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

  Desperate for another school to play its handling game, Harvard turned its attentions towards McGill University in Canada, which favoured rugby. In May 1874 the two agreed to contest a match under each code. Not surprisingly, Harvard won at the Boston Game, but they then held McGill to a scoreless draw in rugby. This proved a pivotal moment in American sport, for not only was Harvard immensely satisfied with its achievement, it also found rugby more to its liking. In October of that year it played McGill again at rugby and won. The days of the Boston Game were numbered; so smitten were the Americans with the Canadian code they declined the rematch, leaving the editor of Harvard's campus newspaper to concede that the Rugby game is in much better favour than the somewhat sleepy game played by our men'.

  Harvard then turned its attention to finding another American school to play. In particular, it was keen to sway its arch-rival Yale from the kicking game. By 1875 the two schools had arranged an exhibition match, drafting concessionary rules which allowed the ball to be handled and thrown. On November 13 Harvard beat Yale by four goals and four touchdowns to nil in what is much closer to America's first gridiron game than the Princeton-Rutgers encounter of 1869.

  From that moment on, American football never looked back. Despite an emphatic defeat (hardly surprising, given that its team scarcely knew the rules), Yale agreed that the handling game was much more hardy and scientific and, unable to resist the allure of a regular encounter with its nemesis, soon gave up on soccer. With two of the nation's most influential institutions converted, it was only a matter of time before others followed. This left Princeton, with its fondness for the kicking game, to arrange matches with less prestigious schools, a situation it found intolerable. In 1876 it invited Harvard, Yale and Columbia to a conference in Springfield, Massachusetts, with a view towards 'adopting a uniform system of rules and considering the advisability of forming an Intercollegiate Football Association'. This meeting would leave soccer out in the cold for decades to come. The association was duly formed in November of that year, settled on rugby as its game - and 28 years passed before another intercollegiate soccer match took place.

  Can American soccer's tiny footprint be attributed solely to the predilections of Harvard University? It is tempting to claim that had Yale and Princeton been less acquiescent, the game Americans call football might never have developed, and that the association game would have risen to heights similar to those it has attained elsewhere. But America's strong desire to assert its cultural independence by developing games of its own would almost certainly have prevented this. In the years that followed, the rugby code agreed to by the Intercollegiate Association was subjected to countless modifications, to the point where the colleges had created their own game, one that looked very little like its antecedent. Soccer would surely have got off no less lightly.

  It took less than a decade for Harvard's rugby evangelism to bear fruit, but rather longer for their game to approach the popularity of baseball, which had already captured the attention of the working classes and a number of promoters. In 1869 the first openly professional baseball team brought notoriety to the city of Cincinnati and by 1876 the professional game had evolved into a fully-fledged league, the National Association (the first of the two major leagues that survive to this day). By the mid1880s, though, gridiron contests had begun to capture the imagination of New York newspapers embroiled in a circulation war. After buying the struggling New York World in 1893, the famed Joseph Pulitzer created a sports page in an effort to boost circulation, a practice which was quickly copied by rivals and soon gave rise to weekend sports sections, rich in textual and pictorial accounts of the big games. This naturally fuelled spectator interest, and even forced some of the bigger collegiate contests to be played in New York because campuses had no grounds large enough to stage them. As a result, gridiron acquired a significance well beyond the competing schools and their localities, and attracted fans keen to attach themselves to the social elite of the top colleges.

  At the same time, soccer was beginning its proliferation across Europe and into Latin America, spread by the railwaymen, traders, mill owners, engineers and sailors dispatched far and wide on behalf of British commerce. By the end of the 1890s it had put down firm foundations in almost all the countries that would play influential roles in 20th century football and clubs such as Penarol, AC Milan and Barcelona had taken their first steps. All this mattered not one jot to the US. It knew how to build its own railways, was not particularly beholden to the British Empire and was certainly disinclined to accommodate a sport merely on the basis of its popularity elsewhere. In fact, though Americans seemed to have fallen for rugby, hardly any time passed before they began reworking its rules. A Yale graduate and Muscular Christianity disciple named Walter Camp claimed responsibility for much of the change, quickly coming to be regarded as 'the father of American football'. Camp had participated in the first intercollegiate season of 1876 and went to work for a clock company. Just as men like Frederick Taylor were revolutionising the industrial workplace through the application of science and mathematics, Camp's disapproval of the randomness of the rugby scrum and his desire to more systematically regulate possession of the ball did the same for sport.

  Camp's development swept across the nation and by 1894 had left the Manchester Guardian bemoaning how the Americans had 'spoiled and brutalised' dear old rugby. By the turn of the century gridiron legends were being written in every corner of the country, but objections to the staggeringly popular sport continued to surface. Ironically, one of its most outspoken opponents was the Harvard president, Charles Eliot. Concerns were persistently raised that the drive to produce winning teams and star players had led universities to take liberties with the amateur code, or encourage players to neglect their studies. More grave was the brutality still inherent in the game. In 1904 the New York Times reported that 21 deaths and about 200 injuries had occurred from football that season.

