Downing Stadium was variously described by Cosmos officials as either a dump, a hellhole or a horror show. Situated under the Triborough Bridge at Randall’s Island (the locals called it ‘Vandal’s Island’), it had long been a site for high school football and track and field meets and had served the student population well. But the ground had seen better days. Broken bottles littered the field, there was often no running water (apart from the overflow from the toilets above the locker rooms) and there was more grass on the road into Manhattan than there was on the field.
The problem for Clive Toye, however, was that the Cosmos had no other option. As their old home at Yankee Stadium was being redeveloped, the Yankees had gone to Flushing Meadow to share Shea Stadium with the Mets, leaving the Cosmos out in the cold. As a base for a mediocre team going nowhere Randall’s Island was fine, but as a venue for the world’s greatest ever player to showcase his vast array of skills it was woefully inadequate.
While Toye and the Warner team had done everything they could to convince Pelé that his immediate future lay with the Cosmos and converting an entire nation to soccer, the notion that the deal could be undone by the condition of its stadium had never really entered the equation. Indeed, before Pelé finally put pen to paper, Warner had flown him over Downing Stadium to show him the home of the Cosmos, but not before they had carried out some emergency maintenance on what passed for the field. ‘We were at practice at Randall’s Island, trying to avoid the broken glass on the field when all of a sudden we see a guy coming on the field and he starts spray painting the field green,’ recalls Shep Messing. Then we see a helicopter flying over, and the helicopter leaves. They had flown Pelé over Randall’s Island to show him the stadium and they had painted the dirt green so he’d think it was a nice soccer field.’
The trick was repeated for Pelé’s first game at Randall’s Island on June 15 when Lamar Hunt brought his Dallas Tornado team to town for an exhibition game. With CBS covering the event and a record crowd expected, it was imperative that the field at least looked good, even if it was still little more than a dirt track. At 6.30 a.m., Stan Cunningham, the stadium manager, gathered his team together and presented them each with a watering can into which he mixed green paint and water. His men were then dispatched onto the field of play to sprinkle over any suggestion that the playing surface was anything other than of a standard a three-time World Cup winner had come to expect. Pelé was a diamond in a rhinestone setting,’ says David Hirshey of the New York Daily News. ‘It was inconceivable that he would play his first game in a place that was essentially a bunch of dirt and rocks left over from the Paleolithic era.’
Signing Pelé was a publicity coup without compare. When kickoff arrived, Downing Stadium, complete with cosmetically enhanced field, was heaving. Suddenly, from an unimpressive average attendance of around 7,000, there were now over 21,000 fans clamoring to see the team and, more specifically, their new star turn. From Astoria and Queens they came. In the bleachers, signs bearing the words ‘Obrigado Brasil’ (Thank you, Brazil’) were held high, while the traffic slowed on the Triborough Bridge as rubberneckers paused to a look at the commotion.
The game itself would be televised in twenty-two different countries and be covered by over three hundred journalists. Steve Marshall’s press box, so long a place bereft of any passion or, indeed, expertise, was now ablaze with expectation. When Pelé finally ran out onto the field it was as if Jesus himself had decided to make his comeback.
Before the kickoff, Pelé and the Tornado’s American captain, Kyle Rote Jr., exchanged flags in the center circle, and though Rote held the Brazilian flag upside down, it was, nevertheless, another gesture that brought a smile to Pelé’s face.
After a low-key first half, adjusting to the demands of a game where all the players, the opposition included, seemed to be in awe of the little black guy with the mile-wide smile, Pelé trotted into the locker room, the sound of the crowd still ringing in his ears, and approached Clive Toye. With an anxious look on his face, he rolled down his sock and showed his leg to the general manager. ‘He was quite concerned. He had this sort of green fungus on his leg and he thought he had caught a disease in his first forty-five minutes playing in New York,’ recalls Toye, ‘but all it was was the green paint coming off.’
Assured that soap and water, rather than amputation, was the best course of treatment for his condition, Pelé returned for the second half and delighted the sell-out crowd with a headed equalizer with ten minutes remaining, earning the Cosmos a 2–2 draw. The following day, one local journalist reported that seeing Pelé play at Downing Stadium was like ‘watching Nureyev dance in a Times Square honky-tonk joint’.
Three days after his triumphant bow in a Cosmos shirt, Pelé returned to Randall’s Island for his official North American Soccer League debut. The team was already nine games into their campaign and their form was unconvincing, having registered three wins and six defeats. By now, Pelé had participated in a couple of training sessions with his new teammates and, ever the professional, the greatest player in the history of soccer had done as instructed by Gordon Bradley, a man whose career had taken him from Sunderland to Bradford Park Avenue and on to Carlisle United. ‘It was a joyride,’ laughs Bradley. ‘I remember the first practice. John Kerr kicked a cross that went behind him, behind Pelé’s head, and he was running toward the goal. Pelé jumped up in the air and did a bicycle kick, and scored. The press couldn’t believe it. I ended the practice right then.’
But while Bradley beamed, the Cosmos squad were having trouble adjusting to the fact that they were now sharing a field with Pelé. The biggest challenge for us,’ explains Werner Roth, ‘was not stopping and watching him play because he still had these incredible moves.’
It was a sense of total awe that would continue long after the games had finished. ‘I remember one time in Boston when the Cosmos were having a team meal,’ recalls David Hirshey. ‘Pelé ordered the lobster special. The waiter went back to the kitchen and gave the order: eighteen lobster specials . . . whatever Pelé said they just followed along, blindly.’
