When you think of the founding fathers of the modern professional soccer in the United States, names such as Clive Toye, Phil Woosnam, Lamar Hunt and Robert Hermann come to mind. They did their own thing to make sure the game gained a foothold. But when William Drought Cox is mentioned, you’re more likely to be met with a blank look.
As it happens, he did a lot. Cox had the audacious vision to mastermind a summer league in the 1960s that helped plant the seeds of professional soccer in the States. The competition was called the International Soccer League, a 10-team round-robin summer competition that included mostly foreign sides. The ISL begat the National Professional Soccer League, which merged with the United Soccer Association into the North American Soccer League. The original incarnation of the NASL went belly-up after the 1984 season.
“He was a very unusual person, no question about it,” said Derek Liecty, who was Cox’s assistant with the ISL in 1961-62. “He could antagonize people right and left, which he did, but his mission was to get what we have today. So a lot of people who are involved in professional soccer today never even have heard of him, which is a pity.”
Twelve years after the NASL’s demise, Major League Soccer got its first kicks. Today, every June, July and August North America celebrates its “Summer of Soccer,” highlighted by the annual pilgrimage of top European teams and clubs from south of the Rio Grande to play friendlies here. To that list you can add the biennial Gold Cup, and most recently Copa America Centenario. “Without Bill Cox, there wouldn’t have been anything,” Toye said. “If you want to simplify it, no Bill Cox, no me, no Phil Woosnam, no NASL, no Pele. Nothing.”
Toye signed Pele to play for the New York Cosmos. Woosnam, a soccer evangelist, was NASL commissioner during its apogee. Hunt owned the NASL’s Dallas Tornado, as well as FC Dallas and the Columbus Crew in MLS. The US Open Cup is named after him. Hermann, the NPSL president, owned the St Louis Stars of the NASL. The Missouri Athletic Club Hermann Trophy, college soccer’s equivalent of the Heisman, is named after him. Cox? That’s another story.
If everything on his resume was listed here – Cox was the jack of all trades and master of many – the internet would break. In his obituary, the New York Times called him “a restless entrepreneur”. So, here’s the short version: born in New York City in 1910, Cox entered New York University at the age of 15, running track and cross-country before transferring to Yale. In New Haven, he played baseball and was a middle-distance runner for the track team. He did not graduate, leaving at 17. He ventured into myriad occupations and adventures, including working on Wall Street, trying his hand as an art dealer and owning a lumber business that provided pilings that helped reinforce the Panama Canal in World War Two. He owned the Philadelphia Phillies, for a short while – purchasing the club for $80,000 in 1943 – before he was banned from baseball for betting on his own team’s games. He became a co-founder of the American Football League, and operated two teams in the minor league. He also helped create stamps for Nicaragua, honoring the world’s best soccer players.
Cox then expanded his lumber company and mineral mining companies to Europe. It was there he was bitten by the soccer bug after watching matches in London and Madrid. Along with movie magnate Arthur Loew and Manhattan attorney Blackwell Smith, Cox decided to give Americans a soccer education. The only international soccer the USA knew was an occasional European or South American team visiting for a game, mini-tour or holiday.
“The reception by the American public to our project has been most gratifying,” Cox was quoted as saying in the 1961-62 US Soccer Football Guide. “The International Soccer League gives every indication of success and future expansion, making America conscious of this great game and raising it to world-class level of play.”
The league was only half of it. Cox wanted to improve the quality and level of the domestic game. Soccer in the States was a glorified amateur game with some players getting a pittance to play on the weekends in the American Soccer League when they weren’t pursuing their day jobs. “It is that time the United States joined the ranks of high caliber soccer,” Cox told the Guide. “From the International Soccer League will come the formation of a true Continental League and from there it will only be a short time before we can produce players and teams of which we can be justifiably proud in international competition.”
He was off by several decades, but that’s a discussion for another day.
“He was a big picture guy,” Liecty said. “He did not like to do details. I am a detailed organizational person to the core, so I just took over every little minute detail he needed to do or needed to be done to put the games on while I was there. He and I got along very well. With whom he did not get along with was the United States Soccer Football Association. He was in constant warfare with him. They were looking upon on the growth of this thing as a threat to their feudal kingdoms, which they particularly had in the east coast.”
Cox was considered an outsider by the USSFA and his trouble with the Phillies did not help. He also wasn’t shy about pushing back. The world’s most cosmopolitan city, New York City, looked like a perfect place for the ISL. Both National League baseball teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, had departed for the west coast, and there was an empty stadium in Manhattan – the Polo Grounds – to play soccer doubleheaders on Sundays. Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island and Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City were also used.
