1967 in San Francisco wasn’t just about free love and mind-expanding drugs. While the hippie movement was in its fullest flower around the intersection of Height and Ashbury streets, drawing young people from across America to the City by the Bay, a different group of young transients had made their way to San Francisco to spend a summer playing as the city’s first-ever professional soccer outfit. For six weeks, Dutch Eredivisie club ADO Den Haag– managed by the legendary Austrian coach Ernst Happel– were rebranded as the San Francisco Golden Gate Gales of the United Soccer Association, touring through the U.S. as part of American pro soccer’s abortive late-Sixties revival, a journey as surreal and flighty as an acid trip.
The Gales’ remarkable story goes back to 1966, with the founding of two rival leagues seeking to promote soccer as a commercially-viable professional sport. As Dennis J. Seese writes in The Rebirth of Professional Soccer in America, the market for America’s established sports had become saturated, leading wealthy men with visions of sporting glory to search for new games whose commercial potential hadn’t yet been tapped. And while the U.S. hadn’t had a professional soccer league of its own since the Thirties, the sport’s mass appeal was noticed by American tycoons on trips abroad. Hence the near-simultaneous formation of the United Soccer Association (USA), which had FIFA’s sanction but no TV contract, and the National Professional Soccer League (NPSL), an “outlaw” league outside the FIFA umbrella but with the greater prize of a deal with CBS to broadcast their matches.
While the USA had planned to start play in 1968, the NPSL’s deal to begin televising games in 1967 forced the USA to begin a season earlier, lest the NPSL be able to establish itself as America’s preeminent soccer league before a ball had been kicked in the USA. Yet there was a major hitch: the USA’s twelve franchises lacked players to fill their rosters and coaches to warm their benches. The ingenious solution was to import foreign teams wholesale to masquerade as American sides for two months, sacrificing their offseasons to play in mostly-empty baseball stadiums. Stoke City headed to Cleveland; Dundee United made for Dallas; and ADO Den Haag went to San Francisco to play as the Golden Gate Gales.
Despite hailing from the Netherlands’ third-largest city, ADO were not one of the country’s marquee clubs. Their two league titles, won in 1942 and 1943, were marred by an asterisk, having been claimed under Nazi occupation, and ADO had spent most of the intervening years living on the edge, trying to scrape together enough points each season to avoid the drop.
Ernst Happel’s arrival in 1962 changed everything. Happel was just 37 when he took the ADO job, but his tactical acumen was already apparent. As René Pas, a winger who made his ADO debut in Happel’s maiden season, told me, “Happel could turn the entire game on its head with one switch.” The club from The Hague ascended rapidly under the Austrian’s stewardship: Happel led ADO to the Dutch Cup final in his first season, then orchestrated successive third-place finishes in the 1964-65 and 1965-66 campaigns before falling a spot to fourth in 1966-67.
The Netherlands was a laboratory of tactical experimentation during the Sixties, and Happel was at the heart of that decade’s inventiveness. While the Dutch system of Total Football is often considered synonymous with Rinus Michels’ tenure as Ajax manager, Happel played a key role in developing the strategy, particularly through his use of a high press to trap opponents in their own half and pounce on mistakes. Happel would go on to enjoy success at the sport’s very highest level; after leaving ADO in 1969, the Austrian led both Feyenoord and Hamburg to victory in the European Cup, and steered the Dutch national team to the 1978 World Cup final.
The ADO team that travelled to America were thus at the cutting edge of modern soccer. Yet it was an open question whether San Franciscans would take any interest in watching Happel’s men hound their opponents deep into their own half and construct fluid attacks of their own. In a December 1966 piece announcing the Gales’ founding, San Francisco Chronicle sports editor Art Rosenbaum bluntly wrote that “pro soccer is a mystery here”, openly doubting whether the USA’s owners would recoup much of the estimated $50 million they had invested in the league. Rosenbaum’s second article on the Gales, dating from February 1967, was hardly more enthusiastic; covering the so-called “soccer war” between the USA and NPSL, Rosenbaum noted that rumors were spreading around Europe that players who moved to America to compete in the unsanctioned NPSL were liable to be forcibly conscripted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam.
This somewhat aloof and condescending attitude towards soccer was hardly unique to Rosenbaum or the Chronicle. Seese notes that press coverage of the USA often (implicitly or explicitly) ‘othered’ soccer, using charged terms like ‘partisan’ to refer to soccer fans as a way of marking the game and those who loved it as foreign and outside the American mainstream. This labelling of soccer as foreign was all too easy in the case of the USA– despite the league’s patriotic initials, there was not a single American player on any of the teams’ rosters.
Interestingly, the Gales’ marketing campaign also tapped into soccer’s ‘exoticism’ as a way of flogging tickets. In one ad, placed in the Chronicle on May 14, Gales season tickets were hawked as a way to “see Europe for only $21,” with San Francisco set to play host to “big league soccer teams from England, Scotland, Ireland and Italy.” Here, the Gales were selling soccer’s foreignness not as a liability, but as an asset; watching elite teams from Europe ply their trade was presented as a chance to awaken the American audience to the beautiful game’s marvels. Such was their faith that the U.S. would fall in love with soccer that another Gales ad billed season tickets as a unique chance to watch soccer ascend to become “America’s hottest new sport.”
