Soccer: Cox's New Kick

In real soccer countries such as Spain and Brazil, championship games draw six-figure crowds. But when a mere 15,231 fans showed up at a Manhattan stadium last week to watch two of Europe's best teams compete for the American Challenge Cup, William Drought Cox, president of the International Soccer League, beamed with delight at the turnout. That is a big soccer crowd in the U.S.—big enough to make soccer pay.

Yaleman Cox, 53, has made a lot of money in business (timber, mining), and lost a lot in sports, investing in such dismal properties as New York's inept football Yankees of the early 1940s, Brooklyn's short-lived football Dodgers, and the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, which finished seventh the year he owned it. A few years ago he foolhardily set out to bring big-time soccer to the soccer-resistant U.S., founded the International Soccer League. It has lost money, predictably, but this year's overall attendance, 288,743, was roughly double the 1960 total, and for a change Cox envisions black ink. Attendance would soar, he is convinced, if the league could get a U.S. team capable of competing against the top European and Latin American squads that play in the I.S.L.

There seems to be something about soccer that stirs fans to violence. Bloody riots break out every now and then at soccer games in Latin countries, and I.S.L. fans display some of that same ferocity. At one game this year a swarm of fans outraged by a referee's decision rushed onto the field, bloodied the referee's nose and ripped the shirt off his back. "With soccer fans it's more than a game," said a shaken I.S.L. official. "It's war."

To protect referees and players from the fans, many foreign teams maintain wide moats around their fields, but with smaller crowds to cope with, Cox just had a strong fence erected at the stadium for last week's Challenge Cup game. Contestants: West Ham, the British team that won the 1963 I.S.L. championship, and Dukla, a top Czech team. Dukla took the two-game series, 1-0 and 1-1. The margin of victory was a late goal booted in the second game by Left Halfback Josef Masopust, whom European newsmen voted Europe's "player of the year" in 1962. At the victory party, the Dukla coach hoisted a glass of beer and said, "Jsem stastny," meaning, roughly, "I am a happy man." Guest Cox, doubtless thinking of those 15,231 paid admissions, lifted a glass of vodka and said, "Ditto."