The Game of Their Lives
The Untold Story of the World Cup's Biggest Upset
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Geoffrey Douglas's The Game of Their Lives: The Untold Story of the World Cup's Biggest Upset tells the inspirational underdog story of the 1950s World cup, a must-read for soccer fanatics.
In the late spring of 1950, eleven young immigrants' sons, most of them strangers to each other, came together for the love and fun of a game of soccer. They came from Missouri, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York, from jobs in canneries, brickyards, post offices, classrooms, and bars, to play for their country in the 1950 World Cup, resulting in what has since been called, by scores of sources for more than forty years, the greatest upset victory in the history of American sports. But no one in America at the time paid attention. Their only public honor--roughly twenty minutes' worth--was from a throng of strangers in a Brazilian mining town.
Geoffrey Douglas's The Game of Their Lives is the story of the lives of these men: their jobs, wives, sweethearts, neighborhoods, the innocence of their era, the anonymity in which they worked and played. It is the story of heroism, stoicism, and simple unsung grace. Of a time before television, endorsement contracts, movie rights for serial killers, and seven-figure idols who denigrate us all. And ultimately--though it is not a sports story--it is the story of a game, played brilliantly. A single game of soccer, the greater game of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1950 in Belo Horizonte, a Brazilian mining town, the U.S. soccer team met the British in one of the preliminary rounds of the World Cup matches. The U.S. had not qualified to go to the World Cup since 1934 and, being from a country where soccer was definitely a minor sport, had to field a semiprofessional team consisting mostly of the sons of immigrants, taught the game by older relatives. The British, by contrast, were the rulers of European soccer, considered certain to win the Cup. The U.S. won the game 1-0, staging what is still arguably the greatest upset in World Cup history. Douglas (Class), a skilled writer, is disappointing when he tries to impart an almost mythic significance to this contest on the grounds that the U.S. athletes played for little more than love of the game and asked nothing but joy. He excels and becomes almost poetic, however, in his depiction of life in the ethnic big-city ghettos from which most of the players came, such as Dago Hill in St. Louis and Kensington in Philadelphia, where trust, closeness, loyalty and a sense of being part of something were a way of life.
