Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #390: Ty Keough on soccer in St. Louis, and the new MLS team

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

Wanted to get somebody from St. Louis to join to talk about the new MLS team, the response from the city, and the history of soccer there. Got Ty Keough, a former national team player, coach and broadcaster whose dad was one of the five St. Louis natives on the U.S. team that beat England at the 1950 World Cup. Covered a lot of ground, including Ty's family's trip to Guadalajara to see the 1970 World Cup. This episode was produced with the help of William Gordon of American Soccer Corps, who is an unsurpassed expert on the history of soccer in America. Follow him and learn about his work here: https://twitter.com/USASoccerStory ----Scuffed is an ad-free podcast. Support that and get exclusive episodes once a week, plus access to the Discord and live call-in shows, by signing up for our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scuffed Skip the ads! Subscribe to Scuffed on Patreon and get all episodes ad-free, plus any bonus episodes. Patrons at $5 a month or more also get access to Clip Notes, a video of key moments on the field we discuss on the show, plus all patrons get access to our private Discord server, live call-in shows, and the full catalog of historic recaps we've made: https://www.patreon.com/scuffedAlso, check out Boots on the Ground, our USWNT-focused spinoff podcast headed up by Tara and Vince. They are cooking over there, you can listen here: https://boots-on-the-ground.simplecast.comAnd check out our MERCH, baby. We have better stuff than you might think: https://www.scuffedhq.com/store Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the Scuff podcast, where we talk about U.S. soccer. Our guest today is a man who grew up in St. Louis, played for the men's national team. Coached for many years in the college ranks, attended the 1970 World Cup as a kid in Mexico, called a lot of soccer games on TV as an adult and whose dad played for the team that beat England at the 1950 World Cup. Tai Kio. Welcome to Scuff. Thanks for making the time, sir. Well, Adam, I'm very happy to be here. and we've got some good things to talk about.

Yeah, let's start with when you were 13 years old, and you went to that World Cup in 1970, in Guadalajara, as I understand it. What do you remember about that? Well, it's kind of a unique experience for an American kid. Right. To be able to witness in person a World Cup. Yeah, I was 13. My mother is from Guadalajara.

her parents are both Mexican, although she was born in St. Louis, but we would go down there about every other summer. Okay. And obviously we made sure that we got there for the 70 World Cup because Guadalajara, the second largest city in Mexico, was one of the venues. A venue that included the teams in the group for that particular World Cup in Guadalajara in 1970 included the defensive, included the defense. winning World Cup champions, England, who had won the World Cup as the host country in 1966, in 1966. And then, of course, the glorious Brazil team at Belay in his final World Cup. And the team that many still consider perhaps to be the greatest team ever assembled

to the World Cup winning 1970 Brazilian team. So, yeah, we drove down from St. Louis to Guadalajara. three-day drive. Wow. And my dad was good at it because he probably over the years, because my mom and dad would spend their winters a gloubara after he retired. He must have driven that at least 25 times. Oh, my sister says 37 times.

Wow. And he enjoyed driving. And he would have his Pepsi and his hand and just keep driving. So we get to Guadalajara, and obviously it's a festive occasion because, you know, the, there's always been a huge rivalry, I think, between Latin peoples, Hispanic peoples, Latin American peoples, and Europeans,

particularly in terms of the beautiful game, in terms of how it's played or the style or what's emphasized in terms of the skills and tactics of the game. But so for Guadalajara, although they were not hosting any games by the Mexican national team, who were, yeah, their group was in Mexico City, Guadalajara embraced the Brazilians. And they more or less despised the English. You're talking about, you know, imperialism is maybe a way that they kind of had a vision of what English. it was. They were rabidly against the English. And I noticed, in fact, and not too far from our neighborhood where the English hotel was, all hours of the day and night, the public in Guadalajara

would blast their horns or set off fireworks. They were trying to throw the Brits off as much as possible because certainly in Guadalajara they were they were pulling not only for Mexico in the World Cup but for Brazil as well. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, here, Keo is a, is that an Irish name? It is Irish. It's not a very common Irish name. But yeah, my dad was of Irish to set. His father was Patrick John Keo, born on St. Patty's Day in 1893 here at St. Louis. I think, you know, it was a great-great-grandfather that came from Ireland in the 1800s, basically. So there's a pretty big Irish population here in St. Louis, as well as Italian and Germans. Right.

