Fall River on tour
Posted on August 8, 2012 12:09 am
The Fall River Marksmen had a big year, their biggest, in 1930. They won the American Soccer League championship, the U.S. Open cup and the ASL’s Lewis Cup. Two of their stars, Billy Gonsalves and Bert Patenaude, were among the leading members of the United States team at the 1930 World Cup in Uruguay. And the Fall River players who didn’t go to Uruguay had an excellent consolation prize. The 1930 World Cup team was away from mid-June to early September. In the meanwhile, a Fall River team, built around the Marksmen and called the Marksmen, made a six-game tour of Central Europe in August of that year.
The Marksmen players on that tour included a number of the team’s biggest stars, such as fullback Charlie McGill, halfback Bill McPherson and forwards Alex McNab (above), Werner Nilsen and Tec White. The 17-man roster also featured several New Bedford players, including forward Jerry Best, one of the ASL’s leading goalscorers; several European players picked up along the way, and Archie Stark, Fall River’s longtime nemesis, who was between teams at that point. The Bethlehem Steel powerhouse for which Stark played had folded a few months before.
Stark’s presence on the tour caused some controversy, but not because he was playing for a traditional rival. It was because he went on this tour after having passed up a chance to play for the United States in the World Cup, although he did have a legitimate excuse for that World Cup absence. Stark and Best fit in nicely, despite the fact that Fall River had a full house of great forwards at the time. With Patenaude at the World Cup, Stark played in his center forward spot and scored four of Fall River’s 10 goals on the tour.
On the field, the results of the tour were passable, not bad if you consider that the Marksmen played some of the best teams of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria, major world powers at the time. They came home with two victories, a tie and three defeats. The victories were 3-1 on Aug. 24 in Vienna against FC Austria and 3-1 again on Aug. 30 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, against a combined team of two leading Slovak clubs, SK Bratislava and Rapid Trnava. Along the way, the Marksmen faced a number of outstanding players who hadn’t been at that year’s World Cup, because neither Czechoslovakia, Hungary nor Austria had entered it. In the first game of the tour, on Aug. 20 in Prague, they played a 2-2 tie with a Slavia Prague team that included five players who played for Czechoslovkia in the 1934 World Cup final against Italy: Frantisek Planicka, Ladislav Zenisek, Frantisek Junek, Frantisek Svoboda and Antonin Puc. The FC Austria team that they beat on Aug. 24 was led by forward Mathias Sindelar, who was then nearly at the peak of a career that made him Austria’s greatest player ever.
That opening game on Aug. 20 was interesting from an American standpoint. For much of the 20th century, it was quite common in America, particularly in New York, for every visiting European team, including a few quite ordinary ones, to be promoted as a fabulous powerhouse. On this occasion, the shoe was on the other foot, with the touring Americans arriving in Czechoslovakia for a game against Slavia that was trumpeted by the Prague newspapers as being between two superteams. It did turn out to be a good game, with Fall River pulling out the tie on goals by McNab in the 79th minute and Stark in the 80th after having trailed by 2-0.
In September 1930, the Marksmen came home to a Fall River where economic conditions had gone from bad to worse. Because of the departure of the textile industry for the Carolinas during the early 1920s, New England textile centers suffered an economic nosedive that preceded the Depression by five years or more, and the addition of the Depression to those woes left Fall River in desperate straits. Within five months, the Marksmen were gone, moved to New York. The 1930 European tour was something of a last hurrah for them, at least as a Fall River team.
Interesting read and all…
….But I gotta say, Fall River is one of the coolest names for a club I’ve ever heard.
It’s interesting how much we were “in the mix” at this point. But we weren’t quite enough. You describe the fate of the Marksmen. They were the Yankees or Giants or Athletics. If they went, so did soccer as a serious national enterprise. Is Don Garber greater than the administrators of those times, or were the times even worse, or is it a combination thereof?
Times in 1930 were much worse. The Great Depression was going on and the USFA (now the USSF) and the ASL had just struggled through the American Soccer War, vying for control of US soccer governance. At the end of it all, USFA was crowned as the governing US soccer body once and for all, but neither side really won. All parties involved were financially ruined and American fan support sharply declined. Bethlehem Steel (the other power house of those days) ceased operations in 1930 when the owner, who was disenchanted with the American Soccer War, gave up on the sport altogether. The ASL limped on until 1933, but didn’t have a chance after a brutal 1930.
MLS’s league health is infinitely more sustainable than the ASL’s was in 1930. Don Garber, I think, is doing a great job with the league, but I don’t think he’s even in the discussion when you compare 2012 MLS to 1930 ASL. The two are contrasting extremes. One could very easily argue that 1930 was the low point in American soccer history.
Yes, 1930 was a thing apart, not really comparable to anything in my lifetime.
