Showing posts with label Len Oliver. Show all posts

Aug 17, 2010

American Soccer Didn't Start with Pele: Part 4 of 7 Playing With the Big Guys: Amateur Soccer in the Early 1950s

Playing with the Big Guys: Amateur Soccer in the Early 1950's

Moving Up

Club teams normally moved up to the Second and First Division amateur ranks in Philadelphia. Our Lighthouse Junior team took a different path. We left the Lighthouse Club to play under the banner of the professional Philadelphia Nationals. We played as the Fairhlll S.C., kids playing against seasoned veterans, many who had learned soccer in their native lands. Whenever l am asked today by anxious parents if their kids should “play up,” I give the Fairhlll S.C. example. Some of us were only 16 years old playing against 30-year old men. We won the Second Division and then went on to win the citywide, prestigious Palmer Cup, symbolic of soccer supremacy in amateur soccer in Philadelphia.

Systems of Play

We often trained with the Philadelphia Nationals, observing and emulating the pros, and our skills and sense of the game grew apace. We never discussed tactics. By this time we had adopted the stopper or “Third Back,” known as the “W-M” system, a change introduced by Charlie Buchan, skipper of the great Arsenal teams in England in the early ‘30s. The W-M was designed to counteract the new Offside Law, and lasted for three decades until the Brazilians introduced the world to the 4-2-4 in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. As a young GI, I saw Brazil play in that World Cup in Gothenburg, marveling at their skills with the ball, their dexterity, and their unusual formation with only two halfbacks.

Without coaching schools, soccer newsletters, papers like Soccer America and the NSCAA’s Soccer Journal, and almost all volunteer coaches--ex-players who coached from intuition, innovations took a long time to become reality. Soccer traditions die slowly, as we see even today as FIFA tinkers with the laws to increase scoring.

The Philadelphia Club Structure

Just as today, whole families involved themselves with soccer, but it was still a male-dominated sport. When the Fairhill S.C. met the First Division champion Kensington Bluebells in the Palmer Cup Final in 1950, we were the kids playing against the team of our fathers and uncles. The final, played at old Holmes Stadium went into double overtime when the younger legs prevailed 5-3. Our fathers and uncles talked about that game for years.

It eased the pain when some of us first-generation Scots-Americans played for the Bluebells the following year. The Bluebells discarded their veterans and filled the ranks with the kids. My brother and I were finally united with our father, the Bluebells’ trainer. We had taken another step up the soccer ladder--all within the Philadelphia club structure.

With the Bluebells in our first year, 1950-51, we were thrown into competition with seasoned players of Italian, Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Armenian, and German descent. Just a few years removed from the end of World War II, soccer in Philadelphia took on an even more ethnic flavor as European immigrants flowed into the city. Many of the players had played top-level competition in “the old country” and immediately raised the caliber of play in Philadelphia’s amateur ranks. We now signed USSF forms, but with no cards and no photos, registration showed a more casual approach to the game than found today.

The Philadelphia First Division clubs had their share of characters in those days, seemingly missing from our do-it-by-the-book soccer of today. We seem unable to tolerate strong individualism, with players like “Cocky” O’Kane, whose crossed eyes became disconcerting to defenders trying to predict the direction of his passes. But call him “Cocky’ and you had an immediate brawl. There was “Chippy” McLaren, known for the deadly accuracy of his chipped passes, or “Sox” Flynn whose socks never stayed up, and “Dutch” from Germany. Even the team names had an international flavor--Juventus, Pulaski, Inter, Celtics, and the Polish Falcons.

The Foreign Touring Teams

This was a time in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s when the American Soccer League sponsored foreign touring teams, so we could see Liverpool F.C with the great Billy Liddell in 1948 and his long, weaving runs down the wing. But our real heroes were Bahr and McLaughlin who led the Philadelphia Nationals to three titles in four years, Hynes of the New York Americans, another Hall of Famer, and Ray McFaul and Gil Schuerholz of the old Baltimore Americans. Just a few years later in the mid-’50s, we were playing with Bahr and McLaughlin, the best players of their day. We were playing against the likes of Johnny Carey, great right half of the touring Manchester United and Max Morlock, German international with Nuremberg F.C. Nuremberg defeated the Philadelphia All-Stars in 1955 before 5,000 spectators by an 8-5 score, with Morlock scoring 4 goals against me. As youngsters, like the players on our U-23s and our US National Team today, playing against this level of competition gave us the confidence to take on anyone.