That kind of planted the seeds of soccer in the late 1800s. Well, just real quick. So if your father is Irish and your mother is Mexican, or Mexican-American, I suppose, Yeah. What's, probably no love loss for England in your household either, right? Well, it's true. Yeah, the Irish, you know, obviously have a certain bitterness about,

about their relationship with England. Although, you know, it wasn't, I know that's true in certain neighborhoods here in St. Louis. My dad and his parents, we didn't hear much of that. We were a little bit insulated from that. could be because this is really very interesting to a lot of people. The neighborhood, and I mean like a small pocket of a neighborhood in South St. Louis, near Cronolet Park, where my dad grew up, it was largely families who had come over from Spain. So all his buddies and his brothers, my dad had an older brother who was more than 10 years older than him,

they hung around with a bunch of guys named Jose Garcia and Jose Fernandez and Jose Menendez and so forth. And that's where he learned his soccer from the Spanish kids in the neighborhood. And there was a club there. And I played for that club when I was a kid, you know, turned into a select team or a traveling team or whatever. But it was called the Spanish Society. And my dad would hang out there and look at the newspaper clippings. they would get every Sunday the Madrid newspaper with all the soccer news in it. And my dad would heard about, in Mexico they say Samora, but I think the Spaniards say Thamora,

the legendary Spanish goalkeeper. I remember my dad talking about him way back. So it was really an interesting upbringing for him near the CronoLet YMCA, where he swam and played basketball and the Blow School playground. and the Spanish lot where he played all that soccer with the Spanish kids. Man, I didn't realize there was a Spanish community in South St. Louis. Yeah, it's not huge, but it was concentrated near the riverfront on South Broadway. Apparently they were brought over because they had some sort of expertise in smelting zinc, believe it or not.

And I guess it was some sort of an operation of plant along the river there. And, you know, there's probably, you know, a couple hundred Spanish families that had come home. I've spent a lot of time in St. Louis, but mostly around, like, University City and, and so. Yeah, that's where we are right. That's where I am right now. Oh, really? I coached at Washington University for 10 seasons, which is, you know, basically borders University City and St. Louis City and Clayton. And so, yeah, this is the neighborhood. But I've spent the last 37 years in action.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I have an uncle who used to live just off a skinker. And a cousin who lives just south of Forest Park now. But anyway, all right, let's keep talking about the 1970 World Cup. You saw Pele play, right? I mean, surely you did. Yeah, in fact, he was the captain.

He was the captain of the Brazil team. Brazil played five matches in Guadalajara. And really, I mean, Pelle was fantastic to watch. I mean, he at the time and had been, he had already been the top player in the world for over a decade at that point. And, but it's funny because my idol was Ritalino, a younger guy who was playing, you know, like an attacking midfield, a wide player. I had a lot of flare. And then, of course, there was Jersen and Tostow, very, very, very. creative playmakers more in the central part of the field.

Jarzino, who scored in every single match of that World Cup for Brazil. It was a leading score of the tournament. So it was really eye-opening for someone who loved the game and played. I was 13 and everybody had played a lot of soccer to see your idols in person and to see what the world considered to be the best team in the world of the time, even though England was a defending champion in terms of World Cup soccer. Carlos Alberto, you know what? I missful.

