American soccer's founding fathers

Tired of World Cup hype? How about a game of Pasuckquakkohowog?The United States has no professional outdoor soccer league, few truly world class players and a public who by and large cannot tell a header from a hat trick. But those who sniff at the country hosting the World Cup would be wrong to say the game has no history here. It's just a little hard to talk about.World Cup teams arriving for the month-long tournament across America may be surprised to learn that when the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New England in 1620 they found the locals played a remarkably familiar game.Colonist William Wood, in his "New England Prospect" published in 1634, wrote that "the Indians played football during the summer months with a varying number of players involved, depending upon the circumstances."It was called Pasuckquakkohowog, translated roughly as "they gather to play football," and involved two teams kicking a medium-sized ball of deerskin stuffed with deer hair along a sandy beach, preferably a mile or so long.The late U.S. Soccer Federation historian Sam Foulds, quoting Wood in a history published in 1979, said the numbers varied from 30-a-side to up to 1,000 people. Two wooden goal posts were set up, one at each end, and a line was drawn to divide the "field" in half.Wood wrote that "village played against village and a large amount of property changed hands, depending on the outcome of the game. Surprisingly there was little quarreling." That was to come with the advent of soccer.Boston and New England can justifiably claim to be the birthplace for the game in America although St. Louis in the Midwest was more of a hotbed in later years.A monument on Boston Common, the oldest public park in America, commemorates the Oneida Football Club team which played there from 1862 to 1865 with red scarves tied around their heads and kicking a rubberized canvas ball. An inscription boasts that the club, founded by Gerrit Smith Miller, was the first organized club in the country and adds that "The Oneida goal was never crossed."Before them, students at Princeton University played a recognizable version of soccer called "ballown" and the first intercollegiate game between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869 was under English Football Association rules.The industrial city of Fall River, with its textile mills and high immigrant population, was a fertile ground for soccer talents as clubs and leagues sprung up in the 1920s.Top players were lured from Europe, and particularly Britain, with the prospect of earning three times the salaries they got at home under limits set by the leagues. Top foreign sides were invited to play American clubs. Support for the local teams was passionate.As soccer writer Paul Gardner retells in his book "The Simplest Game," soccer hooliganism -- as many Americans suppose -- is not merely something that happens abroad."American soccer, through its own slackness, was building up an image of riots and referee-bashing rather similar to that which had surrounded baseball at the turn of the century," Gardner writes of matches in the late 1920s.The New York Times of April 20, 1927, reporting a Uruguay-Boston match in Massachusetts, ran a headline "Four hurt in riot at soccer contest" with the words "members of team rushed from scene by police when crowd threatens." It added: "Boston athletes carried off as 2,000 persons swarm on field-referee's decision starts melee."Another headline, from 1928, reported a police battle with fans: "Nightsticks swing freely -- melee starts after Hispano Eleven beats Rovers for northern New Jersey title." The United States was one of the first to join world body FIFA, becoming a member in 1913 and reaching the semifinal of the first World Cup in Uruguay in 1930.The Great Depression, internal bickering among soccer leagues and the exclusion of soccer from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics dealt the game a body blow but the country's finest hour came at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil.England had just rejoined FIFA and decided to participate in the World Cup for the first time. They drew the United States, a team of part-timers including mailmen, an undertaker and a factory worker among them -- and lost 1-0.The Italian referee said after the match in Belo Horizonte: "If I had not refereed the game myself, I would not have believed the result, no matter who had told me."Since the very earliest days it has been a commonplace, backed up by poor results and the indifference of much of the American public, that soccer is alien to Americans.The failure in the 1980s of the North American Soccer League, despite players such as Pele and Johan Cruyff, hardened the view that soccer and America do not mix."From time to time we hear the comment that American soccer does not have traditional American values," wrote Foulds."Usually this impression exists among people who have immigrated to the U.S. and who assume that soccer is a relatively new sport in America."Soccer was America's original football."