If you wish to know America, a noted European scholar once advised, you must first understand baseball. But on June 17,1994, I quickly discovered that baseball alone would never get me through the summer of 1994. On that bright afternoon, I parked my car in Hoboken, New Jersey, and walked down Washington Street, the city’s long main drag. I had once lived in Hoboken and knew all about its “ethnic” flavor. But I was amazed by the international feeling that rippled through the old city like a cool breeze that day. The World Cup of Soccer had come to the nearby Meadowlands, and for every officially sanctioned flag of the participant nations fluttering above Hoboken’s street corners, I spotted several homemade banners exhorting the Azzuri (the Italian national team), the Mexicans, and of course the Irish, who, in a matter of hours, would defeat Italy at the Meadowlands in a shocking first-round upset.
Like most Catholics of North Jersey origins, my family background traces the faultlines of an Irish- and Italian-American urban experience. Thus the Ireland-Italy game was seen as a showcase for the resurgent pride of New Jersey’s two dominant ethnic groups: “A match made in heaven,” George Zoffinger of the New Jersey World Cup Host Committee told a reporter for the New York Times, who duly added that the match offered “cousinly competition within the Roman Catholic family, right out of a John O’Hara story.”
The match generated scores of articles on ethnicity, religion, and immigrant history covering not just New Jersey but the entire New York metropolitan area. Many waxed nostalgic about bygone neighborhood rivalries dissolved in time and inter-marriage. Others sought to link soccer’s putative unpopularity in this country with the immigrant experience; the newcomers’ willingness to leave most things from the old world behind. When analysis failed, there were plenty of Italian-Americans to be found discussing the elaborate menus for their tailgate parties, while Irish-born singer Christy O’Connor informed readers of the New York Daily News that the World Cup “is more important to us than the Hail Mary.” I was fascinated by the assumption underlying much of the background reporting on the World Cup that equated ethnic Catholicism with a passion for sports, an issue first treated by the late John Tracy Ellis nearly forty years ago in a celebrated essay where he lamented the inveterate “athleticism” of Catholic culture and the death of Catholic intellectuals.
Yet soccer itself is invariably described as a game of either the “old” world or the “new” immigrants who have flocked to this country since 1965. Not being among the 16 million Americans who actually play the game, I wondered if there might be some deeper historical connection between soccer, urban America, and the civil religion that has bound this nation together. To find out I paid a visit to Kearny, New Jersey, or, as it became widely touted in the days to come, “Soccer Town, U.S.A.”
I felt I enjoyed just a slight edge on the hordes of reporters and camera crews who descended on Kearny because not only do my mother’s family’s “roots” lie there, my cousins live next door to Charlie McEwan. McEwan, an affable, burly Scots-American had coached three star players now on the United States national team—Tabare Ramos, John Harkes, and Tony Meola—when they had played as twelve-year-olds for the Thistle Football Club of Kearny. Imagine a working-class city of 34,000 providing three starters for, let’s say, the New York Yankees, and you have some idea of the mystique this town packs. (Meola, incidentally, still lives in nearby Hillside, but is a pure product of Kearny youth soccer.) Kearny and the neighboring town of Harrison provide the setting for a familial creation myth I have fashioned over a lifetime of rootless flight (even the name, CAR-nee, evokes the incantatory music of place names captured so hauntingly in Irish playwright Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer”), but in speaking with Charlie McEwan I saw that myth being altered and recast in ways that challenged some of my cherished assumptions about religion, ethnicity, and urban America.
Charlie explained that soccer came to Kearny in the 1870s with the Scottish immigrants brought over to work for the Clark Thread and Congoleum Nairn companies. The Scots-American Club, founded in 1928, fielded teams that competed in an extensive network of ethnic leagues, some still active today on weekend afternoons in places like Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The Scots-Catholics in Kearny tended to play for the rival Irish-American Club, but over time the sport came to transcend ethnic and religious distinctions and generated a new vision of community based solely on a shared passion for the game. In Harkes, Meola, and Ramos, Kearny produced representatives of the three great waves of immigration to America, from the Scots of the mid-nineteenth century to the Italians early in this century and finally to more recent arrivals from places like Ramos’s native Uruguay.
While working for a local chemical company, Charlie McEwan led his Thistle Club team all across the Northeast for matches. He even took the team to Scotland, where they lodged at a women’s conservatory in Glasgow. One Saturday evening, their host informed McEwan that Mass would be offered the next morning at a Catholic chapel on the grounds. McEwan recalls, “It was the first time I had even thought about the religious makeup of the club.” He was surprised to discover that eighteen of his twenty-two players were indeed Catholics.
That did not surprise me. What did was that Charlie, a Scots-American, urban Protestant, was jovially bantering in the living room of my Irish-Catholic relatives in a town I had always linked with some primal, unmelted core of ethno-religious tribal identity diluted only by the suburban hegira of the 1950s and 1960s. This paradigm of ethnic declension and “white flight” has been dominant for so long that I found myself asking whether the temptation to present Kearny as anomalous—a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, soccer-loving town, absorbing “old” and “new” immigrants alike—says more about those, like myself, who are in but not fully of the neighborhoods, than about these communities themselves.
I wonder sometimes if the stories of postwar America many of us tell—whether as historians, novelists, or sportswriters—focus so heavily on that flight from cities to suburbia because the products of that experience are as conflicted—in our own way—as an earlier generation of the “uprooted” who sought to explore their new identity as Americans. The ambivalence we feel toward “old neighborhoods,” real and imagined, may compel us at times to neglect the persistent vitality of those communities that have often survived quite well without us. In the 1950s and ’60s, the age of the great migration—especially for ethnic Catholics—the Scots- and Irish-American clubs of Kearny flourished and fielded soccer teams that competed against dozens of clubs representing other “hyphenated” Americans, in the process fostering a version of multiculturalism that belies the myth of the ethnic ghettoes we offer as our origins.
Fans of Kearny soccer will speculate for years to come on whether the outcome of the U S team’s second-round defeat by Brazil might have been different had John Harkes not been suspended for committing two yellow-card fouls in the first round, or had Tabare Ramos not been knocked out of play by a Brazilian defender’s elbow in the midst of a brilliant performance. But their mere presence in the tournament bore witness to an urban American sporting tradition as old and continuous as any this nation has to offer, perpetually re-invented by newcomers who don’t need to be told that, in Kearny at least, soccer is as American as a game can be.
