When the United States opens its World Cup Saturday versus England, the players will don jerseys with the U.S.A. crest over their hearts to represent their country and a diagonal stripe to honor their history ‹ in homage to their 1950 World Cup win over the top-ranked Three Lions, still
the biggest upset in soccer history.
“I’ll feel good about that. I’ll feel wonderful, and they’ll have a chance to [do it again],”said Frank Borghi, the goalkeeper in that 1-0 upset in Brazil. It was a result so improbable newspapers printed it as a 10-1 England win, so inconceivable it spawned a motion picture and has taken on a life of its own the past 60 years.
“Those guys [England’s players] were all professionals. We had jobs. But we’d played in the streets all our lives. That’s what kids did back then. They had no toys. They [played].²
And on that June 29, they played the Game of Their Lives, a win turned into a movie by the same name.
“I’m certainly surprised, but we’re happy to see [the win get its due],”said Harry Keogh, a retired postman who was a fullback on the team.
He joins Borghi, Walter Bahr and John Souza as the only survivors of that overlooked and under-prepared bunch of semi-pros, a hodgepodge of postmen and schoolteachers and hearse drivers that engineered the biggest upset in soccer history.
They were 500-1 underdogs, and even their own coach, Walter Giesler, labeled them as lambs going off to the slaughter. But that day, the lambs proved to be wolves in sheep’s clothing.
They’d actually opened the World Cup four days earlier, leading favored Spain 1-0 with 10 minutes left before tiring and coughing up three goals.
But against England, they closed the deal.
It was Bahr, a Philadelphia schoolteacher, who set up the winner by Joe Gaejtens, a Haitian immigrant who had come to New York to study accounting at Columbia, washing dishes in Harlem and playing semi-pro with Brookhattan for $25 a game to pay his way. But it was in Brazil that he truly earned his keep.
After Bahr took a 37th-minute throw-in, he unleashed a 28-yard, far-post shot. England keeper Bert Williams dove to his right, but Gaetjens went horizontal to redirect the ball with his head for the only goal.
Borghi, a hearse driver and World War II vet, and Charlie Colombo then preserved shutout, the former with a string of saves down the stretch and the latter with a breakaway-saving, 82nd-minute takedown on striker Stanley Mortensen.
“Charlie made a beautiful play on that tackle. The Italian ref leaned over and said buono, buono,” said Borghi, who had been a field medic who landed on Omaha just days after D-Day.
He and best friend Frank Wallace, who had spent a year in an Italian POW camp, provided a steel that toughened the team, but it was defender Colombo who made the game-saving play.
“Charlie was a pretty tough guy. Nothing got past him by fair or foul. The guy got by him and he brought him down from behind. Not a leg tackle, an arm-tackle. But it saved a great opportunity,” Bahr said.
Bahr went on to coach soccer at Penn State, where he still lives, and where his sons, Chris and Matt, were place-kickers before winning Super Bowls in the NFL. And that 1950 upset epitomizes that most used of all NFL clichés: On Any Given Sunday.
“You have to win the game on the playing field. So many times a complete underdog steals a win somehow,” Bahr said. “They outplayed us, our team was out-prepared, we didn’t have any [pros]. But a collection of players went down and we hit one in.
“There’s been so much talk of it being a fluke victory. That bothers me. Lucky you could say, but we went out and worked hard for 90 minutes. No question they had most of the ball and many more opportunities, but the underdog sometimes wins.
It did that day, with Gaejtens carried off the field by the Brazilian fans for beating mighty England. Souza was named to the World Cup all-star team, the only American to do so until Claudio Reyna in 2002.
But not all the homecomings were happy ones. While the English returned home to barbs from the press and fans, the United States returned to silence, bosses angry over missed time and in one case a wife who came to the airport only to give her husband an earful for returning a day late.
“There was no hullabaloo, nobody at the airport, no money,” Borghi said. “They just went back to work.
As for the Gaetjens, he returned to Haiti, where he disappeared in 1963. He was arrested and killed because his family had opposed dictator François Duvalier. It was a bittersweet epitaph for sweet victory, where 11 Lambs beat Three Lions.