South Bay Was Early Magnet for British

The British invasion of the South Bay was well underway in 1977 when Brian Boswell left London to play for the Los Angeles Aztecs of the now-defunct North American Soccer League.

A former defender in English leagues, Boswell settled in Manhattan Beach, where a growing colony of Britons had discovered the California lifestyle. It was just a short hop to El Camino College in Torrance, where the Aztecs sometimes played.

“There were a lot of guys living here who worked in the aerospace industry,” Boswell said. “Others came over and started their own painting businesses, and some came over illegally to find work and they settled here with the rest of us.”

Baseball and football were as foreign to the newcomers as the Britons were to the beach communities they flocked to. But soccer, rooted in their working-class backgrounds, was one thing they had in common.

“Back then, if you had an accent you could coach, or at least we thought so, because we had grown up with the game back home,” Boswell said. “Lots of guys started teams and the South Bay was the soccer powerhouse in California.”

For years, soccer had been a staple of life in San Pedro, where Croatian, Portuguese, Serbian and Italian immigrants worked on the docks and in the canneries six days a week, then packed Daniels Field on Sundays to cheer neighborhood club teams.

The British--predominantly immigrants from England and Scotland with a smattering of Welsh and Northern Irish--formed teams such as South Bay United and joined the rollicking action at Daniels Field as well. But their greatest influence was felt in suburban parks and school grounds, where their offspring kicked around soccer balls with American-born friends.

One American, UC Irvine women’s soccer Coach Marine Cano, was walking past a Torrance schoolyard one day in 1964 when he saw a few chums playing soccer. The 10-year-old Cano was on his way to baseball practice when the boys asked him to join a soccer league that was just getting off the ground.

Cano wasn’t too swift on his feet, so his British-born coach stuck him in goal. Cano went on to play professionally as a goalkeeper, both here and in England, while that league, the American Youth Soccer Organization, headquartered in Hawthorne, has grown to 625,000 participants ages 5 to 18.

“The British influence in the South Bay was big in the ‘60s, even bigger in the ‘70s,” Cano said. “These guys came to this country and loved soccer. They knew a lot about the game and they gave me a very good idea of how to play it.”

The British style of play was straight forward and appealing to American boys.

“It was a very fast-paced game,” Cano said. “They taught us to play very aggressively. They taught us to be men at a very young age. Even if you were scared, you went out and played with no fear and you played to win no matter what.”

Boswell became a premier division youth coach for FRAM, a private soccer club that operates an eight-acre playing facility in Rancho Palos Verdes. But Boswell laments that South Bay soccer waned as the population shifted south when the aerospace industry hit hard times.

“Everything has migrated down to Orange County,” Boswell said. “There’s more money down there to be made as a coach. Orange County leads the way as far as club soccer and the money spent on kids goes, and the facilities are so much better in Orange County, too.”