The recent 1-1 draw between England and the USA in the World Cup surprised and disappointed English fans. England started well but nerves and poor finishing opened the game for the Americans who gradually grew in confidence.
However it was never a David and Goliath match. Most of the 2010 US team are seasoned professionals playing in the top flight of European football – unlike their predecessors in 1950 when the US and England last played each other in the World Cup.
The 1950 Americans were all semi-professionals who had to supplement their earnings with other jobs, including the captain Walter Bahr.
Bahr said at the time of the 1950 match, playing was a part-time gig where they had to supplement their incomes with other jobs. He recollects making $50 a week as a Philadelphia high school teacher and $25 per week for a match. Other teammates worked as mail carriers and dishwashers to earn money.
All the England team were full time professionals and were still perceived as one of the world’s leading football nations – 3/1 to win the cup. The USA were rank outsiders – 500/1 – and not even their coach felt they had any chance at all. In 1950 it really was David v Goliath.
The result, a 1-0 win for the Americans, was totally unexpected, a real shocker yet, strangely enough, the news had almost zero impact in the USA where, for the media, “soccer” was very much a minority sport.
The American goal was scored by Joe Gaetjens. Joe was from Haiti but was studying accountancy at Columbia University and played semi professional football in New York to earn some extra cash. He came to the attention of US coaches and joined the World Cup squad headed for Brazil. Although he was not an American citizen he promised to take up US nationality after the competition.
Joe Gaetjens scores for USA v England 1950
After the World Cup, however, he went, instead to France, where he played in top flight football until 1954 when he returned to Haiti and went into business. Unfortunately his family got on the wrong side of Haiti’s dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier who proclaimed himself “President for Life” in 1964.
Most of Joe’s relatives fled from Haiti but he had never considered himself a “political” and didn’t think Duvalier’s secret police, the notorious Tonton Macoutes ,would be concerned with an ordinary businessman.
How wrong he was.
Within days he was arrested and never seen again. It is rumoured that he had been taken, with hundreds of other “suspects” to the feared Fort Dimanche prison in Port-au-Prince. Soon afterwards they were all executed and their bodies buried in secret in mass graves that have never been found.
Thus perished America’s 1950 “soccer hero”, the victim of one of the world’s most vicious political regimes – his only memorial a 1976 induction into the US National Soccer Hall of Fame…
h/t cudaforever