Carlos Alberto was the captain. Pelle was like a big leader on the team, but Carlos Alberto was the captain. He's the one that raised the trophy in Mexico City. So we saw Brazil play their group games, including beating England and Gordon Banks and Bobby Charlton and Bobby Moore 1-0 at the Estadio Halisco in Guadalajos in Guadalajos, with about roughly 75,77,000 people there. And then they played their quarterfinal match or semifinal match. And the final itself was, of course, at the Azteca, in Mexico City, the Azteca Stadium,

which was designed to hold about 110, 115,000 people. I'm convinced, you know, because I was in the stadium that day, and seeing that the aisles were full of fans as well. And I think there might have been easily 130,000 in that stadium that day, maybe more. Amazing, yeah. So you were there for that legendary Brazil, Peru, Peru quarterfinal, I guess. Yes, I was. In fact, Nene Kubei, yes, was the star of the Peruvian team.

And I had the honor of playing against him later on in the North American Soccer League, I played for San Diego and he was playing for Fort Lauderdale strikers. So that was something great for me to be able to say, yeah, I saw him playing a World Cup, but now I'm playing against him. That's so cool. I do have a question or two about that time in San Diego too. But let's talk about your dad a little bit. He famously beat England at the 1950 World Cup.

He was one of five St. Louisans on that team. You already answered my first question, which was he the first generation, immigrant. I guess he was second generation. No, it goes farther back than that. I believe it was maybe a great, great-grandfather who came over in 1850s, 1860s. And he grew up down in South St. Louis around Corondolet Park? Correct. Okay.

So what was the Italian influence on soccer in St. Louis? Was it bigger than the German influence or the Irish influence? Well, the biggest influence overall, was something called the CYC. And that was really, St. Louis remains one of the most Catholic cities in the United States. And that's due to the big waves of immigration that came in from Italy, from Ireland, and from Germany, mostly in the early 1900s. And the late 1800s, and being Catholic, it has.

having the parish schools. From what I understand, as many of the parishes and their schools had either Irish or English teacher, brothers that kind of ran the schools and the priests as well. And they knew soccer. They also knew it didn't take much to put together a soccer team. All you needed is some shirts and a ball and some woodposts. Because the story goes, they really didn't have the money at that.

time to build gymnasiums for basketball or to outfit to American gridiron football teams with helmets and pads and so on and so forth. So many, many, many kids, especially the Irish and the Italians and the Germans who were going to the Catholic schools, grew up playing oh, six or eight months of soccer each year. And then probably five or six months of baseball, in the warmer months. And they didn't play much basketball. They didn't play much American football, and they played a lot of soccer.

It became a part of the culture here in St. Louis, and all the rivalries were between the Germans and the Italians, the Irish and the Italians, the Irish and the Germans, and so forth. So it was really a hotbed of soccer. Is it still – I mean, I know that it has an MLS team, and we have, you know, we have a couple of St. Louis area players on the national team and Josh Sargent and Tim Ream and, of course, Taylor Twelman's, like, one of the best known soccer personalities in the country.

But is it still, is there still that strong grassroots foundation for soccer in St. Louis, do you think? It has changed someone. It's not so much about the neighborhoods and the ethnicity, the way it maybe was even when I was coming up as a player. But there is. The Scott Gallagher Club here in St. Louis, the Lou Fuse Club here in St. Louis. There's a couple of other pretty strong clubs as well are still producing players that move on to the national youth teams.

And certainly, Scott Gallagher, for certain, is normally among the top 10 or 15 in the nation in terms of academy teams. So it's, yeah, there's still a lot of strong soccer. and even the high school soccer here in St. Louis is still very strong. My high school, St. Louis University High School, CBC, which is Christian Brothers College, always has strong teams. Shamanad has several alumni playing in Major League Soccer right now, the Shamanaut High School. Those all happen to be Catholic high schools, but Tim Rame, those guys went to public schools. So you also have public high schools here.

