Inside XI Issue One – A Preview of Coming to America (Part 2)
Yesterday, we previewed roughly the first half of XI Issue One: stories on Gil (Scott) Heron, Latina players in North Carolina, Johan Cruyff in DC, immigrants and success in American society/soccer, and the controversial story of Howard University’s NCAA championship teams. Today, we’ll look at the remaining six stories that make up “Coming to America.”
VI
Writing this preview the night after the US men’s national team’s historic win at the Azteca seems as good a time as any to bring up the blurred boundaries that exist for their female equivalents, especially after an Olympic success for Mexico that showed the strength of its development program for male players. Jeff Kassouf looks at why the Mexican roster is stocked full of Mexican-Americans, while Mexican-born players look north of the border for higher level playing opportunities, talking to players such as Monica Gonzalez.
Training with boys’ teams is not out of the ordinary for Mexican women’s players. Some train with men’s professional teams. While training with men’s teams is not the ideal practice setup for women’s players, it at least provides a high level of competition. But it does not provide the money players need to make a living.
Mexican women’s national team players still only earn a stipend of 4,000 pesos –– roughly $300 –– per month from the Mexican federation, according to Gonzalez. Last year Gonzalez was in camp with the national team ahead of the 2011 Women’s World Cup and had to sell her car to pay rent. Mexico needs a league of its own to foster the development of domestic talent. Until that is established, players will continue to play abroad and view that as a route to discovery.
VII
One aim of XI is to dig up lost American soccer history. Expats from the British Isles, of course, were responsible for spreading the sport around the world: and in the United States, some of that role in establishing soccer is fairly well-known on the east coast at the start of the twentieth century. But less is known about the sport’s nascent days on the west coast, a tale Michael Orr uncovers in-depth as he looks at the sport’s early growth and stutters in Portland, Oregon.
Association football was regularly described in the local press as the “Scotch and English game.” Occasionally large crowds in cities like Glasgow and London were a subject of note in Portland newspapers as the sport was very specifically linked to the British Isles, despite the growing presence of clubs in large, eastern American cities.
Portland competed in their its first interstate match on Febuary 22, 1902, when PFC traveled via the steamer Hassalo to Ilwaco, Washington, to face the powerful team from the mouth of the Columbia. Though Portland fans made the 115-mile trek to support the team, there was not enough quality in the metropolitan side to defeat Ilwaco. The 2-0 score line made the proximity to Cape Disappointment all the more appropriate and the PFC crew made the long trip back to Portland.
VIII
MLS is a league that straddles two nations; and within one, there is an internal nationalist dynamic of its own defining the identity of an MLS club, Impact de Montréal, as explored by Elizabeth Cotignola as she looks at the team’s marketing campaign upon entering the league this year.
It would appear that the Impact has attempted to reinvent itself upon its ascent to MLS by resurrecting symbols that are rooted in Québec’s history and culture. The team harkened back to Québec’s very beginnings in its campaign. The slogan chosen for the team’s inaugural season in MLS was la conquête commence, meaning “the conquest begins.” This theme – conquest, battle, war – underlies the Impact’s entire marketing campaign. The Impact’s website features posters, which that showed up in Montreal’s metro stations and other public spaces, depicting various players standing stoically at the base of Mount Royal, bearing shields embossed with the Impact’s newly minted crest. The posters feature slogans such as À La Defense du Nord (to the defense of the North) and À La Conquête de l’Ouest (to the conquest of the West). The imagery is unambiguous: the Impact has presented its upcoming inaugural season in MLS to be as much a challenge, a conquest, as cause for celebration – much like the founding of la Nouvelle France, Québec.
IX
How did youth soccer become as American as apple pie in suburban America? The massive explosion in the popularity of the game in places like Southern California was no accident, David Keyes argues, but the planned result of an attempt to “Americanize” the game from its ethnic roots by the founders of AYSO.
The goals that Bill Hughes, Hans Stierle, Ted McClean, Ralph Acosta and Steve Erdos had in creating AYSO in 1964 were very different from those involved with the ethnic leagues. While for those in ethnic communities, soccer was about providing a connection to fellow immigrants and to their homelands, from the beginning AYSO was focused on growing the popularity of the game in Los Angeles and throughout the United States.
As Clay Berling, longtime editor of Soccer America, puts it, “The ethnic groups were concerned with having a team that won championships. That was what they grew up with.” In contrast, “The AYSO contingent had an entrepreneurial spirit that the ethnic groups didn’t have.” Former AYSO executive director Tim Thompson has gone further, describing the organization as having a “religious zeal.” Like an evangelical church, the non-profit AYSO was run by leaders who saw it as their mission to convert others to this new game of soccer.
In order to grow soccer, AYSO had to change the sport’s image. If the game was to increase in popularity, it would have to appeal not only to those in ethnic communities, but to the broader American public. Joe Bonchonsky, whose sons played in the first ever AYSO game and whose extensive later work with the organization would see him elected to the AYSO Hall of Fame, sums up the founding of the organization as follows: “AYSO started at the request of a [USSFA] organization. Bill Hughes had tried it before under their direction and failed because it had been too ethnic-oriented. So he said, ‘we’ll start but not in an affiliated manner. We’ll be independent completely.’”
