WORLD CUP : THE UNITED STATES, PAST AND PRESENT : The Most Stunning Upset in the History of Soccer : Soccer: The United States beat England, 1-0, in a game that seems unbelievable 40 years later.
On June 29, 1950, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, an upstart team from the United States beat England, 1-0, in a game that is still considered the greatest upset in 60 years of World Cup soccer history.
In his book, “Soccer in the Fifties,” Geoffrey Green wrote: “The newspaper offices (in England) thought it was a typographical error when the score came through on the teleprinter and tape machines. Surely it must have been 1-10 to England.” The astonishing score confirmed, English newspapers ran the story the next day on their front pages, one of which, the London Daily Herald, was bordered in black.
In contrast to this year, when 105 U.S. reporters will be in Italy to cover the World Cup, only one American journalist, Dent McSkimming of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, attended the game in Brazil, and he was there on vacation. The Times devoted one paragraph to the game, on the bottom of Page 2.
This is the story Times staff writer Randy Harvey would have filed if he had been there.
In a result that might cause even the guards at Buckingham Palace to blink, a U.S. team that was considered the soccer equivalent of the St. Louis Browns earned respect Thursday, along with a place in sports history, by incredibly beating His Majesty’s England, 1-0, in the first round of the World Cup.
To call it merely the most stunning upset in the history of this tournament is understating the magnitude of the U.S. achievement. There have been only three previous World Cups, none since 1938. It is, rather, one of the most bewildering results ever in a sporting event.
It is as if Ben Hogan were beaten by his caddy, as if Citation were outrun by his stable pony, as if Joe Louis were knocked out by his sparring partner. People will still be writing about this game 40 years from now.
England might not have invented soccer; several other countries take responsibility for that. But the English did organize and refine it--as they modestly claim to have most of the civilized world--by establishing rules for the modern game in 1857. England has considered itself so superior to other soccer-playing nations that it did not even stoop to entering World Cups in 1930, ’34 and ’38.
While England entered this tournament as one of the favorites, the United States is considered a 500-1 shot. Its team was hastily selected by Coach Bill Jeffrey, a Scotsman, after an East-West all-star game in St. Louis two months ago, and played only two games before arriving in Brazil, losing to a Turkish club team from Istanbul, 5-0, in May and to the English third team, 1-0, last week. In England’s warmups, it beat Italy, 4-0, in Turin and Portugal, 10-0, in Lisbon.
It is no wonder the English decided to rest forward Stanley Matthews, perhaps the game’s finest player. They expected to have a considerably easier time in this game than in their opening 2-0 victory over Chile. Although the United States did not appear significantly outclassed Monday in its 3-1 opening loss to Spain, how seriously could the English take a team that has among its 11 starters an undertaker, a dishwasher, an interior decorator, a carpenter, a cannery worker, a schoolteacher, a machinist in a knitting mill and two mailmen?
Apparently, not seriously enough. England forevermore will ponder how it was beaten by a dishwasher in a jersey that was ripped down the front because it was too small for him and socks that sagged around his ankles.
Haitian-born forward Joe Gaetjens scored a goal in the 37th minute that, to hear the English tell it, was more likely to have resulted from divine intervention than design. They had to explain it some way. An assist was not officially recorded for defender Harry Keough, but he deserves one nonetheless.
The son of a Haitian mother and a Belgian father, Gaetjens is a carefree sort who takes on odd jobs, such as washing dishes in a Manhattan restaurant, so that he can devote most of his energy to playing soccer on weekends for a New York semi-pro team, Brookhatten Galicia.
When the players arrived Wednesday in this mining town of about 1.8 million people in southeastern Brazil after a 500-mile bus ride from Rio de Janeiro, some unwound with a beer or two. Gaetjens, who says he plays better if he carouses the night before a game, might have had more than one or two. Thursday morning, Keough, a mailman from St. Louis, had to shake him out of bed in order to deliver him to the game.
How it must hurt to head the ball with a hangover! Perhaps the English journalists were correct when they claimed that Gaetjens was diving in an effort to remove his head from the ball’s flight pattern when a hard shot from 25 yards out hit him on the left ear and bounced past the startled English goalkeeper, Bert Williams.
The English could not have been more astonished when the Duke of Windsor abdicated his throne to marry American socialite Wallis Simpson.
“The goal was appropriate to the whole bizarre situation,” said an incensed John Thompson of the London Daily Mirror.
U.S. players were as amazed by the goal as the English, but considering the source, they did not believe it was a fluke.
“It certainly was a lucky goal; that nobody can doubt,” Keough said. “But it wasn’t accidental. I don’t mean that Joe Gaetjens makes shots like this around the clock, but he is--what’s the right word?--an eccentric, flashy-type player.
