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

Sunday Mirror review: three errors in 47 words

The Sunday Mirror did me the immense favour of reviewing Rock n Roll Soccer this past weekend. It was an astonishing achievement. Not to sound ungrateful or anything, but in the space of just 47 words, the review not only failed to even remotely convey what the book is about, but also managed to make three gross factual errors (or five, if you take into account that one of the errors is tripartite). It also made a grammatical error and a terminology error. That’s an impressive rate of around one mistake every seven words.

Here’s the review in full:

“A nostalgic trip through the early years of the North American Soccer League, the harbinger for what we now know as the lucrative MLS. Its struggle to stay afloat and be accepted by FIFA is fascinatingly explained, with cameos from legends Pele, George Best and Bobby Moore.”  

Mirror, Mirror, on the ball...

Error one: it’s not a trip through “the early years” of the NASL. In fact “the early years” only make up about one tenth of the book. It’s an account of all 17 years of the NASL.

Error two (discounting the following grammatical error - you can only be “a harbinger of” something, not “a harbinger for”; and Major League Soccer is known as “MLS”, not “the MLS”): MLS is not “lucrative”, it is a league that prides itself on its attempts to be financially stable, having learned from the mistakes of the NASL. It has been lucrative for David Beckham, and it may well one day become lucrative for its current owners, but that’s all a long way off – many of its teams have only just started making modest profits, many others still run at a loss.

Error three (and errors four and five): Pele, George Best and Bobby Moore played “cameos” in the NASL? You mean, they showed up, played one game and then left again? Or does the writer (and his sub-editor, and his editor) not actually have a flying clue what a cameo is? Best played for seven seasons in the NASL, Pele for three (bringing it instant world coverage and prompting hundreds more players to follow), and Bobby Moore for two.  

Apart from that, the review’s spot on. Indeed, I am absolutely convinced that the reviewer read the book from cover to cover. Thank you, Sunday Mirror – your review is a journalistic triumph. I have no doubt at all that the rest of the paper is as scrupulously accurate as this towering two-sentence book review. 

"Marsh has overshadowed Pelé, no doubt about it"

Tampa Bay Rowdies coach Gordon Jago said of players like Rodney Marsh that “you have to accept them the way they are. Only a fool would try to submerge those assets.” Yet the 1970s were full of fancy-footed, flair players who were adored by fans but submerged by managers and clubs who couldn’t afford to let a single unruly player look bigger than the club, no matter how special his talents. Spurned by the tactically dull English game and the post-Victorian disciplinary norms of its custodians, many of the more individualistic British players found the North American Soccer League to be a far more receptive platform for their charisma-driven style, both as a footballer and a personality.

Chapter 4 of Rock n Roll Soccer examines at length the largely successful NASL careers of Marsh and George Best, looking to resurrect their reputations after having fallen out with Manchesters City and United respectively. While both had their issues with team bosses and coaches in the USA just as they had done in Britain, the two players were also uniquely suited to bringing the NASL the kind of panache and publicity that it was craving during its heady expansion years in the mid 1970s. Here are the opening paragraphs to ‘Marsh and Best: Entertaining the USA’:

Marsh and Best: hair and flair

Rodney Marsh stopped the game, although referee Peter Johnson hadn’t blown his whistle. The Tampa Bay Rowdies midfielder fell to his knees, stretched out his arms and gestured at the ball in his possession. Come and get it, he was saying to the New York Cosmos, a team that was losing 4–0, and whose pivotal player, Pelé, was not having his greatest day. Come on, come and get it – I know you can’t, but try anyway.

It was the 1976 season, and the first visit by the Cosmos to the upstart Tampa Bay Rowdies since Pelé’s signing the previous year. The New York team, fresh off the plane from an exhibition game in the Dominican Republic, looked distinctly out of sorts, playing in front of a national TV audience and a regular-season League record crowd of over 42,000. They finished exhausted, outplayed, and soundly beaten by five goals to one. The talking point of the game was not, however, the exemplary hat-trick that Derek Smethurst put past New York’s hapless second-choice goalkeeper Kurt Kuykendall. It was Marsh, down on his knees, taunting a team that featured the greatest player of all time. 

The Englishman, playing his first NASL season, opened up and flaunted a full bag of tricks that day. There were cheeky back-heel passes, nonchalant dummies, and a flawless back-heeled lob over his own head down the left wing that saw him breeze past a floundering opponent. On another occasion he effortlessly robbed an oncoming Cosmos player of the ball, then passed it forward down the line to a teammate, all the while holding his left boot, lost in action moments before. Marsh fully exploited the vast space in midfield that the Cosmos and the 35-yard offside line (see chapter 7 for more on this NASL innovation) permitted him, prompting CBS’s co-commentator Paul Gardner to say at the end of the afternoon, ‘Marsh has overshadowed Pelé, no doubt about it.’ When he left the field shortly before the end of the game, he received a standing ovation…