“Soccer was dead,” says Kevin Baxter of the Los Angeles Times. “Then the Wolves came along.”
Few supporters of Wolverhampton Wanderers, and even fewer fans of wider football, know the story of how the club from the English West Midlands helped take ‘soccer’ to the United States.
But Russell Jones, Wolves’ marketing manager, told the audience at a film premiere last week that the events of 1967 rank a lofty third for their historical staging posts, behind only the founding membership of the Football League and their role in pioneering European football in the 1950s.
So it was little surprise that Jones decided to put the story on the screen.
“Ten years before Pele, 30 years before MLS, 56 years before Messi” say the captions that open the film, titled 1967: When LA Wolves Conquered The USA.
“Los Angeles Wolves was the spark for soccer on the North American continent,” argues Les Wilson, a former Wolves player, at the end of the film.
A bold claim, perhaps. But by the time Wilson makes it, filmmakers Owen Blackhurst and James Bird, both of whom were brought up in the Black Country, have done a solid job of making his case.
“America is still a young country, and it was a younger country then,” Blackhurst, of football content creators Mundial, tells The Athletic.
“We all know the story of the Wild West, we’ve all been brought up on stuff like that. This was sort of that for football.”
The story of Wolves’ 1967 American adventure is simultaneously simple in its concept and remarkable in its execution and impact.
It begins with Jack Kent Cooke, then owner of the Los Angeles Lakers NBA basketball team and a general sports mogul in southern California, deciding it was time to bring soccer to the United States. Yet with the sport played largely by the state’s then relatively small ethnic minority communities, there was an absence of elite players with which to start a mainstream tournament.
Cooke’s solution was to invite 12 established clubs from Europe and South America to spend nine weeks in the United States and his native Canada, each located in their own ‘home’ city and rebranded with new team names and new badges.
Wolves, freshly promoted back to the English top flight under manager Ronnie Allen, were handed the plum job of representing Los Angeles.
“I’d never been out of England,” says legendary Wolves goalkeeper Phil Parkes, who turned 20 that summer. “I’d never been to Wales! [The English-Welsh border is around a 90-minute drive from Wolverhampton.]
“All of our music was from LA. LA was the ‘in place’ — the sun shone every day and it was a completely different world. (While there) We lived in a pair of shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops and there was ‘free love’ and flower power. What more do you want?”
Wolves are in negotiations with TV companies over potentially screening the film before it is released on club channels.
In the course of just over half an hour, Blackhurst and Bird tell two stories.
One is about how a vaguely absurd plan to parachute a dozen established football clubs into cities across a huge continent succeeded in giving soccer its first foothold in the crowded North American sports market.
The other is about how a group of young men, some not even old enough to drink legally in the United States at the time, enjoyed the time of their lives, partying at the famous Whisky a Go Go club, rubbing shoulders with Hollywood celebrities and, to quote the Wolves-supporting football journalist Dave Harrison, “zig-zagging across America like a rock band”.
The Wolves squad of 1967-68, many of whom headed to the US (Peter Robinson via Getty Images)
“It’s a hybrid of your first lads’ holiday for the players and a breakout tournament for America,” says Blackhurst. “It was thrown together. They had to import teams because there were no domestic players over there. They made it happen very quickly and they got a tournament going. It didn’t result in next year there being an MLS, but it eventually resulted in kicking off the game there. And I think that’s a story that always needs telling.
“Wolves is a great and historic club, but not one that gets documentaries made about it very often. Even though it was in partnership with the club, I think you can see from the production that it’s a bigger story than that and it’s something we’ve really tried to apply high production values to and tell the story in an engaging way.”
The film explains the tournament, split into eastern and western conferences and featuring teams from England, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Uruguay and Brazil, all rebadged for a little over two months.
While Wolves retained their English nickname, others changed entirely — Uruguay’s CA Cerro became New York Skyliners, Dallas Tornado were actually Scotland’s Dundee United, and the Dutchmen of ADO Den Haag were temporarily recreated as San Francisco Golden Gate Gales.
But the film focuses mainly on Wolves, who emerged from nine weeks of competitive round-robin fixtures, complete with multiple red cards and unprecedented indoor matches, followed by a tempestuous final as the inaugural United Soccer Association champions.
The final, in the iconic LA Memorial Coliseum saw them defeat the Washington Whips — AKA Scotland’s Aberdeen — 6-5 in ‘golden goal’ extra time in a game that included a brief fistfight and a flurry of four goals (two for each side) in four second-half minutes.
Wilson, winger Terry Wharton and full-back Gerry Taylor give first-hand accounts of a trip that Parkes describes as “one of the best times of my life”.
“I’m glad we could tell their story and I’m glad about how happy they were with it because that means a lot,” says Blackhurst. “If you’re telling people’s stories, you feel like you want to do right by those people because they’ve been good enough to give you their time. I don’t suppose their stories get told, but they all had stellar careers.”
LA Wolves played on in 1968 as founder members of the North American Soccer League, predecessor of today’s MLS, but without imports from Molineux.
For Parkes, Wharton, Taylor and Wolves legends including Peter Knowles, Dave Wagstaffe and Derek Dougan, it was a one-off adventure.
“We won it, we got our trophies, we had a good party, flew home the day after and all was well with the Wolves,” said Wharton, pictured with the trophy above.
Yet while a group of young men were enjoying the time of their lives in one of the greatest summer camps of all time, they were accidentally planting the seed for the growth of their sport on a new continent, paving the way for Pele, George Best and other iconic names and eventually for MLS.
As Baxter puts it in the closing sequence of the film: “It was the wet cement on which all these other things were built.”
(Top photo: Wolverhampton Wanderers)