On May 28, it was time for kickoff, with the Vancouver Royal Canadians visiting San Francisco. ADO had not closed the Dutch season in great form, winning just one of their final four Eredivisie matches, but their transformation into the Gales immediately boosted their fortunes, throttling Vancouver 6-1 with Henk Houwaart scoring a hat-trick. The Chronicle’s match recap praised the Gales’ sharp passing game, which tore their opponents to shreds in front of just over 8,000 fans at Kezar Stadium. The report, perhaps sensing the average American reader’s unfamiliarity with soccer’s nuances, also tried explaining concepts like crossfield passes (“designed to keep the defense spread”) and discussed how soccer, like basketball, requires terrific footwork. This opening day recap, and its attempt to make soccer relatable to an American audience, also shows that soccer was not always ‘othered’ by stateside media.
The Gales would falter in their next game, a 2-0 home loss to Toronto, but the Dutch-San Franciscans rediscovered their groove on a four-game road swing which took them across the American landmass. The first stop was Houston, where the Gales faced the Houston Stars– who had imported Brazilian club Bangu– in front of what was described as “an enthusiastic crowd of 16,875” at the futuristic Astrodome. It was by far the highest attendance for any Gales fixture, and the visitors got off to a roaring start, Lambert Maassen bagging the opening goal inside two minutes. Further strikes from Lex Schoenmaker and Houwaart gave the Gales a comfortable lead early in the second half, before two Bangu goals made it a tight contest once more. The visitors’ nerves were settled a minute from full time when René Pas scored to make it 4-2, giving the Gales a statement win against the highly-regarded Brazilians.
The sojourn continued through Cleveland– where the Gales fell 4-1 to a team featuring England World Cup winner Gordon Banks in goal– towards the East Coast, where Yankee Stadium was the venue for a 2-2 draw against the New York Skyliners. By this point, the Gales were dealing with a litany of injuries, perhaps feeling the effects of a long Dutch league season; regular starters Maassen, Harry Heijnen and Harry Vos were all absent for the game in the Bronx.
In their absence, the onus to perform fell on younger players like René Pas. Pas, 22 years old in the summer of ‘67, had come through ADO’s academy and was on the margins of Happel’s first-choice eleven when the team set off for the U.S. Once stateside, however, Pas started scoring seemingly at will, following up his goal in Houston with another strike in Boston to conclude the road trip before notching a hat-trick against Detroit on the Gales’ return to San Francisco. Pas, who wound up as the USA’s fourth-leading scorer for the 1967 season, made such an impression on Happel while wearing a Gales jersey that the Austrian “told me that I was better than [Johan] Cruijff,” as Pas related to me in a recent phone interview.
Pas’ excellent goalscoring form helped the Gales rack up a succession of positive results, but they still trailed the Western Division pacesetters Los Angeles Wolves heading into a critical clash with the division leaders on June 29 at Kezar. The Gales knew a win would move them into a tie for first place with just two games remaining, and a first-half strike from Piet de Zoete was enough to secure victory for San Francisco. The match was overshadowed, however, by what the Chronicle euphemistically referred to as the teams’ “extracurricular activities”; by the final whistle, only 19 players remained on the pitch, two Wolves and one Gale having been sent off. Nor were the red-card offenses the only instances of misconduct; Pas related to me that his teammate Dick Advocaat– later a star manager with Rangers, PSV Eindhoven and the Dutch national team– was struck in the head by a Wolves player, the wound swelling to the size of an easter egg, an incident which went unpunished.
Despite the Gales’ good performances, crowds at Kezar Stadium remained lackluster. Kezar, which was then home to the NFL’s 49ers, could hold north of 50,000 fans, but Happel’s whirling Gales never reached the 10,000 mark in attendance. In a June 24 article, the Chronicle’s Glenn Dickey opined that the paltry attendance figures for both the Gales and the Oakland Clippers, their NPSL counterparts, was proof that “there aren’t yet many soccer fans in the area,” noting that both teams were unlikely to turn a profit from hosting Sunday matinees the next day. Two days later, a Dickey interview with USA commissioner Dick Walsh was published in the Chronicle, with Walsh arguing that the Gales’ and Clippers’ competition for the same niche market was depressing attendances for both and implying that a merger might be necessary to make the game commercially viable.
Poor draws were not unique to the Bay Area; of the twelve USA franchises, only one (the Houston Stars) mustered a five-figure average attendance. Looking back, Pas told me that the ADO-cum-Gales players “knew it would be tough” to generate interest in soccer, and that their fear that Americans would remain largely apathetic was confirmed. The struggle to get butts in seats wasn’t aided by the ill-suitedness of several USA venues. In his book, Seese notes that the Boston Rovers played their matches at a high school stadium fifteen miles outside the city, while the ground-up turf at Yankee Stadium made passing the ball a formidable challenge, hindering the quality of play.
The Gales fell short of the Western Division title, ending two points behind Los Angeles. There was to be no chance at revenge. Ahead of the 1968 season, the NPSL and USA merged to form the North American Soccer League, with only one team per metro region allowed. In the Bay Area, that team ended up being the Clippers, with the Gales’ assets being subsumed into the Vancouver Royals. While the Clippers did occasionally play matches in San Francisco– including a 1969 friendly against the reigning Soviet champions Dynamo Kyiv– the Gales’ demise brought an end to the City’s first attempt at hosting professional soccer.
Still, the memories of the Gales’ exploits during that remarkable summer live on. René Pas was effusive: playing in America, he told me, was “the greatest journey I ever took.”
Inthehalfspace 