  Such carnage and corruption attracted the attention of journalists as well as university officials and politicians, and in 1905 President Roosevelt - whose son had recently joined the freshman team at Harvard - felt compelled to take action. Summoning representatives from Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House, he urged them to redraft football's rules to encourage safer and fairer play, and to better uphold the ideals of amateurism and university life. But the intervention of America's Muscular Christian nonpareil came to little. Football remained dangerously violent and for the next few years proponents, abolitionists and reformers debated what role, if any, such a popular yet flawed game should play on the nation's campuses. Some institutions, such as Columbia, dropped the sport entirely, while on the west coast the universities of Stanford and California substituted it with rugby, having apparently been swayed by an exhibition between New Zealand and Australia.

  That soccer was not put forward as a substitute suggests that attitudes towards the kicking game were already entrenched. Neither players nor spectators appeared to favour its emphasis on individual skill and elusiveness over the fierce physical contact and pseudo-military science of the Americanised game. The Washington Post maintained in 1906 that 'association football, whatever its merits, seems to appeal to persons quite different from those who like the other [football]'. Americans believed they were inherently unable to adhere to its more genteel code, particularly after years of trampling, slugging and gouging each other on the gridiron. After watching a soccer exhibition between English and American teams at Harvard in 1905, Eliot noted that 'there is plenty of opportunity for brutality in the socker ... our American college boys would spoil it in five minutes'.

  All the same, the socker' did make a slow return to campuses.* One of its earliest appearances was at Haverford College in Philadelphia. An enthusiastic student newspaper editor, Richard Gummere, who had played the game as a schoolboy in England and then in Switzerland, is credited with forming a college team in 1902. Later, as a graduate student at Harvard, Gummere helped to restore the game
there. A two-match series with Haverford staged in 1904 - with Haverford winning both games in close and exciting fashion' according to the school newspaper - marked a return to intercollegiate play.

  Within a few years Columbia, Cornell and Pennsylvania joined an Intercollegiate Association Football League with Haverford and Harvard. Even at this stage, though, the prominence of foreign players was evident. According to one account, when Haverford - the league's first champions - travelled to Cornell, its players spent part of the train journey attempting to learn how to pronounce the names of opposing players. By this time, though, whatever hope soccer had of supplanting the other football was purely illusory. 'As far as soccer is concerned,' an official at Princeton declared in 1909, 'this game is now classed among the minor sports, and it is very unlikely that it will ever take the place of football at Princeton.'

  This was an accurate prophecy, but it didn't stop Gummere and other enthusiasts with old-world links from working to put the game on a firmer footing. One such group was a collection of public school-educated Englishmen who toured North America in 1905 as the Pilgrim Football Club. Though amateurs, several in their ranks were with Football League clubs, including the captain, Fred Milnes of Sheffield United. Backed by Sir Alfred Harmsworth, the future Lord Northcliffe of newspaper publishing fame, the Pilgrims were not short of ambition: they were said to be prepared to offer universities the services of top English coaches in an effort to re-establish the sport on campus.

  Stretching from Canada to St Louis - a surprisingly westward trail - the Pilgrims' two-month tour included only one match against a team representing a university. Nevertheless, their presence helped to revive interest in the game and generated huge crowds. Milnes later asserted that 28,000 turned out to watch the team's second match in St Louis, an almost unfathomable figure for the era - a local newspaper later cited the official gate as 15,986 but claimed that several thousand others had gatecrashed. Interest was heightened by one paper brashly billing the contest as the 'Championship of the World'. 'Such a bold title made us wonder what we were up against,' reflected Milnes, though his team strolled to a ten-goal victory.

  The gulf in ability between the English and their foes was plain. The Pilgrims scored 72 goals and conceded only seven in their 12 matches. Their only defeat came at the hands of an all-Chicago team in front of a small crowd ('the Chicago goal seemed charmed ... we retired beaten by a team of triers, who possess a splendid defence,' noted Milnes). Such superiority was only to be expected, but to many American observers, having never seen an association game played to any standard, the scoreline was not nearly as revealing as the level of entertainment a good team could produce.

  Four years later, the Pilgrims returned for another tour, in which they scored 123 times in 24 matches. A more famous group of English amateurs, the Corinthians, made three tours beginning in 1907, and demonstrated similar superiority and flair. Without such visits, turn-ofthe-century American soccer would almost certainly have fallen into an even deeper hole than the one football had already dug for it.

  Gridiron's survival was safeguarded by a series of dramatic rule changes and better policing under the auspices of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, founded in 1905. Eventually, and to the relief of their students, Stanford and California dropped rugby and returned to football; Columbia resumed play in 1915. With Walter Camp at the helm, gridiron soon evolved into something recognisable to the modern fan, with the legalisation of such tactics as throwing the ball forward and the abolition of the flying wedge and other hazards. By the start of the First World War its pride of place on American campuses was assured, and whatever tiny hope soccer had of rivalling it had vanished. In the New York Times, the Athletic Director at Northwestern University of Illinois declared:

  We do not believe in its success in the ordinary college community. It takes a leaven of good Scotch, English, and Scandinavian players to make the game a success. It looks tame to boys after American football and baseball.