(purchase: The American Soccer League,
The Golden Years of American Soccer 1921-1931)

Trying Out for the Olympics

Some of us were selected to compete in the 1952 Olympic tryouts in New York and St. Louis for the team to go to Helsinki. National teams in those days were selected by a USSF National Selection Committee which conducted the tryouts. No ODP programs, no state or regional select teams, no U-17 or U-20 teams, no women’s teams--just a Committee with all the major regions, the colleges, and the Armed Forces represented. The Committee members selected players for the tryouts from their knowledge of the players’ innate talents and the Committee’s awareness of the need for geographic representation. Politics also played a role--”You put my player on and we’ll take care of yours.”

In the ’52 Olympic final tryouts in St. Louis, I played with Jack Dunn and Lefty Didriksen from our original Lighthouse team in a tough, two-game series representing the East squad. We played on the same team with John and Eddie Sousa, players I had watched in awe as a youngster when Ponta Delgada came to town. They impressed me with their willingness to share the ball, their soccer smarts with “the kids” in the tryouts, and their encouraging play. I made alternate-and felt proud to be there.

Throughout my youth career in soccer, I had played only two systems, either the 2-3-5 or the W-M with the stopper back. The 4-2-4, the 4-4-2. and the 4-3-3 were still to be invented. Coaches were ex-players, and coaching meant putting a team on the field. We always knew what we had to do. We never discussed systems of play or tactical play. With the amateurs we received spending money and even with the pros, we never received more than $35 a game. We were fit, technically adept, and competitive. We loved to play and most of us continued in long careers into our 30s. Cub soccer honed our skills, but school and college soccer brought us glory, brought out the spectators, and provided us with the education we needed to have a life beyond soccer.

Part 1 - “Street Soccer” Memories
Part 2 - Youth Soccer with the Lighthouse Boys Club
Part 3 - Philadelphia Junior Soccer in the 1940's
Part 4 - Playing With the Big Guys: Amateur Soccer in the Early 1950's
Part 5 - High School and College Soccer--Products of the Clubs
Part 6 - The Pro Game in the Early 50's
Part 7 - In Retrospect

Aug 16, 2010

American Soccer Didn't Start with Pele: Part 3 of 7 - Philadelphia Junior Soccer in the 1940s

Philadelphia Junior Soccer in the 1940's

Neighborhood Teams

We didn’t call them “travel” or select teams then, just Lighthouse Juniors playing in the 20-team, two-tiered Philadelphia Third Division, or Junior League. We played a full season, non-stop, from September to June, with few games called for inclement weather--a schedule that gave us close to 4O games a year, equivalent to any European youth program.

Since Philadelphia was a neighborhood city, populated by ethnic groups attracted by job opportunities, particularly in the textile mills, along with plentiful housing, organized soccer in the city reflected the city’s ethnic/neighborhood mix. Teams came from Cardington in West Philadelphia, Nicetown in the North Philadelphia area, Germantown in the Northwest, and numerous neighborhoods like Kensington and Harrogate in the hotbed of soccer, Northeast Philadelphia, with its large concentration of immigrants. As the ethnics moved out of the city to the suburbs north of the city, teams like the Erzgebirge Club for the Germans and the Ukrainian Cub grew up to serve their youngsters.

Playing “Junior Soccer”

Unlike our modern youth soccer breakdown of U-l9, U-17, U-16, and so on, the Philadelphia Third Division simply went up to 18 years old; anyone younger could play whatever his age. The League was affiliated with the Philadelphia Soccer League composed of three divisions--Juniors, Second Division, and the First Division--the top amateur grouping. No USYSA, no AYSO, no state youth soccer associations unlinked with the top-level amateur clubs. Once you started with the Juniors, you were expected to move up the ladder--there were always older teams to play for. The Eastern Pennsylvania District was affiliated with the United States Soccer Federation, founded in 1913 to oversee soccer in the US and the FIFA-sanctioned body for soccer in our country.

