Ron Newman: 1936-2018. "When the NASL folded I was sitting in my office crying my eyes out"

I was saddened to hear of the death on Monday of former North American Soccer League player and coach, Ron Newman. Five years ago this week I talked to Ron, who granted me an extensive and entertaining interview about his time in the NASL. Many extracts from that interview ended up in Rock n Roll Soccer (he has 12 referrals in the book's index), but much of it has remained on my hard drive.

In tribute to a kind and generous man who gave so much to the game in the US, here is the interview in full:

What brought you to the USA and the Atlanta Chiefs in 1967?

Ron Newman: I was sold by Portsmouth to Orient and through the club I took over this house where [future NASL Commissioner] Phil Woosnam had been living while he was at West Ham. I used to get his post and send it on to him, though I didn’t know him. We got talking one time in the players’ tunnel and had quite a long chat. Now when I was in the army I was a drill instructor, so I knew how to handle people, and when my career started to wind down I thought I wouldn’t mind a go at coaching. Eddie Firmani was talking to me about coaching abroad in Australia or South Africa. But then I got a call from Phil and he said, ‘Don’t go to South Africa, come with me to America.’ I said, ‘America? They can’t play the bloody game over there!’But I talked about it with the kids and we ended up going, all because of that link up with the house where we’d both lived.

What was it like that first year in Atlanta?

Newman: Everything was new. Everything was huge. Right in the beginning I’d met the people from Atlanta in a hotel in London, and we had lobster. I’d never had lobster before, we couldn’t afford that. This of course was the baseball people. My son, who was about eight, had just started playing soccer and he didn’t want to go because there was no soccer in Atlanta. We told him they had hamburgers and colour television over there, so that persuaded him. When I got to Atlanta I told him we were

Interview with the late John Best: Spartans, Stokers, Sounders and Roses

John Best was a player, a coach and a General Manager in the North American Soccer League. After coming over from his native England in the early 1960s, he turned out for the Philadelphia Ukrainians in the American Soccer League (1962-67), the Philadelphia Spartans (1967), the Cleveland Stokers (1968), and the Dallas Tornado (1969-73). He then coached the Seattle Sounders for three years before becoming GM at the Vancouver Whitecaps. He then returned to the Sounders, also as GM.

John Best, transitioning from
 player to coach in 1974

    John very sadly passed away a year ago. With the permission of his wife, Claudia, here are the highlights of an interview that John gave me in January 2014 while I was researching Rock n Roll Soccer.

RnRS: You started out with the Philadelphia Spartans in the National Professional Soccer League [which one year later merged with the United Soccer Association to become the NASL]. Can you tell me about the pay and conditions as a player in 1967? Were you well looked after?

John Best: Oh yes, very much so. The pay wasn’t great at that point in time, but it was as good as a lot of people were getting in the first and second divisions in England. I’m sure there were many [in the NPSL] who earned less, but in terms of being taken care of  - it was really unbelievable because of the quality of hotels and travel. We flew to games, stayed in the best hotels, and I remember after we played in St. Louis, [team owner] Art Rooney took the whole team out to eat. I don’t know that every team was treated that way, but certainly we were. And at the clubs I later managed we tried to maintain the high standards as well. It was a better experience than most people had in British soccer.

RnRS: Art Rooney was typical of the early NASL owner - a wealthy entrepreneur. Looking back, is it surprising to you that people like him wanted to get involved in soccer?

JB: Rooney owned the Pittsburgh Steelers. If you go back and look at the ownership of the NASL clubs all the way through that early period, you’ll find that it was extremely strong, and made up mainly of sports entrepreneurs. They were wealthy people, but very shrewd in terms of marketing professional sports. The problem was that the sport was unknown – you’re not just starting up a new sport, but you’re starting up with people with absolutely no concept or idea of that. It took a tremendous effort to grow the sport in those early years.

    I was very fortunate to play for the Rooneys. Later on I played in Dallas for Lamar Hunt, and then went up to Seattle as coach for an expansion team, where the ownership group were city elders, and [were] just very intelligent, proactive people. So you had a great opportunity to do a quality job, because you were left alone to do it, and with enough funding. I’m not suggesting that all ownerships were like that. There were amazing changes as time went by, and the majority of teams became corporately owned, and that brings a difference in attitude and perspective – when you have a meeting of CEOs of major corporations compared with a group of wealthy sports entrepreneurs.