WORLD CUP ’94 / 6 DAYS AND COUNTING : His Kind of Town : Harkes Is One of Three on U.S. National Team From Soccer-Mad Kearny, N.J.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, especially when played by the United Gaelic and Sean McGonigol Pipe Band. All of the band members, most of whom are bagpipers, were wearing kilts, except for one of the drummers, Tony Meola. “We let him stand in occasionally,” a band member said of the Italian-American goalkeeper for the U.S. soccer team, “but we call him Tony (Mike) Meola.”
An overflow crowd of about 350 had gathered in the dining hall of the Scots-American Club one night late last month to honor the U.S. players, especially those who were raised on the playing fields of Kearny.
It might seem extraordinary that three members of the United States’ 22-man roster for the World Cup can trace their soccer roots back to this town of 35,785, but not to those who live here--on the bank where the Passaic and Hackensack rivers merge, a goal kick from Newark.
Upon entering the city limits at either end of Kearny Avenue, one cannot fail to see the signs that proclaim Kearny: “Soccer Town, U.S.A., Home of Tony Meola, John Harkes and Tab Ramos.”
This has been a soccer town for more than 100 years. Two members of the United States’ first World Cup team in 1930 were from Kearny, and so many other college, semipro and professional players have passed through here before and since that both of the town’s libraries are displaying exhibits centered around the town’s soccer heritage.
To read the names of players past and present is to understand Kearny’s changing demographics. All Scottish and Irish in the beginning, they were joined later by Italians and Portuguese and, more recently, Latin Americans.
Like virtually everywhere else in the United States, multiculturalism has not been embraced by all of the townspeople. But the goal is closer here than in many places because of one passion shared by all of the cultures, soccer.
“When I was growing up, we played soccer every single day,” Harkes said. “If the fields were being used, we played in the street. It wasn’t until I was older and began traveling to other towns to play that I realized that not all kids in America were doing the same thing. They were playing baseball.”
Harkes spoke a couple of weeks after the celebration at the Scots-American Club, which he missed because he was still engaged with his professional team in England’s First Division, Derby County.
But he is omnipresent in the Scots-American Club. The walls in the bar downstairs, papered with plaid, are covered with soccer pictures, most of them of Harkes. Although Meola’s heritage is Italian and Ramos’ is Uruguayan, they are loved like sons in the Scots-American Club, but there is an even more special feeling among the members for Harkes because he, the son of a Scotsman, is a link to their forefathers.
When the Coats & Clark Thread Company established a mill along the Passaic River in 1890, the Scottish owners recruited skilled workers from among their countrymen by offering free passage and six-year contracts to come to New Jersey. Many more Scots and Irish soon followed, either to work for the other textile mills opening in the area or for the giant Congoleum Niarm linoleum factory.
As the story is told today at the Scots-American Club, the Thistle Football Club signed potential players right off the boats from Scotland and Ireland, and it was not long before there were enough teams for a healthy league.
Particularly competitive were the teams sponsored by the mill owners, whose stars are said to have seldom seen the insides of the mills. With businesses closed because of the state’s blue laws, the Sunday afternoon games were well attended as people in the area had little else to occupy their time after church.
The mills have long since shut down, but the Scottish influence upon the town remains as thick as the accent that still prevails in the pubs and fish-and-chips shops, in the markets whose butchers supply meat pies to the British Embassy in Washington, and of course, in the Scots-American Club.
It was that ambience that attracted young Jimmy Harkes to Kearny in 1961. A better-than-average player in his native Dundee, he had a couple of tryouts with professional teams before giving up and joining the British Army, which assigned him to its soccer team that toured the world.
Upon returning to Dundee, he found that his services as a carpenter were not in demand, convincing him to accept an invitation from his sister to move to Detroit. He soon ventured to New York, where he was told that he might find a home away from home in Kearny.
He settled into carpentry, married a woman from Scotland and had three children, and although he continued to play soccer in the semipro league on weekends, he soon discovered that his passion was in watching, and sometimes coaching, his two boys, Jim and John.
When he took Jim to sign up for an 8-and-under league, John, only 4 1/2, insisted that he be allowed to join.
“My father said that I was too little, but I grabbed a shirt and went on the field,” John said. “He said, ‘OK, if that’s the way you want it, but you’ll have to work harder than everyone else.’ ”
That was no challenge for John.
“Without question, he was far and away the most dedicated young player I’ve ever seen,” said Hugh O’Neill, a Kearny native who played professionally in the North American Soccer League. “He had an old head on young shoulders.”
John Harkes played on a Kearny High team that compiled an 86-6 record and played in four consecutive state championship games, the final two years with Meola as a teammate, earning Harkes a scholarship to the University of Virginia, where he was the Missouri Athletic Club’s player of the year in 1987. That also was the year he made his debut with the national team.
After playing in the 1990 World Cup, he jeopardized his status as local hero among at least half of Kearny’s Scottish population by trying out for one of Glasgow’s famous teams, Celtic. That is the Catholic team. As Protestants, most of the Harkes family friends have allegiances to the other Glasgow team, Rangers.
“My father was getting a lot of stick at the club,” Harkes said. “When I told him I wasn’t going to stay in Scotland, he was relieved. They take these things seriously in Kearny.”
Harkes went south, where he has established himself in the English League--first with Sheffield Wednesday and now with Derby County. While it is the dream of English players to take part in a game on soccer’s most hallowed ground, the field at London’s Wembley Stadium, most never make it there. Harkes has done it six times, making everyone at the Scots-American Club--Catholics and Protestants alike--proud.
World Cup Player at a Glance
Name: John Andrew Harkes.
Born: March 8, 1967, Kearny, N.J.
Height: 5 feet 11.
Weight: 165.
Position: Midfielder.
Club: Derby County (England).
National team debut: May 23, 1987, vs. Canada.
Caps (international matches): 49.
Goals scored: Four.
Little-known fact: He was a ballboy for the Pele and Franz Beckenbauer-led Cosmos of the North American Soccer League.
Honors: Parade Magazine’s 1984 high school player of the year; Missouri Athletic Club and Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year in 1987 for the University of Virginia; scored English League’s goal of the year in 1990 for Sheffield Wednesday; 1992 U.S. Cup most valuable player.
