AMERICAN CONNECTIONS By Geoff Fox

BEFORE the Oxford–Cambridge match in 1961 there had been rumours of an Easter tour to the States, and at the post-match dinner it became clear that the trip was definitely on. And so it was that, a few weeks later, a party of 16 left Glasgow airport on an Icelandic Airways flight (the low-cost airline of choice at the time).

The victorious Oxford team was based on a very tough defence, including three Rhodes scholars from the States. They didn’t want to make the trip home, but Mike Gillette, Oxford’s ex-West Point attack man, came with us and worked hard to induct us into

American rules. (At that time in the UK we played 12-a-side with no substitutions and very little protective kit, apart from gloves and lightly padded caps. No offsides, either – and in the Oxford Parks the field was restricted only by ‘natural’ boundaries including the university cricket square on one side and flower beds on the other.)

We recruited one or two guest players, including the excellent George Metcalfe from Purley and England – instantly dubbed by the Baltimore Press ‘the veteran stickman’. Oxford’s David Wilkinson, who went on to play for England, was one of the co-captains.

Among the Cambridge contingent was Mike Brearley, later to become the doyen of England cricket captains and as agreeable a touring companion as you could wish for. He had picked the game up very swiftly as a freshman at Cambridge only that season, and

his tactical and technical improvement on tour, game by game, was remarkable.

The inspiration behind the expedition was Terry Allsop, the Cambridge goalkeeper. He was an extraordinarily determined character – the ultimate glass-half-full man. Despite having a right arm that that was foreshortened below the elbow, he played first-team cricket, rugby and lacrosse for Cheadle Hulme School; climbed mountains; and was reputed to hit a golf ball many a mile. He was an outstanding goalkeeper who played for the South and for England (in fact, the South, largely comprising players from

Oxbridge, beat the North in 1961 and 1962 with Terry in goal). The last tour to the States had been made in 1926, but Terry was undaunted. He simply decided that the trip would happen and then filled in the necessary administrative gaps. All of us were, and are, much in his debt.

Three stops west

We flew via Reykjavik and Goose Bay, or maybe it was Gander. Whichever it was, we didn’t see much of it, as it was dark as we shivered over to a wooden hut in the corner of an airfield and were issued with mugs of soup. But from the moment we arrived in

New York the hospitality was superb. We flew on down to Baltimore where a distinguished figure in lounge suit and full Indian head-dress greeted the team. To each of us he presented a new lacrosse stick; wooden, of course, and individually crafted by native Canadians on a reserve in Quebec.

Our team bus awaited us, driven by the sardonic, wise-cracking Frank, self-appointed baggage master, coach and counsellor. Our official coach and manager was the urbane and witty ‘Dicky’ Zimmern, whose PR, enthusiasm and geniality were matchless but whose knowledge of the American game, as he freely admitted, was not much greater than ours. We began in Maryland, the heartland of US lacrosse. From there the tour moved steadily north, fixture by fixture, via New York city to Boston. We struggled to master the American rules and tactics – I was penalized within minutes of the start of the first game for ‘setting up a moving pick’ – and getting used to helmets and body armour was tricky, too. I’d played against touring American teams in the UK and seen all the gear, but that was about it.

Our record was not impressive. We lost, though never heavily, to Washington and Lee, the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins, Army (West Point), Harvard and Yale. Towards the end of the tour, as we adjusted to the rules and tactics, we beat Holy Cross College 13–5 at Worcester, outside Boston, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 7–2.

Johns Hopkins had visited the UK in 1958, winning eight straight games, including victories over Oxford–Cambridge (18–2) and All England (10–1). I played against them for Kenton (7–13) and the South (1–13), and had never seen a team like them for skill, fitness and tactical organization. In Baltimore, followingthe instigation I suspect of their respected coach, Robert Scott, Hopkins played us under UK rules, as a kind of courtesy and to demonstrate the English game to the locals. In front of a crowd of 3,500, they defeated us 12–9. The press were kind to us, describing our stick work as ‘superior’, and off the field we could not have been made more welcome. We stayed in private homes in Baltimore, where my host was ‘Boots’ Ives, a member of the Hopkins team which represented the States at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1932. His son Jack was in the current Hopkins squad.

We were entertained to tea or something equally innocuous by the young ladies of the most desirable sorority house at the University of Maryland – male undergraduates spoke of our visit in awed tones, as if we had broken into Fort Knox. The homes of our hosts seemed awash with daughters and their friends, and the odd Oxbridge heart was, temporarily, left behind in Baltimore. We met senators in their private offices in Washington, were entertained as VIPs at the UN, elevatored to the top of the Empire

State building in New York, photographed with executives of Exxon, and serenaded by the celebrated Wiffenpoofs glee club at Yale. If all this sounds innocent and wide-eyed, readers must realize that transatlantic travel for students was not so common at that time.