X
In the 1924-5 season, Archie Stark - Scottish-born, New Jersey-bred - scored 70 goals in 44 games, playing for Bethlehem Steel of the American Soccer League. We tell Archie’s story in words, photos and statistics.
XI
Ethnic soccer has long defined the game in the United States at the highest levels of the amateur and semi-pro levels: just scroll through the list of US Open Cup winners prior to the entry of MLS clubs in 1996 for proof of that. In an essay illustrated by photos from Marty Groark, we look at the past and present of one Chicago club, Croatian team RWB Adria - winners of the 2011 National Amateur Cup, and who once welcomed Eusebio into their red, white and blue colors.
That takes us to the end of this XI issue one preview: you can be the first to read it by subscribing now, with a special introductory offer available through the end of this month.
While conducting some research for issue two of XI, we came across the cover of this 1904-5 edition of Spalding’s “Soccer Foot Ball Guide,” held in the University of Southern Illinois’ Henry D. “Hap” Meyer’s Collection.
Gil Heron, father of Gil Scott-Heron, playing for Celtic in the early 1950s, the first black player to turn out for their first team.
Decades later, fans would turn up to Gil Scott-Heron’s shows wearing Celtic colors, though the poet-singer was estranged from his father until he was 26, due to his move from Chicago to Glasgow to play for Celtic.
This father-and-son tale is illustrated superbly by Steve Welsh (miniboro) in issue one of XI.
The history of soccer in Portland dates back to the late nineteenth century, as Michael Orr explores in his XI issue one article titled “The Scotch and English Game: The Founders of Soccer City USA.” Here, Orr discusses some chapters of Pacific Northwest soccer history that few even know exists.
"His skills would offend the opposition, often leaving them feeling foolish and flailing victims of Gil’s fancy footwork. There were scoundrels in places like Skokie, a suburb of Chicago then primarily inhabited by Europeans, who treated soccer like an ethnic heirloom. My mother talked about incidents when opposing players had felt forced to foul, going for his legs instead of the ball, not trying to tackle him but to injure."
- Gil Scott-Heron discussing his father’s soccer career in his posthumously published memoir. Gil Heron was the first black player to turn out for Glasgow Celtic’s first team in 1951, having built his career playing in Detroit and Chicago. Explore the story in the forthcoming inaugural issue of XI in an illustrated portrait of father and son.
Cover of the NASL’s official publication Kick magazine from 1980, featuring Johan Cruyff and with some positive words about women’s soccer.
The South Pacific, August 30th 1943: teams from American and Australian cruisers face-off in a soccer game, won by the U.S. team 3-1. Pictured, according to the AP caption, is B.R. Smith of Great Banks, Mass., disputing possession of the ball with two Australians.
AP Photo/Frank Filan
Soccer is returning to Wrigley Field in Chicago for the first time since 1984. The above video footage shows a classic match-up at the Friendly Confines between the New York Cosmos and the Chicago Sting from June 1981. The Sting would go on to win the Soccer Bowl later that year, defeating the Cosmos in Toronto.
Knee-Knockers: Celebrating 120-Years Of Oregon Soccer
Great overview of the history of soccer in Portland stretching back to the nineteenth century by George Fosty. Note: there might, just might be something on the very early history of the sport in “Soccer City USA” in an upcoming issue of XI Quarterly…
Another look back at the Soccer America archives (click the image to zoom in): in November 1972, the roadmap for soccer’s future in the U.S. was very much up for the debate. The author argues here for the college and semi-pro levels to make smart choices and for the future benefits youth soccer’s explosion would bring, allowing soccer to stand alongside American football now “the program of professional soccer has seen its worst days” (not foreseen were the dark days to come between the NASL’s demise in 1984 and the launch of MLS in 1996).
The writer cheerily concludes: “Football is still King, but watch out; the foot in soccer will soon be matched with head play and then many kings will reign.”
"A lot of people…still think of soccer as two ethnic teams chasing each other around with knives on a stone-covered pitch."
- Lee Stern, Owner and President of the NASL’s Chicago Sting, quoted in the Chicago Tribune in June 1977. Hopefully that’s not the case any longer, right?
Photos by Scott Butner of the Seattle Sounders during the 1977 NASL season - including the Soccer Bowl defeat to the New York Cosmos at Portland’s Civic Stadium. Butner was 19 at the time, working for a photography studio contracted by the Sounders - in this interview with goalWA.net, he explained the challenges of shooting at the Kingdome:
“Mostly, I remember that shooting in the Kingdome was like taking pictures in a bat cave. Very dark, very cavernous. It was always such a treat to get to shoot a game outside for a change, where there was light, and weather, and sometimes even mud! All the things that made soccer photos more interesting.”
Prehistoric Timbers Army banner discovered. Found on tour in San Jose, August 25th 1975, in the North American Soccer League championship game between the Portland Timbers and the Tampa Bay Rowdies. The Rowdies won 2-0.
AP Photo
Pelé in the United States - not in the NASL, but playing for Santos against the NPSL’s Oakland Clippers in a friendly at the Oakland Coliseum on August 30th, 1967, in Oakland, California.
Here he is driving past the Clippers’ Trond Hoftvedt to score in the first half, later scoring again in the second half to lead Santos to a 3-1 victory in what was described as a “record crowd” of 29,162 in Oakland. (AP Photo)