produce pretty strong players. Okay. And you do have college programs still come in here to recruit pretty seriously. Indiana University, you know, even ACC teams come in here, look at St. Louis players. So you'll see St. Louis players sprinkled around some of the top NCAA NCAA teams as well. Right. Did you notice or looking back, do you recognize any sort of common style of play in St. Louis? common characteristics of play for St. Louis

teams when you played. And then, of course, as you recruited players through your coaching career at Wash You. Yeah, but there's a lot of pride here. And as far as when players step on the field are either to confront each other or to confront teams from outside

of St. Louis, the pride is front and center. And as terms of the style of play, it's very aggressive. I mean, it was basically, you know, people talk about high pressure and counter pressure and so forth, you know, as being the new trend. It's kind of always the trend here in St. Louis, in

terms of you fought for every loose ball. The quality of the field, the surfaces that we played on, not very high. So pressure paid off because there's always a bad bounce that's possible or a bad touch and whatever. So it was a pretty high

pace game, and it was largely played through the winter. That is something that you may not hear unless you're talking to guys from my era. We played a fall season with our club teams, our select teams, or whatever you would call it. So you'd start training, you know, maybe in August and you'd play your season, you know, through November. The high school season started in December. So you'd play all your high school games,

December, January, February, the state tournament was in March. So you played right through some really cold, nasty conditions. And you didn't want to do anything but run hard because that's how you stayed warm. Right. And then, you know, once the high school season was over the Junior Cup, you know, the McGuire Cup, basically, it was the competition that was next. So you'd prepare, again, with your club team to play in cup competition, and then you'd play in summer leagues as well.

So I remember being with the youth national team and with the under 20 national team, U-7 teams and so forth, and guys from other parts of the country would say, why do we have so many St. Louis guys on this team? And why are you guys all pretty good? And I said, well, I would say, well, how many games a year do you play? And a lot of these guys from the East Coast, you know, sort of prep school type guys or whatever. Yeah, they'd say, oh, we play like an 18-game season or we play a 25-game season.

I said, well, here if you count select in the fall, high school in the winter, junior cup in the spring, summer leagues, you know, we're playing, and especially if you count friendlies, or we would call those practice games, we were playing around 60 games a year. Interesting. Yeah, you're going to be better if you play 60 games a year compared to guys who might play 20 or 25. Yeah, that's interesting about the pressing and the counterpressing, because St. Louis City, the new MLS, team very much fits in the tradition of that, doesn't it? I mean, that's how basically how they play. Yeah, it's funny because Lutz Fanonsteel, who's the sporting director, German guy is a sporting director for St. Louis City.

He brought in Bradley Cornell, who had been an assistant and an interim coach, you know, with the Red Bulls. They play that. And the whole Red Bull style in Europe is that pressure and counter pressure. But they act like it's something that they invented. And I'm like, you know, we've kind of been doing that here since the early 1900s. Did it have something to do with the grass, like the grass, too? I think so. I think, you know, we'll think about it.

You know, back in the day, people would be so critical about the British soccer, and Scottish soccer, and all they do is play long ball. It's kicking run. And that's it. Well, think about it. How are you going to play the ball out of the back in those days when, and even in England, through the 70s and even the 80s? the fields were largely mud by the time you got to December, January, February.

So you had to adapt to that. So in terms of, you know, trying to play like Barcelona or play like teams from Spain or Italy or Portugal where they keep the ball on the ground a lot, it just wasn't feasible with the poor surfaces that the game was played on. Right. Yeah. I guess they've gotten a lot better at taking care of the ground, too, in England. Oh, in England, in the Premier League in particular, it's awesome. They immediately, I know a little bit about the technology,

but they immediately went to where they actually have vacuum systems under the field that sucks the water away so you don't have the puddles and all the damage in the field. And then also to heating systems under the field so that the roots continued to strengthen and growth. throughout even a cold winter season. So, yeah, the fields are impactful in the English primarily. When you went and played against teams from other regions and stuff, did you notice the difference in how they played compared to the way of saying this? When I was playing, let's say, in the 70s and 80s,

and you would go to places, let's say, like Southern California, where they have better fields and they had a lot of. longer, you know, warm weather season and so forth. And maybe more of a Latino or Hispanic influence on the game. Yeah, they, they would be, you know, really try to be more technical probably about the game than we were, although St. Louis very much prided itself on a short passing game for a long time. But this is an interesting aside. As a 16-year-old, I went with basically the Region 2 team to play in a tournament in Scotland. And at the time, this was 1973, at the time, Scottish and English soccer was almost entirely long ball.