Our team was coached by my cousin, Tom Oliver, a star with the Philadelphia Nationals pro team. We received little instruction, no overlapping or diagonal off-the-ball runs, no “numbers’ down” games, no Coerver moves. We built these features into our game by instinct, without instruction. We had only one system of play--the old 2-3-5, with a great workload falling on the inside forwards and the halfbacks, specially the center half. Our practices were simply a continuation of street soccer--we played, practiced moves, and played some more. No stretching, no drills, no warmups, no cones, no manuals, no pennies-just play, experiment, and always go for goal. We were rugged, urban kids who wanted to win and had the skills to back up our cockiness. We won two straight Philadelphia Junior League titles, going on to win two consecutive National Junior Cup titles in 1948 and 1949, running up a string of 36 straight victories.

In those days, the referees, all former players, let us play. No cards, just occasional verbal warnings to “Hold it down” to keep control or to ensure fairness. But you had to be tough. There was a lot of intimidation, occasional fights, lots of heckling from the sidelines. But the referees knew us and knew the dynamic of the game--we settled matters on the field with our feet. Some of the refs had colorful names like “Offsides Smitty,” known in his playing days as the forward who couldn’t stay onside. Since we didn’t have registration cards with photos, we would tell a ref new to us that the first scorer’s name was “Bill Zook,” who incidentally came in second in League scoring one year--and didn’t exist!

Toughness on the field and backing down from no one helped me later when I was playing against international teams, or playing overseas, taking the bruising tackles and giving it back--knowing the fouls would not be called. Today, our kids seem surprised when they go overseas where fouls that would be called in the U.S. are overlooked in the course of play overseas.

The National Junior Cup competition pitted city against city in one-game knockout competitions. We hosted the Schumacher Club of St. Louis in 1948, winning 1-0 on a direct corner kick before 2,000 fans at Holmes Stadium, and then defended our title the following year by defeating the Windsor S.C. 2-1 in a rain swept night game before 250 fans at St. Louis’ Public Schools Stadium. This game stands out as a lasting soccer memory. Windsor scored with two minutes remaining. Somehow we came back with two goals in one minute in the mud, forcing our way into the box to win our second title--a truly memorable soccer moment for a 14-year old player. After two years in the Junior Division, we were ready to move up to the next level of competition. That’s the way it was done--when you were ready, you played up.

Aug 13, 2010

American Soccer Didn't Start with Pele: Part 2 of 7 - Youth Soccer with the Lighthouse Boys Club

Youth Soccer with the Lighthouse Boys Club

The Lighthouse Experience

Lighthouse was founded in 1897 by Mrs. Robert Bradford, a Philadelphia socialite. This was a time when Jane Addams and other social reformers were establishing their settlement houses and neighborhood centers to help the wave of European immigrants and their youngsters cope with urban life. Lighthouse capitalized on its Scottish, Irish, and English neighbors’ passion for soccer and early on created a soccer foothold in the Kensington community. Most boys started with the Club at 9-10 years of age, often staying with the Lighthouse teams until they were ready for play in Philadelphia’s top First Division or the pros. For years Lighthouse had provided the senior amateur teams and the pros with top class, home-grown American talent. For example, the 1936 Olympic Soccer Team had four former Lighthouse players in its ranks, a tradition that went back to the 1912 Olympics.

Lighthouse offered us age divisions, a club for practices, a large field complex, and retired English and Scottish players to coach “the lads.” My first coach, Ozzie Lynn, a wrinkled, stolid Englishman who could still drive a ball 60 yards, appeared every Saturday morning, rain or shine, in the same old, patched green sweater to put us on the field. By this time, we had mastered the basic techniques from our years of intense street soccer, so Ozzie’s task was to instruct us: “Don’t hold on to the ball,” “Get it up the field,” or “Put it in the net.” We did this with regularity, often ignoring his exhortations to play “the English game.”