“The first time I ever saw him was in that tryout game in St. Louis, but Walter Bahr had told me about him. He said, ‘Harry, this guy Gaetjens is a little silly, a little cuckoo, whatever you want to call it, but he makes some of the most uncanny goals you ever saw.’ ”
Bahr, the Philadelphia schoolteacher who took the original shot, added:
“If anybody else on our team had been in that position, I would say, ‘Most likely yes, it was an accident.’ But knowing Joe, it wasn’t. There’s no question of him not making an attempt to get to the ball. His energies were to get to the ball and try to get it in that goal. It certainly was not a ball that hit him. He went for the ball.”
If Gaetjens will be remembered as the man who won the game for the United States, then defender Charley (Gloves) Colombo should be credited for saving it.
A professional carpenter and an amateur boxer from St. Louis who wears the same lightweight leather gloves on the soccer field that he wears while sparring with a punching bag, Colombo made a vicious, flying tackle against English forward Stan Mortensen in the 83rd minute that would have been more appropriate in the kind of football that Marion Motley plays. Colombo has a reputation as a player who will do anything to win, even, as Keough said, if he had to tackle his own mother.
“Stan Mortensen is very, very fast and very cagey,” Colombo said of the World War II bomber pilot. “So he took a pass through the slot and had me beat by about half a step. He was going in on the goal, so all I did was just tackle him and brought him down outside the penalty box, about 25 or 30 yards out.
“Otherwise, he would have went in and scored. That’s all I could do. It’s either that or let him go in and take the shot. The goalie might have stopped it, but he probably would have scored.”
Even some U.S. players thought Colombo should have been ejected. As it was, the Italian referee’s idea of discipline was to shake his finger at his Italian-American cousin while telling him, “Buono! Buono! Buono!,” which means good.
Hardly anyone here wanted the English to succeed, especially not the 30,000 Brazilian fans who danced--the concrete bleachers were too uncomfortable for sitting--throughout the game while chanting cheers in support of the United States. The sooner England is eliminated, the better the host team’s chances of winning its first World Cup become.
The referee, however, was compelled to give England a free kick from just outside the penalty area, almost resulting in the equalizer when Alf Ramsey’s chip shot floated over the U.S. wall and was headed by Jimmy Mullen toward the goal. The ball appeared to elude goalkeeper Frank Borghi, a St. Louis undertaker, but he reached behind him with one hand and slapped the ball out of danger. Was the ball over the line, as some of the English players argued? The Italian referee thought not.
“The ball was on the line, maybe, but not over it,” said Borghi, an unorthodox goalkeeper who learned his skills as a baseball third baseman and catcher.
As the Brazilian crowd encouraged the Americans to score one more goal-- “Meis um! Meis um!” --they were content to play keepaway from the English. Forward John Souza of Fall River, Mass., used at least half a minute with a dashing and darting run that covered half the bumpy field.
“I kept looking at the referee, that whistle in his hand, and saying to myself, ‘Damn it, blow that whistle,’ ” Borghi said.
When the whistle finally blew and the game was over, the Brazilian fans rushed onto the field and carried Gaetjens and Borghi off on their shoulders.
“This is all we wanted to do,” said Jeffrey, the U.S. coach. “This is all that we needed to do to make the game go in the States.”
Frustrated as they were, the English were characteristically gracious.
“This is one of those games where we could have played until next week and not scored,” midfielder Tom Finney said as the sun set on Belo Horizonte and, for at least one day, the British Empire as well.
Postscript: The U.S. celebration was short-lived. It lost, 5-2, to Chile in the final game of the first round and was eliminated. England also lost its final first-round game, 1-0, to Spain and was eliminated. The Brazilian fans were disappointed when their team lost in the championship game, 1-0, to Uruguay.
Five of the 11 U.S. players are living. A funeral home director in St. Louis, Borghi buried two of his former teammates. Bahr has retired after several years as the soccer coach at Penn State, where two of his best players were sons Chris and Matt, who both have had careers as NFL kickers. Keough is a retired mailman in St. Louis. Gino Parihini is a retired freight dock worker in St. Louis. Souza retired to Florida after a career as a knitwear machinist. The English player whose free kick almost tied the game became Sir Alf Ramsey after coaching England to the 1966 World Cup title.
Colombo died in 1986 in St. Louis at 68. Gaetjens returned to the island of his birth, Haiti, where he disappeared in 1963, believed to be a victim of Papa Doc Duvalier’s death squads, Tontons Macoutes.
Details and quotes for this story were gathered through interviews with members of the U.S. team and previous articles in The Times by staff writer Grahame L. Jones, Soccer America, the London Daily Mail’s You magazine and Sports Illustrated.