In its last home game, the Cosmos had attracted a crowd of just 5,227 for the match against the NASL’s perennial whipping boys, the Hartford Bicentennials. Now, they had to lock the gates when the ground reached its 22,500 capacity. There must have been another 50,000 turned away,’ remembers Gordon Bradley.
The away fixtures were just as popular. In the days leading up to his first away game against Shep Messing’s new team, the Boston Minutemen, the local papers were full of little else; one even billed it as ‘The Minutemen v. Pelé’, as if the Cosmos was a one-man team.
Sensing a quick buck, Boston owner John Sterge ditched the Minutemen’s usual ground at Nickerson Field and rented out the University of Boston’s Richardson Stadium for the game. It was a venue capable of holding 12,000 people but official records show that over 18,126 wedged themselves into the grounds for the match. Such was Pelé’s appeal.
Although the match would end in a Cosmos defeat, the game would be replayed as an official complaint lodged by Gordon Bradley was upheld by Phil Woosnam and the NASL. During the game, Pelé had scored a goal (later disallowed) and the crowd spilled onto the field to celebrate. Shep Messing estimates that there must have been ‘a thousand bodies on the field, just trying to touch Pelé,’ adding that ‘It was a horrifying thing to see.’
Although Pelé would emerge from the incident unscathed, Bradley and the Cosmos complained that as Boston had failed to provide adequate security for the players the game should be replayed. Phil Woosnam agreed, and when the two teams met again, the Cosmos won 5–0.
Away from the field, Pelé soon discovered that the idea that he would be able to enjoy greater anonymity living in New York was flawed in the extreme and that his schedule was as hectic as ever. There was an appearance on Johnny Carson and a meeting with the president, Gerald Ford (both designed to publicize the New York Cosmos and attempt to explain exactly what this soccer thing was all about), and he would vie with a young New Jersey songwriter called Bruce Springsteen for the country’s hippest magazine covers too.
Even when he took time out to enjoy himself there was no avoiding the city’s burgeoning legion of soccer fans. On one occasion, Pelé accompanied the Cosmos promotions director, John O’Reilly, to an Elton John concert at Madison Square Garden, and as the pair rocked along to the strains of ‘Philadelphia Freedom’, a spotlight switched from the stage and focused on Pelé, resplendent in a white suit. ‘[Then] Elton John introduces the greatest soccer player in the world,’ recalls O’Reilly. ‘At that point I say, “We have to get the hell out of here … ” otherwise we would’ve been crushed.’
Pelé’s arrival would not only signal a wholesale reversal in the fortunes of the team itself but in the NASL as a realistic, viable alternative to the mainstays of baseball, basketball and American football. As well as publicizing a league in dire need of a fillip, Pelé had brought instant credibility to the standard of the game in the States, even if the quality of the play was still dubious. If the NASL was now good enough for Pelé, a three-time World Cup winner, scorer of over 1,000 career goals and the man known throughout the world as ‘the king of soccer’, how could any other player say no to playing in the States?
Suddenly, the Cosmos metamorphized from being a club run by a handful of people from an inadequate office on Park Avenue into one struggling to cope with thousands of media requests and ticket orders each and every week.
Every facet of the club had to change. Sales staff were hired, advertising people recruited and promotions experts drafted in. Almost overnight, the Cosmos suddenly had over fifty support staff to help capitalize on the huge public interest prompted by Pelé’s arrival.
Where once the Cosmos press conferences would be held in the locker room with a handful of hacks passing the time before the bars opened, now they were conducted in the 21 Club or the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, with scores of journalists enjoying the trappings of a club heading for the big time. Even the quality of the buffet improved, as Jim Trecker, the Cosmos director of public relations, recalls. ‘Before Pelé got to the Cosmos, you’d only have five or six journalists at a press conference and you’d serve a couple of finger sandwiches and maybe you’d open a couple of bottles of soda if it was really high end. After Pelé signed, the basic food was caviar and smoked salmon and champagne. There was no more finger sandwiches and no more beer.’
But being the next big thing in NYC presented a new set of problems. As the Cosmos reveled in its coup, it soon found that Randall’s Island couldn’t cope with a global superstar. The Island had been built in the depths of the Depression in the 1930s and was designed for pedestrians, not motorists. Where once fans would across from 125th Street or amble along from Astoria or Queens, now everyone drove everywhere, resulting in traffic chaos on game day. While the crowd could get in without much difficulty, the problems arose when the final whistle blew and 20,000 or more fans all wanted to leave at the same time. With only one road into Randall’s Island from the east and another from the west, supporters were then faced with a two or three hour wait to finally extricate themselves from the jam.
With Pelé on a three-year contract at the club, it was clear that Clive Toye and the Cosmos had to find a new ground. Soon after Pelé’s arrival, negotiations began with their first home, Yankee Stadium, and the yet-to-be-finished New Jersey Meadowlands stadium. Those days at Randall’s were the best days, although maybe not from an accountant’s view,’ laughs Mark Ross.
But after years of doing anything and everything to persuade people to come see the Cosmos, some heavy traffic once a week was a nice problem to have. As the crowds flocked to Randall’s Island (and struggled to get out), Steve Marshall soon realized that he would no longer have to count the freeloaders watching from the Triborough Bridge as part of the official attendance and that the days of Harold the Chimp, men dressed as milk shakes and giving seats away at Burger King were history. Cosmos was cleared for takeoff.