Even the 66 England team that won the World Cup, they were called the wingless wonders. In other words, they no longer played with wingers. They just played the ball long and tried to see. what happened. And so we went to this tournament in Scotland, which had a German team, had a couple of Scottish teams, English teams, Swedish teams. So it was a pretty prestigious tournament in Scotland. And we went over there and we kind of tore that tournament up and we beat the Scottish

Youth Champion 3-0, Drum Chapel, and we ended up losing on penalty kicks in a semifinal. But the game that we lost, and we kind of were a sensation, because they'd never seen an American team actually be very competitive. And some older gentlemen came into our locker room after we lost on penalties, and they were so complimentary about how we played because this is what they actually said. And some of our guys were telling them, get out of our locker room, you old man, we don't want to hear it, you know, because we were very bitter about losing.

But I said, wait a minute, did you hear what they just said? They were comparing us to the Hungarians who had beaten England at Wembley in 1953 and spankton, you know, by about four or five goals because we were short passing and we weren't playing all the long ball stuff like the English and Scottish teams were playing at that time. So they liked the fact that we actually tried to keep the ball on the ground. So, you know, there is that element of St. Louis soccer that also passing and possession was hugely important. And it was also due to an emphasis on not being a showboat.

In fact, in St. Louis, when I was growing up, if you dribbled a lot, you were considered a ball hog. In other words, you weren't sharing the ball. To the extent that to some degree, they squelched some creativity of God. guys that maybe would have been great dribblers or would have really become big-time players because it was like, hey, no, man, if you dribble and you lose the ball, nobody can give you the ball for the next 15 minutes, you know. Right, right. I wonder, well, I guess two things.

How did that, all of that, about St. Louis soccer sort of help shape American soccer in general. Because really it was like New York and St. Louis were the places where there was like a soccer community for a long time, right? Just those two places. Yeah. Yeah, at Los Angeles to some degree, because, again, the Latino influence, I think. But you're right.

There were only certain pockets. There was like Milwaukee and Chicago who had Germans, you know, that were pretty good players. And there were some pretty good rivalries between us in Chicago, certainly later on. even Pennsylvania had some pretty good teams back in the day. They were hard. They were coal miners, basically. They just should kick you as look at you. And I played against some of those teams as well.

But yeah, you're right. It did influence U.S. soccer because, you know, you mentioned that there were the five St. Louis guys on the team that beat England in the 1950 World Cup. Even as late as the 1980, Olympic squad that I was on, there were seven or eight St. Louis. They weren't all starters, but there were seven or eight St. Louis players on the roster for the 80 Olympic squad. So, yeah, we certainly influenced it in terms of our style of play. And it was really just

fight for every ball, win the ball, and be unselfish with it. That was some of the critique that you've got about St. Louis soccer is that it was kind of cookie cutter. all the same kind of player, and not enough guys at times with the real player to take people on and so forth. Right. But, you know, it was pretty effective in terms of teamwork, in terms of passing, in terms of pressure. Yeah, you had players that all knew how to handle those situations and came to dominate, you know, many of the Olympic squads, the youth national team squads, of course, the 1950 World Cup squad. Well, you even look at the 2002 World Cup squad.

I mean, they weren't doing, they weren't, I don't know that how much they were doing high pressure, but they were, you know, sort of a bunch of high energy. Yes, high energy. And, you know, there was the advantage, too. I think, you know, foreign teams would take the U.S. team kind of lightly sometimes, too, and would pay for it. Because, you know, there were very competitive guys, like you said, high energy guys that wanted, wanted to prove themselves and maybe, you know, dreamt of playing at a higher level or getting a European contract. and had a chance to prove it, they're welcome. One of the struggles, I think, for the U.S. in soccer is just how big the country is and how many different influences there are now.