  A representative of Ohio's Wesleyan University added:

  Its only desirable feature with us is that it can be played out of doors after the tennis courts and ball fields can no longer be used because of the weather. It is not a game that appeals to those of our students who are engaged in other forms of athletics. It is not scientific enough. Others do not care to take it up because it requires too much running.

  In the decades to come soccer would be introduced to increasing numbers of universities. Yet it never won over the student body in the way that later inventions, particularly basketball, did. Well into the 1960s, long after a national collegiate championship had been organised, many colleges regarded the soccer team as little more than a training fillip for other, more important, sports such as football or even wrestling. The formation of a team on campus often had more to do with the presence of a soccer-disposed member ofthe faculty than any groundswell ofinterest. In 1922 the University of Florida became one of the earliest colleges in the deep south to form a team. But when its coach, Harry Metcalf, died in 1925, the team disbanded - and did not reform until the 1950s. As late as 1918 only 12 colleges played soccer against each other, all in the east and all to little public attention. Training began in December - after the end of the football season - and the fixtures often not until January, continuing as best they could through the brunt of the winter. Although this often resulted in wretched playing conditions, there was little hope of beginning any earlier and interfering with gridiron, in some cases because soccer teams depended on football players to make up their numbers.

  Soccer in the colleges may have struggled for air, but among the country's burgeoning immigrant communities there was greater cause for optimism. The 1890 census established that nearly 15 per cent of the nation's population was foreign-born - as high as it has been before or since. One out of seven of them had come from England or Scotland, where association football had taken a firm hold. Although the majority of English and Scottish emigrants followed their kinfolk into the rural south, enough gravitated towards the northern conurbations to keep the country's flickering soccer torch alight.

  In a select few communities, the fire burned very brightly, owing to a peculiar combination of circumstances. Nowhere was this more true than in unassuming Kearny, New Jersey, a town less than eight miles from Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Separated from the city of Newark by the Passaic River to its south and west, and from Jersey City by the Hackensack River to the east, Kearny had become a Scottish enclave, largely because of its principal employers. Michael Nairn & Co, whose headquarters were in Kirkcaldy, opened a substantial linoleum mill in 1886. More importantly, six years earlier the Clark Thread Company of Paisley had built the second of its New Jersey factories in Kearny. In November 1883 the firm established an athletic association for its workforce, proudly naming it after its groundbreaking product, ONT: Our New Thread, a filament which was the first suitable for use in sewing machines and which would soon revolutionise the industry. Since the athletic association was headed by two employees who had arrived from England only a few months earlier, it was little wonder soccer was given such attention.

  Other places near Kearny - in fact much of the West Hudson area - displayed a similar Britishness and affection for the game. The hamlet of Harrison immediately to the south and the 'Silk City' of Paterson 1S miles to the north proudly fielded teams of their own. Paterson's links with silk-producing Macclesfield in Cheshire were strong enough for one historian to claim that 'in Macclesfield, men spoke of Paterson as familiarly as if it were only a run of half an hour by train'. For generations to come, the area's enduring ethnic make-up would keep the game alive long after it had virtually died elsewhere, producing an impressive array of semi-professional and amateur teams well into the middle of the 20th century. Even after this influence waned, the area remained a soccer stronghold, producing players such as Tony Meola, Tab Ramos and John Harkes.

  The West Hudson communities were well represented in o
ne of the earliest efforts to organise a top-class league in the United States, the National Association Foot Ball League, which began in 1895. In spite of its name, its imprint was confined to greater New York, northern New Jersey and, by 1917, eastern Pennsylvania, and its composition fluctuated wildly from season to season. From 1898 to 1906 it did not even operate. Yet over its three decades of existence, the National League established itself as probably the strongest in the country. As late as 1912 five of its eight clubs were based in or near Kearny, underlining the area's intense level of interest. One club, Kearny Scots - an enduring name in ethnic soccer - was a rare ever-present until the First World War, and claimed two of the first three championships.

  Another foothold was established in New England, along the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border. Its heart was the town of Fall River, Massachusetts, about 50 miles south of Boston. In the 1870s Fall River experienced a period of frenetic economic growth, driven by the demand for linen (southeastern New England was the birthplace of the American textile industry), and came to be known as `Spindle City'. By 1876 the city was home to 43 factories, more than 30,000 looms and more than one million spindles. Keeping them all turning required more labour than the nation could supply, and while some arrivals were French-Canadian and Irish, many others came from two of the earliest strongholds of British football, Lancashire and the Clyde.

  Nearby New Bedford, Massachusetts, and the cities of Providence, Tiverton and Pawtucket in Rhode Island, also relied heavily on immigrant workers. This area, much wider than the river-locked West Hudson, produced its own slew of clubs and, by 1886, a Bristol County League. The creation of a Southern New England League in 1914 placed teams such as Fall River Rovers and the Pawtucket-based works club of Howard & Bullough - a cotton machinery firm established in Lancashire - among the country's elite.