An excerpt from the first chapter of "Alive and Kicking"!
THE GAME’S AFOOT
“A soccer ball? You must be joking. I don’t even know what a soccer ball looks like,” the owner of a State Street sporting goods store in downtown Madison, Wisconsin, confessed to me.
It was the red-hot summer of 1955. “I thought the players just kicked each other,” he added with a laugh. “Very funny,” I thought. Life magazine had rated Madison the best place to live in the United States a year or two earlier; obviously the city was not the best place to find a soccer ball—or a comedian.
I had just arrived from England, where my life had practically revolved around soccer. Now there was none. Well, I thought, there’s a job to be done here if I want to keep on playing. It was 1943 when my life-long love affair with soccer began, in grim wartime England. I was eleven. “Would you like to go to Elland Road on Saturday?” my dad asked. Elland Road is the home of Leeds United, the area’s professional soccer club. Back then, they weren’t much of anything, but they were all we had.
Leeds is a city located in West Yorkshire, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, and in 1943 it was an area of woolen mills, foundries, and coal mines. It is off the tourist path, although only twenty-five miles from the much-visited, quaint old city of York. Even the German Luftwaffe did not pay much attention to Leeds. Although the air raid sirens drove me, my parents, and older sister, Barbara, into our tiny homemade air raid shelter frequently, only once was Leeds a primary target.
In that bombing onslaught, sixty-five people were killed and Leeds City Museum was blown apart, but the local ammunition plant went unscathed. Emerging from our shelter after the “all clear” siren, we looked toward the city center and saw what looked like a beautiful sunset. It was, in fact, a city burning.
The following morning, I was out in the street early, picking up shrapnel that had bounced off our roof—I don't know whether the shrapnel was from German bombs or British anti-aircraft fire. That was about the extent of my wartime exploits.
To get to Elland Road, my dad and I took a tram from our outlying village of Crossgates. Those clanging, lumbering, swaying double-decker streetcars could move a hundred or so fans at a time, for a few pence a person. We switched trams in downtown Leeds.
Downtown Leeds was dominated by the huge, black Victorian town hall. It was so Victorian, in fact, that Queen Victoria herself had attended the opening ceremony. It wasn’t really black, as restoration a couple of decades later revealed, but plain limestone darkened over the many years of factory chimneys belching smoke and grit into the atmosphere.
From the tram at the Elland Road stadium, we were immediately swept along by a crowd of cloth-capped Yorkshiremen, spending their hard-earned “brass” on the “Sat’day match.” We then jostled for a good vantage point standing on the cinder terraces. At that time, the only available seating was for the Board of Directors.
Then I first experienced that thrill of anticipation waiting for the two teams to emerge from the tunnel under the stands. The atmosphere was electric as fans chanted, waved their club scarves, and swung the giant wooden rattles to spur on their team. Due to wartime power restrictions there were no programs or loudspeakers, so before the players came out, a little man trotted around the drab field with a chalkboard listing their names. Often the names of all the players were not available until the last moment. Since most players were in the British Armed Forces, whether they played that day or not depended on where they were stationed and whether or not they were home on leave. Sometimes a name on the chalkboard read “A.N. Other,” which meant no one knew who was going to participate until kick-off.
I don’t recall who Leeds United played that day—probably Barnsley, Bradford, Huddersfield, or Halifax Town, all teams from the surrounding area of grimy colliery and mill towns. The match began, and I was enthralled. The skills on display, and the size, the speed, and the strength of the players was something I had never witnessed in those days before television. I loved hearing the roar of the crowd when Leeds went on the attack. And when they scored, I underwent that scary feeling you get when the crowd surges forward, your legs are lifted off the ground, and you end up rows away from where you started.
“Come over ‘ere, lad,” said one old gaffer, moving to accommodate me. “Stand where tha can see.”
At halftime a special treat awaited us. The Salvation Army Band, average age about eighty, serenaded us with the brass band music so popular in the north of England at that time. I have forgotten how the match ended and what the score was, but I do remember that my hero was the Leeds United center-forward, and usually well placed in the center to meet the high crosses the wingers were there to provide.
As we rode home on the tram through the dreary, blacked-out streets of the city, between rows and rows of identical back-to-back brick houses, I told my dad, “I want to be a center-forward when I grow up.” “Aye,” he said. “Everybody does.”