Karl Wallenda walked across Veterans Stadium on a tightrope, dazzling a nearly sold-out crowd when he stopped halfway to do a headstand and unfurl American flags from the ends of his balancing pole.
It was exactly what the more than 50,000 fans came to see between games of a Phillies doubleheader on Memorial Day 1976. And the show across the street, a soccer game featuring Pelé and other all-time greats — didn’t stand a chance against The Great Wallenda.
Philadelphia has become soccer-infused this summer with six games of the World Cup at the sports complex Center City bars were packed Monday afternoon hours before France and Iraq played, banners hung from City Hall, the Broad Street Line carried fans to Lincoln Financial Field, and even the mayor was spotted last week buying soccer jerseys.
The games are so massive that the Phillies had a rare Friday off last week because Brazil and Haiti were playing at what is temporarily called Philadelphia Stadium.
But 50 years ago, soccer was still finding its footing in Philadelphia. And that’s why the eyes of the city were fixated above Veterans Stadium while Pelé, Italian superstar Giorgio Chinaglia, and Bobby Moore — the captain of the last English team to win the World Cup — were in a match across the street.
The soccer icons played for Team America in the Bicentennial Cup against the English National Team at JFK Stadium in front of just 16,000 fans and a lot of empty bleachers.
Philadelphia now has a professional team with staying power, local players on the U.S. team that have people dreaming this summer, and a stadium full of crazed fans. That was hard to imagine 50 years ago, when the gods of soccer passed through without much notice.
“Jeez, 50 years,” said Bob Smith, a Trenton native and member of the National Soccer Hall of Fame who played for Team America against the British. “There’s no comparison. The game just grew, and the community grew. The spread of the game is just unbelievable.”
Gateway to soccer
Smith learned to play the game as a 9-year-old when an Irish neighbor in Trenton organized a recreation league. He played four-on-four for hours with his buddies and organized games against kids from neighboring towns. Today, the sport is played everywhere, but it was concentrated in the 1960s to neighborhoods in Trenton, just like in Philadelphia.
Soccer was huge to those who knew it.
And a mystery to those who didn’t.
“We’d go to our high school field on weekends to train and see like 2,000 people in our football stadium,” Smith said. “We were freshmen in high school, and we knew exactly where we fit in the spectrum of sports. ‘Who are these guys running around with shorts on?’ But we just fell in love with it.”
Smith was plucked as a teenager by Manfred Schellscheidt, the legendary coach who assembled an All-Star team with the best players in New Jersey. Schellscheidt brought the Jersey boys to his German hometown, where they beat every team they played. It was an unbelievable experience, Smith said, and it gave him and his buddies the confidence that they could do it.
“I was like ‘Damn, I can do that,’” Smith said. “We felt like ‘we’re OK here.’”
Smith played at Rider University before turning pro with the Philadelphia Atoms and helping them win the North American Soccer League championship as a rookie. The league didn’t pay the players enough for soccer to be a full-time gig, so he worked as a laborer at a construction site during the day and practiced in South Philly at night. But he was still a professional soccer player.
“A lot of guys were schoolteachers,” Smith said.
This U.S. team started nine players in their World Cup opener who are on professional teams overseas. Smith, who had 18 games for the U.S. team, played overseas in 1975, with Dundalk F.C. in Ireland. Unlike today’s players, Smith and Dave D’Errico — his buddy from New Jersey — didn’t get paid much. No team was looking then for an American player, Smith said.
“When we got off the plane, a guy picked us up at the airport in Dublin,” Smith said. “We signed this five-quid-a-week contract. We stayed over top [of] this garage, and I pumped gas at night, making a quid an hour.
“But we were in Ireland playing soccer. What the heck? We didn’t care. You were broke your entire career playing soccer. I never cared about what I made because it was a thrill of a lifetime.”
‘It was just wild’
The starving artist returned to the U.S. after a year abroad and joined the New York Cosmos, which had become America’s traveling band of soccer stars. They had Pelé and Franz Beckenbauer on the field and Mick Jagger and Henry Kissinger in the dressing room after games.
“The Cosmos years were like a circus,” Smith said. “It was just wild.”
The NASL brought Pelé out of retirement in 1975 with the hope that the all-time great could spread the gospel of soccer through the country. Every Cosmos game felt like the opponent’s biggest game of the season.
“It was always a show,” Smith said. “The expression with us was always, ‘We’re with him.’ There was a lot going on in restaurants and clubs and all that. We went to Denver and they rode him on a horse. There was so much marketing stuff, and he got pulled into an awful lot of stuff.
“I felt sometimes that he was being pushed to sell the game to this country, and I think that was difficult to him. He just wanted to get on the field and play with the guys. Off the field, it was crazy with the commitments he had to fulfill. But he did it 100% with a great attitude. But it was tiring.”
The 1976 Bicentennial Cup was another attempt to grow the game as Brazil, England, and Italy came to America for tuneups before qualification began for the 1978 World Cup. They played in Washington, New York, and Seattle before finishing in Philadelphia.
The organizers knew that the U.S. national team wouldn’t be able to keep pace with the world powers, so they filled Team America with the stars of the NASL. That’s how Smith and Delaware County’s Bobby Rigby got to play with a dream team. The stars of the soccer world came to South Philly.
Philadelphia just wasn’t yet ready in 1976 to embrace what was happening. The city was too distracted by the guy walking in the sky.
“It was such a thrill to play with those guys,” Smith said. “It was a great honor, and it was also a blur.”