And I wonder if you... How spread out it is? Right. How do you fuse that tradition, the St. Louis tradition, with the really huge number of Latino players we have, even on our youth national teams, the U-20 World Cup is happening right now? now, 30, 40% of the players on that roster are of Mexican-American descent. How are we going to merge all this into something that's sort of distinctly American and yet coherent?

Well, it would be very cool if there was a hybrid type thing that took the best elements of all those styles that you just kind of covered there. I think the sheer numbers make it more and more competitive. I mean, we are a massive country, but it's still not quite a part of the culture in the same way it is, let's say, in Argentina. Oh, no. You know what I'm saying? But what really has changed a lot, and I had this conversation with Mike Sorber, who is, You know, he's still Bob Bradley's assistant in Toronto, but he was Bob Bradley's assistant also at a World Cup. Mike Sorber played at St. Louis University.

And according to Bora Militinovich, who's the U.S. coach in the 94 World Cup, Mike Sorber of St. Louis was the U.S. team's best player at that 94 World Cup. But Mike and I were talking about how the sport has gone totally global in the, that there are no secrets in terms of tactics and training techniques and, you know, what's working and what's not working. And, you know, he ends up for Bob Bradley traveling the world to scout players. And when you think about it, because of the Internet, you can see any training session, you can see any training technique, you can see any match, you can see any player.

it's all out there. So that does shrink the world in that regard. And people have no idea what it was like. So when I got to go to Guadalajara in 1970 as a 13-year-old and see those games in person, that was impossible for an American youth player for that to happen. Because on television. Those games weren't even on TV?

they were not so in the u.s there were there was never any soccer on tv except i remember as a kid on ABC's worldwide of sports with jim mckay they would do like a 60-minute version of the f a cup final maybe once a year and that was it uh then uh after the 74 world cup which was hosted by germany television would here in the U.S. do a 60-minute version of the Bundesliga's game of the week called soccer made in Germany. And that was on, you could see that on your PBS station starting in about 75, 76, 77 on like Saturday morning, and they would repeat it on Sunday morning. And that was the only soccer, the only soccer on television. So the only way to, you, the only way to see a high-level game would be to drive three days to get to Guadalajara or fly to Europe.

Here's a good one for you. In 78, Argentina hosted the World Cup. There were no games televised here in the U.S. You could maybe do closed-circuit television, like an auditorium and pay, you know, 20 bucks. It's coming and watch it. So there was no actual television of the 78 World Cup. here in the U.S. We drove to Guadalajara in 78,

where on Mexican television, every single game was televised. So we sat in Guadalajara and watched all the games on TV. That's crazy. So was it like 1990 when they first started showing the games on TV? Yeah, well, in the 1990 World Cup, I was one of the analysts for Turner Broadcasting. So TNT, I believe, televised 20, I want to say 26, 27 of the 56 games or 52 games, you know, whatever it was.

So not even every game was televised for the 90 World Cup. I believe the 94 World Cup is the first one that actually had every single game televised here in the U.S. So you called the U.S. games at the World Cup in 90 for T&T? Not the U.S. games. Okay. Yeah. I was, you know, I did some other group games in 90. So I think I worked, I worked only four or five games at the 90 World Cup

because we had three broadcast teams that went around it and a total of only about, you know, 26 or 27 of the games were actually broadcast. In 94, same thing. I did work 10 broadcasts for, mostly for ESPN, I think one or two of those. were on ABC, but I did not do any of the U.S. games, except on radio, I probably did a couple of U.S. games. But it was not until 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea that I worked as the analyst, all of the U.S. games, as well as the World Cup finals for ABC.

This episode has been produced with the help of William Gordon of the American Soccer Corps. No better source on the history of soccer in this country than William. and I'll put the link to the Twitter account for American Soccer Corps in the show notes. The rest of the episode, including discussion of St. Louis City, the scene around the new MLS team there, Ties playing career, including playing with Hugo Sanchez in San Diego in the late 1970s, and his ideas about improving coaching education in America will be available to patrons. Please consider joining our Patreon. The link is in the show notes.

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