The crowds, which usually were in the thousands, were often comprised along ethnic lines. If Spanish and German teams competed, for example, the crowd likely was dominated by fans and immigrants from those countries. The league lasted six years from 1960 to 1965 and boasted big name clubs from 23 countries who played during the summer off-season in Europe. Teams included Bayern Munich, AEK Athens, Everton, Palermo, Real Valladolid, Sampdoria, Werder Bremen and Sporting Lisbon. There even was a side representing the US, the New York Americans, consisting of ASL players.
“These games were hotly contested,” Liecty said. “There was a championship. Their reputations were on the line for these teams and they took these games very seriously. They were always vying for the American Challenge Cup. They didn’t send over a bunch of substitutes. We had the world’s top players … really high-level teams. This was no pussy cat operation.”
Bobby Moore, the captain of England’s 1966 World Cup winners, was the 1963 MVP when West Ham United won the league title. Dukla Prague boasted players from the Czechoslovakia team that finished second at the 1962 World Cup. Cox’s playoff system was rather unique. The previous year’s winners would play the in-season champions for the American Challenge Cup. They were allowed to keep the hardware for a year, but had to return to the USA to defend it.
Bangu, captained by Brazil international Zózimo, won the first American Challenge Cup in 1960, defeating Kilmarnock in front of 25,440 spectators at the Polo Grounds. “When Bangu won the championship there were so many Brazilians at the game it was like they won the World Cup,” said one-time Long Island University men’s coach Arnie Ramirez.
Ramirez, along with future St Francis College coach Carlo Tramontozzi and other top players from the metropolitan area, had up-close views of the games as ball boys for ISL games after their team played in preliminary matches of the doubleheaders. For a soccer-crazy 16-year-old, it was heaven.
“It was incredible,” Ramirez said. “We learned a lot by watching these guys play as well. You saw the different styles. Kilmarnock, Dundee, they played very direct. They had all big guys. Bangu, very technical a short passing game. Dukla a short passing game.”
Ramirez’s team was coached by former Wales defender Alf Sherwood, a high-quality youth coach back in the day. Because he spoke Spanish, the Costa Rican-born Ramirez became an unofficial liaison to some teams, guiding them on shopping trips. On one occasion, he took CD Guadalajara to a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan. Ramirez remembers that Mexico’s Salvador Reyes demanded some authentic food, and had to consume mounds of bread and milk after taking on some particularly hot chilli.
The ISL lasted through 1965 as the USSFA ruled that Cox could not bring foreign teams to the States. Cox had bigger dreams though: permanent professional soccer in the US.
“While the International Soccer League as an entity was never a financial success, it did bring about this awareness, particularly on the east coast, in Chicago and Montreal, places where the games were played,” Liecty said. “The 1966 World Cup being televised nationally for the first time was another key item that was added to Mr Cox’s ability to attract all these millionaires to put together the National Professional Soccer League.”
Cox brought owners of baseball and football teams and sports promoters together at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City and the NPSL was formed. The USSFA counteracted that with a league of its own, the United Soccer Association. Much like Cox’s ISL, that league brought in overseas club teams. The USSFA proposal duly received Fifa approval, but had no TV contract. The NPSL, on the other hand, had a deal with CBS, but was considered a pirate league because it did not receive Fifa sanction.
To put it mildly, having rival leagues was a disaster. They merged and Cox became the president and general manager of the San Diego Toros, which lasted only one season. Not surprisingly given the chaos, Cox concentrated on other pursuits outside soccer before he passed away at 79 in 1989. Yet his soccer legacy still can be felt.
“I think [Cox] would be extremely pleased if he was alive today to see where we’ve come,” Liecty said. “I believe primarily as a result of his resolve to make [a professional league like MLS] happen.”
Liecty has much resolve at the age of 83. He has been on a mission to bring home the last piece of the ISL – the American Challenge Cup. In the competition’s last year, Polonia Bytom stunned Dukla and took the cup back to Eastern Europe. “They were happy to come back [to the US] but there was nothing to come back to,” he said. “So this trophy has been sitting in this obscure town in southern Poland for 50 years. This is an American trophy. It doesn’t belong to Poland.”
Liecty journeyed to Poland last summer, met with the club president and began the groundwork for negotiations. There were a number of obstacles. The team was “in great financial difficulty,” and fell into the lower divisions. Liecty said club officials told him “we’re afraid the creditors might want to seize it. So, they’ve hidden it away in a museum in a vault.”
Liecty visited the museum and had the curator open the vault.”So I come home with this fantasy idea that this trophy should be in the National Soccer Hall of Fame museum or some place because of its historical significance,” he said.
Liecty has asked Polonia Bytom officials how much the want for the trophy. A month prior to Liecty’s visit, Dukla traveled to Poland to play Bytom in a 50th anniversary match. Dukla prevailed, “but they didn’t get to take the trophy back,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see it [the cup] again.”
Still, Liecty will keep on trying to secure that piece of silverware from a by-gone era that helped plant the seeds for today’s game.
