Booters' Trophy

One of the prettiest plays in sport is soccer's "corner kick"--a free kick booted from the corner of the field toward the players of both teams, who try to kick or butt the ball into the net or down the field. In The Bronx's Starlight Park this week, corner kicks and other fancy head-and-footwork were executed with rare artistry. The performers were the two foremost big-league outfits in the U.S.: the Brooklyn Hispanos and Pittsburgh's Morgan Strassers, facing each other in soccer's equivalent of the baseball World's Series.

Last week these titans, champions of East and West respectively, had run themselves ragged for two and a half hours (90 minutes of regular play and four 15-minute overtimes) trying to break a 2-2 dead lock, when approaching darkness finally postponed the decision. This week 6,500 fans gasped and groaned through the play off. Within the regulation 90 minutes the Hispanos finally proved their superiority, 3-to-2. To the Hispanos went the National Challenge Cup, put up in 1912 by Scotland's late, great Sir Thomas Robert Dewar (whiskey), while on a visit to the U.S.

Poona to The Bronx. Soccer is played in some 60 nations with varying degrees of intensity and skill. In South America and the British Isles (where, legend says, the game was first played with the skull of a hated Dane) soccer fans pack stadiums seating 100,000 to 150,000. In Moscow a few years ago 2,000,000 fans applied for tickets to an international match between Turkey's No. 1 team and Moscow's beloved Dynamo Club (Russia's New York Yankees).

In India, where they play barefoot, games often end in riots. Argentines take their futbol so seriously that spectators have been known to fire shots at players, try to burn down the stadium. Only in the U.S. have citizens failed to get excited over soccer, the game Ivy League pioneers scrapped for their own version of football nearly 70 years ago.

U.S. lack of interest is due mainly to U.S. distaste for sitting outdoors in wintry winds and sleet (in Europe fans rarely sit down during a game). The comparative handful of U.S. enthusiasts who follow the sport through its September-to-June season are mostly American-born citizens of foreign parentage who inherited their passion for the fast & furious game. Although U.S. attendance is far below the standard of other countries, U.S. pros are not. One U.S. star who can stand up to any of the world's Internationalists is Big Bill Gonsalves, a Portuguese-American who plays inside-right for the Brooklyn Hispanos.

Big Bill Gonsalves, who works as a mechanic at the Worthington Pump Co. when he is not playing soccer, is a 200-lb. six-footer with a tremendous kick in his massive legs. One of soccer's hardest shots, he can boot a ball fast enough to break a man's hand. From 20 yards he has often broken the goal's netting. Despite his Bronko Nagurski bulk, Gonsalves has the nimbleness of a Red Grange. At dribbling, volleying, jumping and tackling (snaring a ball from an opponent by clever footwork), he can match his stringier colleagues. At heading, too, Gonsalves has no peer. He butts with prodigious accuracy, has headed a mud-heavy ball smack into the net.

Many professional U.S. soccer players are former semi-pro baseball players. Gonsalves is one outstanding exception. Brought up in Fall River, Mass., a mill town teeming with soccer fans, he has played professionally for 19 of his 35 years. He has played with seven different teams, has led his teammates to eight National Challenge Cup finals--six of them in a row, from 1930 to 1935. He has been chosen for every International soccer team sent abroad since 1929: to Montevideo (1930), Rome (1934), Mexico (1936), Haiti (1941).

Bought by the Brooklyn Hispanos last fall, Gonsalves plays soccer once a week, gets about $50 a game, hopes to be still going strong when international matches are resumed at war's end. One of the first international sports events scheduled for postwar U.S. is a soccer match between North and South America.

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