US soccer history isn’t exactly flush with great administrators – the sport has been mismanaged over and over and over again.
I think it’s safe to say that Don Garber is one of the better administrators soccer has had in the United States.
I agree that Garber ranks way up there. The pre-WW2 years in American soccer weren’t completely devoid of good administrators. I’m thinking particularly of Thomas W. Cahill and Edgar Lewis.
So what was Archie Stark’s legitimate excuse for not playing in the 1930 World Cup?
After the Bethlehem Steel team was disbanded in April 1930, Stark (a 32-year-old forward) didn’t know if he was going to be able to continue making a living from soccer or not. So he started an automotive business in Kearny, N.J., where he lived. He was still in the midst of getting that started at the time of the World Cup in July. By the time of the Fall River tour in late August, the business was up and running and Stark was able to get away from it. I suppose that if anyone had realized what a big deal the World Cup was to become, Stark might have viewed it differently, but the 1930 World Cup was a sort of tentative affair, with most of the leading European teams missing.
Judging by US club soccer history, it is clear that closed leagues cannot accommodate the unlimited clubs at the core of the world football narrative. Whether it is Madrid or the Marksmen, unlimited clubs feature prominently in narrative of the game, yet US Soccer sanctions MLS to limit clubs for domestic competitive balance needed to maintain a closed league.
Do you think Americans prefer their clubs limited, or that some US pro-sports owners insist that leagues remain closed?
If MLS success is measured by our history of closed league train wrecks, things look pretty rosy. What if those chronic crashes have more to do with our closed system than soccer?
Our soccer history is full of examples of closed leagues battling, ignoring and subverting independent federations. Yet, like unlimited clubs, strong and independent federations are also at the core of the world football narrative.
Baseball and US Football have their roots in European sports. Both are great examples of what happens to a world sport in splendid US isolation. If MLS and US Soccer continue to shun core features of the world game, might US club soccer be on the same path?
In what way were the Marksmen an unlimited club?
Marksmen had no salary caps, no DP rules. They certainly weren’t under single entity control. Marksmen were as unlimited as Real Madrid – and were in a league that was robbing Europe blind of players.
ASL, like all top flight leagues of unlimited clubs, crashed and burned. Perhaps Marksmen, Steel, et al would still be with us today if US Soccer did the same thing as every other major soccer federation of the day, and sanctioned open leagues?
Instead, Bill Cunningham did what every top-flight closed league commissioner does: Fought with the federation. Tried to be like MLB. Except for MLS/SUM, who subordinated the federation, and tried to be like NFL.
No doubt you can see the same pattern. Am I right or am I right?
I’ll think about that pattern. However, I believe that the demise of the Marksmen, Bethlehem Steel, etc. involved a lot more factors than just the form of league they played it.
Broken down to the lowest common denominator: when clubs are independent, leagues cannot go bankrupt. No doubt US club soccer have taken a huge hit in Depression. We would have lost our share of clubs. That being said, most US cities that lost an ASL 1 club to league collapse immediately gained an ASL 2 club.
If leagues can’t fold, legacy can remain. Shouldn’t that alone give one pause that our problems have long been system based – not soccer based? If that’s the case, is MLS limiting soccer in order so that it may survive in our system?
Several points:
1. You are right that it would have been possible for the original ASL to continue to exist as an empty shell after all the teams had spent their last dollar, but what would have been the point? So that the commissioner could sit in his office every day doing crossword puzzles and wondering who was going to pay him?
2. Quite a few cities in ASL1 didn’t immediately (mostly ever) get teams in ASL2. Boston, New Bedford, Fall River, Providence, Pawtucket, Bethlehem. And those that did get ASL2 teams (mostly New York) didn’t get the same sort of teams they had had in ASL1. There was a considerable difference between those two leagues. ASL1 was a fully professional league. ASL2 was a semipro league, a conscious attempt to keep budgets under control. ASL1 went aggressively after European players (over the course of its 10 years, it had 53 players who had been capped by other countries). ASL2 didn’t do that.
3. The question of whether MLS is or isn’t doing the right thing is a legitimate subject for debate. However, this isn’t the place. This blog isn’t about MLS.
4. You do realize, don’t you Ted, that you, me and When Saturday Comes may be the only people looking at this debate. Once my blog entries are off the Big Soccer home page, as this one has been for a few weeks, they tend to get about five hits a month.
So Soccerreform if MLS looks pretty rosy only in comparison at what point will you admit things are actually very rosy and you are wrong about the league and it’s structure? When MLS has 28 clubs with a $100m cap per team and considered one of the top 3 leagues in the world and with USMNT consistently top 5 or 6 in the world?
Or when that happens will you be saying we should be #1 league in the world with every team borrowing money to spend $300m in salaries and USMNT winning every World Cup?
At what point will you realize that your theory has been debunked?
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