The Elites
Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
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The Elites
Chapter One: The Normal Days
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The Greatest Soccer Story You’ve Never Heard
Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
The crowd of 30,000 erupted. The impossible was happening. Rocky Balboa had just knocked Apollo Creed to the canvas; the Bad News Bears were beating up on the grand Yankees. Only this was real: the top-ranked English soccer team was a goal down and the Americans were on their diagram to pulling off what remains the most astonishing upset in the history of World Cup soccer.
June 29, 1950 was a chill, overcast day in the Estadia Independencia in the small Brazilian mining town of Belo Horizonte, reminiscent of a spring afternoon along the Eastern Seaboard. Eleven American amateurs lined up in white shirts with a red sash to face the finest soccer team in the world in the first round of the World Cup finals. Only one of the Americans, the Scottish-born Ed McIlvenny, had ever played professional soccer before. His teammates included a meatpacker, a schoolteacher, a knitting machinest, a paper stripper and two mailmen, all selected from low-budget try-outs in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago and New York. They were outsiders in every sense of the word. In their last seven international matches, they had lost by a combined acquire of 45 goals to 2 and were 500-1 rank outsiders to win the World Cup.
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