young collegian could test his mettle. The first intercollegiate baseball game took place in 1859, the first cricket match five years later. Three colleges contested a two-mile foot race in 1873, and before the turn ofthe century universities would face each other in tennis, polo, lacrosse, cycling, cross-country, fencing, ice hockey, basketball, golf, swimming, gymnastics and water polo. Baseball remained the most widely played sport on campus, regattas the showcase event.

  But another sport - one far more bruising and complex, and unequivocally American - would soon overtake them all. It claimed the name football and could trace its origins to a variety of unruly kicking activities periodically outlawed by campus officials. One such variant had taken place between freshmen and sophomores at Harvard in the 1820s, where, according to some sources, the contests did not always involve the use of a ball. The introduction of an object to kick - alongside all the shins - seems to have had little effect on the game's brutality. Harvard's infamous 'Bloody Monday', an initiation ritual held on the first day of the autumn term, seemed to include a ball as something of an afterthought. By 1860 the practice had been banned. Similar activities elsewhere met with similar fates.

  Many historians claim that American football was conceived during the era of Muscular Christianity, a doctrine which espoused vigorous exercise and bravery among young men in Britain and the US alike. For much of America, 'sport' still carried connotations of idleness and sin, but fears that its men were becoming effeminate and unhealthy began to alter this thinking. Muscular Christianity gained acceptance through the promotion of clean, arduous outdoor activity. Its most visible champion was President Theodore Roosevelt, a well-known advocate of 'the strenuous life'. Roosevelt and other disciples considered ball sports to be part of wholesome, masculine living, promoting teamwork, fair play and character - not to mention empires. In 1896 Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts congressman who would help to shape the country's early 20th-century foreign policy, told a Harvard commencement dinner that 'the time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world conquerors'.

  Muscular Christianity helped make rugged, combative games accepted in higher education, where the 'extracurriculum' was emerging as a feature of campus life and where 'character' needed to be 'instilled'. Sport was establishing strong links with American colleges and universities, which were far more egalitarian than those across the Atlantic and whose leaders did not restrict the educational experience to purely academic pursuits. As Roosevelt, Lodge and a number of other influential statesmen were studying at Harvard, the university was building impressive gymnasiums and even assigning an academic status to physical education. This was in stark contrast to its European counterparts. Even universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, which embraced competitive sport, did so under the auspices of gentlemanly avocation.

  By the 1860s football had worked its way back onto campuses in a more organised and regulated guise, but rules still varied wildly. Princeton played a game with 25 players, while others awarded victory to the first team to score a set number of goals. One variation, known as the Boston Game, seems a hybrid of rugby and soccer. Players could run with the ball, but only if they were chased; if the pursuer gave up the chase he would shout, and the person with the ball was obliged to stop. The Boston Game gave rise in 1862 to the first organised 'football' team in America, and one of the first anywhere outside England: the Oneida Football Club, which drew its players from the elite secondary schools of greater Boston. Facing makeshift opposition drawn from gentlemanly society - and benefiting enormously from the fact that only its own participants had any experience of playing together - the Oneidas did not concede a single goal between 1862 and 1865.

  In the midst of this dynasty came the pivotal meeting in October 1863, when the London Football Association made the first attempt to lay down a set of rules that would satisfy a number of competing clubs. Among other things these outlawed running with the ball (though not catching it) and deliberate hacking, decisions which led dissenting clubs down the path of the game that quickly developed into rugby. Three years later, Beadle and Co of New York published a set of rules for both 'Association Foot Ball' and the 'Handling Game'. Until this point, few American schools played 'foot ball' under the same rules, but these eve
nts helped to homogenise it enough for intercollegiate competition to be considered.

  Although November 6, 1869 is widely cited as the day of the first American football game, it is more akin to the birthday of American soccer. Indeed, the ball used in this match is on display not at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Indiana, but at the US Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, New York. On that day, teams of 25 from the universities of Princeton and Rutgers met and, after removing their hats and coats, contested a variation of the 1863 London FA rules. The ball could only be kicked or butted with the head, though it could also be caught. If this happened in the air or on the first bounce, the recipient was entitled to a free kick. Points were scored through posts set 25 feet apart, with the first team doing so six times declared the winner. Rutgers won 6-4, but a rematch the following week saw Princeton win 8-0 under rules with which it was more familiar. A deciding game never came about, perhaps because the two schools could not agree how it should be played, or perhaps because of faculty opposition.

  Within two years, Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania had formed teams. By 1872 a codified form of football existed at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, three pivotal members of the American sporting fraternity. The precise rules still varied from school to school, but crucially by 1871 Harvard had adopted the Boston Game, deviating from the general preference for the association code (some evidence suggests Harvard did not find the kicking game rugged enough). Two years later the university rejected an early attempt to create a common set of rules when it failed to attend a convention on the matter.