Coach Ozzie told us where to play, still in the traditional 2-3-5, and we did it. We changed in a one-room, timbered clubhouse with no showers or heat, often shivering until we moved onto the field and started running. We always walked the three miles to the field, arriving ready to play without warmup or stretching, and walking home afterwards, our boots over our shoulders. Raw, tough, hard soccer where we honed our skills, applying what we had learned in the streets to real, full-sided games. We now started to learn positions, heading (seldom done in street soccer), and gaining a tactical sense of the game.

We were low-income kids, so our equipment consisted of the hand-me-down high top Mansfields or Hotspurs--the only shoes available, colored sweatshirts for uniforms, and usually Popular Mechanics or some other pulp magazine for shin guards. They made good reading at half time. The Club supplied one ball per game and an older player to referee. We came with a love of the game and good technique and skills, but we had to learn to play on the larger field with a full team
But the street soccer moves paid off.

What We Learned About the Game

Just a few years later we were playing against some of the best players in the country, and I made it to the U.S. Olympic Team final tryouts in St Louis in 1952 at the age of 18. When I think of our years in the streets, unsupervised, I wonder if we would have been better players with trained coaches, as many youngsters, both boys and girls, have today? Probably. Would we have faced the twin dangers of being overcoached while being discouraged from taking risks and working on new moves on the field? Possibly. Did we gain an appreciation for the game, confidence in our skills, and a competitive drive that would last a lifetime? Absolutely.

Aug 12, 2010

American Soccer Didn't Start with Pele: Part I of 7 - “Street Soccer” Memories

American Soccer Didn't Start with Pele: Philadelphia Soccer in the 1940s and 1950s
by Len Oliver:

This paper was originally published in the Journal of Ethno-Development by the Michigan Ethnic Heritage Studies Center in 1992 and is reproduced with the author’s permission. Len Oliver is Director of Coaching for the DC Stoddert Soccer League, is a staff member with VYSA, and a member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame (1996)

________________________________________

“Street Soccer” Memories

In a recent article in USYSA NETWORK. the writer stated that “the first generation of true American players has grown up, and is beginning to take over the grassroots coaching reins.” For young Americans who began playing soccer in the 1940s in urban America, these words ring hollow. People writing about soccer seem to forget the generation of young Americans exposed to the game from their immigrant fathers three decades before Pele’s debut in the North American Soccer League in the mid-’70s. This paper is written to remind us that American soccer didn’t start with Pele.

Earliest Memories

My earliest soccer memories were watching my father play in the late ‘30s and kicking a ball in the streets with my twin brother, Jim. I remember above all the pungent smell of liniment in the changing rooms for my father’s teams--they had no locker rooms, just places to change--and hang around with Jim as our father prepared for a match with his German-Hungarian Club. The “Hunkies,” an outstanding amateur soccer team in late ‘30s in Philadelphia, were no different than the other ethnic clubs that dotted the Philadelphia landscape in this period. They were the immigrant Scots on the Bluebells. the Germans with the German-Hungarians, the Irish playing with the Celtics, along with trade union-backed teams like the Bricklayers and Hosiery Local, or corporate teams such as Bethlehem Steel and Fleischer Yarn. Ethnics dominated Philadelphia soccer, although Philadelphia nurtured a sizable number of home-grown talent.

My father was a blur in his red and black jersey--running, passing. tackling, yelling-a 5’7” pesty Scottish center half moving up and down the field under the traditional 2-3-5, soccer’s mainstay system since the 1870s. And he seemed to be always full of mud.

Jim and I shared oranges with the players at halftime, sometimes kicking a ball with a sympathetic player. These early experiences created an accepting, pleasant soccer environment for us. But beyond the liniment, the ethnic clubs, and the post-game parties where someone was always good for a soda, we had the streets of Philadelphia’s Kensington area where we grew up in a working-class neighborhood of red-brick row houses on a tight little street. Helen Street was our playground, a garage door our goal. Streetlights and curbs were merely additional obstacles to be overcome. We went I v 1 for hours on that street, joined occasionally by cousins and neighbor kids for 2 v I or 3 v 2 games. Time skipped by and 25-20 was not an uncommon score.