We came back to England pretty much agreed that boundaries, offside and substitutions made for a faster, more skilful game. I brought back the second-hand arm and shoulder guards that I’d been given on tour and played in them ever after. If I’d been allowed to also bring my helmet I wouldn’t have been brained and bloodied a couple of years later by Alan Marsland, a mad axeman who played for Old Hulmeians – I can still find the lump on my skull where I was stitched up late one Saturday afternoon at Withington Hospital. Probably several older readers have similar souvenirs of Alan’s precise stickwork.

Of course, we cared about our record, but not too much – it had been a great experience. I gave talks and slide shows about the tour at pie–and–peas suppers at Rochdale, Cheadle, South Manchester and my own club, Old Mancunians. It’s possible that our trip lit the way for later World Cups and tours, and so to changes in the rules that have led to the present form of the game.

New beginnings

Personally, the tour left me with an itch to return to the States, and in 1966–67 I spent the year as an exchange teacher at Newton High School, just outside Boston. In the spring the school decided to introduce lacrosse. Living on my English salary plus a small subsidy from the English-Speaking Union, my family was technically below the poverty line, so I was glad to earn some extra dollars as one of the four coaches to the newly formed squad. On day one, 70 boys turned up. Money helped – the school provided sticks, helmets, body armour; the lot. The football coach sent us all his hulking defensive linemen to keep them fit and to improve their agility.

Our Harvard-educated head coach surveyed the assorted adolescents, awkwardly clutching their sticks, and said: ‘Well gentlemen, and I’ve no reason to suppose there’s anyone here who is not a gentleman, let me make one thing clear. You’re not out here to enjoy yourselves, you’re out here to play a game.’ Even though I’d discovered in my English literature classroom that irony was a waste of effort, I still thought he was making some kind of joke to relax the novices. Not a bit of it. We trained five afternoons a week after school, for two hours a session. Within three weeks we were playing our first game. Our opponents were a high school team who’d played lacrosse for years. Their town was about 40 miles away. We changed in the locker rooms at Newton, got into the yellow school bus and drove round the Boston peripheral highway, Route 128 (four or five lanes each way, even in 1967). We played, got back in the bus in full kit without a word to the other lot, and drove home. No showers, no after-match tea and biscuits here. We’d lost something like 5–3 which, given that none of our team had picked a stick up three weeks earlier, seemed okay to me.

On the bus, there was dead silence for 20 miles or more on the return journey. Seated in front of me were two of our younger players, who hadn’t even made it off the bench onto the field. One of them muttered a couple of words and made a quiet joke. Instantly, one of our co-captains strode down the bus and struck him hard on the shoulder. ‘Have you no pride?’ he yelled.

When I left MGS in 1969 to teach at Exeter University, I knew my lacrosse-playing days were over. There were no men’s teams in Devon and Bath had not then started up. I’d had 10 or so seasons with Old Mancunians, and had shared in a sad decline which took the club from being one of the top sides in the country to the Third Division. In the early seventies Old Mancs folded up, and an unsympathetic head replaced the game at the school with hockey.

In the last couple of years, with the help of coaches from the clubs and the support of the school hierarchy, lacrosse has been reintroduced at MGS. Instigated by the evergreen Don Bennett and myself, an increasingly geriatric generation of Old Mancs lacrosse players has contributed to funds to buy sticks and kit for boys to try out the game. And now, to my great pleasure, the men’s team from Exeter University (where I worked for more than 30 years) is about to begin its second season in the league.

My wooden stick and those second-hand American armguards are still in the garage, just in case I can get on as a substitute in an OAP five-minutes-each-way game somewhere. When I was 19 and playing for Kenton in 1957–58, Hampstead sometimes fielded a chap in their attack who must have been close to 70. I believe his name was Norman Pearson. Every now and again his skipper, leaning on his stick in defence, would yell, ‘More effort, Norman! For God’s sake, give it more effort!’

Geoff Fox learned lacrosse as a boy at Manchester Grammar School (MGS). He played for Kenton in a championship winning season (1957–58) while serving in the RAF during his National Service, for Oxford (1958–61), and for Old Mancunians through the Sixties. He taught at MGS and helped to run the lacrosse club there, which in those days fielded five teams each Saturday. In 1969 he left Manchester for a post at Exeter University.