We always kept score in ”street soccer,” building in an early and not-to-be-forgotten competitiveness. We invented ways to take each other on without instruction, now called “self-teaching” by the licensed coaches. We also fought with each other and with neighbor kids. Our father, a former amateur boxer in Scotland, had taught us to use our fists when we were five years old: “If you’re going to play this game, you have to know how to fight,” words reminiscent of an earlier era of rough-and-tumble ethnic soccer. But whatever we did with the ball on Helen Street, we learned the rudiments of soccer techniques and tactics with tough, challenging opponents, inventing moves as we needed them. We shielded, overlapped, changed pace and direction, jockeyed, executed wall passes, and nutmegged each other without ever hearing the terms.

Occasionally our father would join us, but the long hours of work during World War II took him away most of the time. He did find time to train the Bluebells, and our joys came in getting a used ‘T-Ball,” as they were called then, a bloated leather, misshapen bladder-filled ball that rolled in curious and unpredictable directions. We could depend on a hand-me-down pair of Hotspurs or Mansfields once a season, soccer shoes with high tops, steel toes, and replaceable nail-in leather studs. When our father brought home a torn Bluebell white-and-blue striped jersey, we fought over it to decide who would be “the big player” that day. This wasn’t used equipment--it was new for us and helped us to identify with the older players.

How difficult it is to explain to young players today, including my daughters who were good players, how we felt about these clunky old shoes when they thought nothing of paying out $100 or more because they liked the purple and yellow stripes on the shoes, or $60 for a slick, imitation leather ball that never loses its shape.

We loved the game in the streets. Adults were not around to teach us the Coerver techniques or tell us to “Lock your ankle.” And when we wore those clumsy Mansfields we moved our 1 v 1 to the 100-year-old abandoned Franklin Cemetery down the street where tombstones became our goal posts and the winos our spectators. We especially looked forward to seeing the pros, usually at Cambria Stadium at Torresdale and Kensington Avenues as it was on the trolley line and we could see the Philadelphia Americans take on the Brooklyn Hispano or Ponta Delgada of Fall River. Our heroes were “Lefty” Mervine, Philly’s superb left halfback, or “Dutch” Christian, a sturdy right fullback and a great sportsman, or “Duke” Nanoski, the peppy center forward now in the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Our Earliest Heroes

The name that sent murmurs through the crowd and excited the kids was Billy Gonsalves of Brooklyn Hispano. Gonsalves, often called the “Babe Ruth” of American soccer, was a dominating center-halfback who stood at 6’2 and came in at 210 pounds. After watching the imposing Gonsalves direct traffic in the midfield or drive powerful shots from 35 yards out, we returned to Helen Street to imitate his moves. Later on it was Walter Bahr and Bennie McLaughlin of the Philadelphia Nationals who became our idols, two of the best American-born players of the era.

Opposing players who stayed with us were Jackie Hynes with the New York Americans and John “Clarkie” Souza of Fall River. I recall watching the balding Souza dribble three opponents on the Philadelphia Nationals’ old home field at Holmes Stadium on Erie Avenue, go for goal and suddenly step over the ball, heel it to change direction, and completely befuddle his mark as he drove the ball into the far corner. I worked on that move for weeks until it became part of my own repertoire of dribbling moves. Always emulating, acting out what we had seen--something so desperately needed on the pro scene in soccer today for the youngsters coming up and seeking their own heroes.

Learning the Game

Coaches today do not structure a youth player’s formative years in this manner. They teach by books and tapes, drills and “freeze situations,” and dribbling through cones. The streets are dangerous, cemeteries are off limits and no substitute for playgrounds, teams are organized for four-year olds. Coaches have formal training, too much individualism is suspect, and kids are coached, or at time over-coached, in the “proper techniques.” We were left alone to develop, with lopsided, worn leather balls and an instinct to go 1 v 1 or 3 v 2 without adult supervision or “coachable moments.”

By the time we were nine years old, in 1942, we were ready for formal teams, which in the Kensington neighborhood meant the Lighthouse Boys Cub soccer program, the famed incubator of youth soccer in Philadelphia since the turn of the century. We also played American football and baseball, as good American kids, but given our choice, we were always drawn to the streets and our soccer ball--our natural element.

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