Kensington’s Walter Bahr upset England, then took down North Catholic

The score remained tied after regulation, sending the 1964 City Championship into overtime and keeping the shivering players at 29th and Clearfield Streets until someone could score.

The leather soccer balls felt frozen, the players from Frankford High and North Catholic rubbed Vaseline on their skin, and the wind was like needles piercing across the spotty grass field. It would have been easy for Frankford to fold as North, the champion of the Catholic League, had more scoring chances and seemed destined to find the net.

So Walter Bahr — who 14 years earlier helped author the greatest upset in the history of American soccer — gathered his group of teenage boys and asked them what they wanted to do.

“He said, ‘How do you want to play this?’ He gave us an option to play conservative or he emphatically said, ‘Do you want to play to win?’” said Bob Peffle, one of Frankford’s captains. “Of course, the whole team says, ‘We want to play to win.’”

Bahr will be remembered Friday before the U.S. plays England in the World Cup for assisting on the stunning goal in 1950 that handed the Americans a 1-0 win. But it was his motivation 14 years later — pushing his players to keep going even when they couldn’t feel their legs — that still resonates with the teenagers he gathered on that frozen field in North Philly.

Bahr grew up on Kensington’s Rorer Street, attended Northeast High and Temple, and became one of the country’s first great players, good enough that a Scottish player famously said that Bahr could have played in England. Two of his sons won Super Bowls as kickers, and Bahr followed his career by becoming a legendary college coach. He was inducted in 1976 into the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

But first, Bahr had to guide a group of teenagers from the River Wards — the group of Northeast Philadelphia neighborhoods that were the first to embrace soccer — through an epic city title game.

“It was the coldest day in the world,” midfielder Bill Snyder said. “You can’t imagine how cold it was.”

The temperature was in the 30s that Tuesday afternoon, but it was the heavy wind that made it cold enough for the players’ legs to cramp. The Public League and Catholic League schedules ran through November, pushing the City Championship into December.

“Hey, I’m a Kenzo, you know what I mean,” said Larry Sullivan, who grew up on Gransback Street. “I didn’t think they would call the game off, but they got close to it.”

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North — a soccer powerhouse until it closed in 2010 — won 11 straight Catholic League crowns from 1957-67 while Frankford shared the Public League titles in the 1960s with Central, Mastbaum, and Dobbins. The teams played pickup throughout the year, beginning in August, when they would play soccer on the basketball courts at McVeigh Playground while the grass field was used for baseball.

And now the neighborhood rivalry — “we were true buds,” Snyder said — would finish in the city final.

“Oh my God. The wind chill was probably minus something,” said John Albright, one of Frankford’s forwards. “We all came with long-sleeve shirts and our mothers’ nylons. Mr. Bahr told us we had to get that [stuff] off. You’re not wearing any of that. He was a straight shooter. One of the nicest men you’ll ever want to meet. Just a man’s man.”

Bahr was just 23 years old when he left Kensington in the summer of 1950 for Brazil. He moonlighted as a professional soccer player, but his real job was as a physical education teacher.

Most of the United States, Bahr recalled a few years before his death in 2018, didn’t even know the World Cup was happening. A teammate — Kensington’s Benny McLaughlin — had to drop out because he couldn’t get off work. The sport was very much a niche in America, but it was king in the neighborhoods that fed Frankford and North Catholic.

Soccer boomed there after World War II thanks to European immigrants who came to work in the mills and live in places like Kensington, Frankford, Fishtown, and Port Richmond. The mill workers would play in the afternoon after their shifts ended as neighborhood kids watched.

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“If they were short a guy, they would put the bigger kids into the game,” said Sullivan, who grew up in Kensington and played for North Catholic in that blustery City Championship game. “These guys could play. Everyone could play. Everyone played soccer. They were just good soccer players. They grew up on it in the ‘40s and ‘50s and kept it going.”

The kids from North and Frankford played on grass at Lighthouse in Kensington and McVeigh in Harrowgate and on cinders at Newts in Fishtown and Cohocksink in Port Richmond. Soccer was what they did.

“It was a community,” Sullivan said. “A culture.”

It had been more than a decade since Bahr’s World Cup heroics, but he was still playing professionally when he coached Frankford. His Frankford players knew about the England game, but there was no way for them to watch it back then. Their Friday practices provided enough of a glimpse of who their coach was.

“He would bring his boots out, put them on, and we’d do a little scrimmage and he would play,” Peffle said. “He would play on with the young guys, like the sophomores on the team. Listen, when I say he could still do it: It wasn’t even close. He was that good.”

The Americans, Bahr recalled, entered that World Cup game against England as 500-1 underdogs. Soccer was just starting to spread in America, but it was born in England. That didn’t faze the U.S. as Bahr found Joe Gaetjens, who captained the U.S. that game, for a goal late in the first half. The Americans held on the rest of the way.

“The Brazilians, from the start of the game until the end of the game, they were rooting for us,” Bahr told The Inquirer in 2010. “And when it ended, they stormed the field and they carried off some of our players. At first, some of us didn’t realize why they cheered for us the entire game rather than some for the British and some for our team. It was because if we won, England probably would not play in the final game.”

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Bahr was not only a great player — “He’s 15 years older than us, on the field playing, making us look like fools,” Albright said — but his understanding of the game’s technical side always seemed to be ahead of everyone. He drilled his team to play “two touches,” bolstered his defense at times with a stopper and sweeper, scheduled a trip each season to play the Naval Academy’s plebe team, and gave his goalkeeper individual instruction before that was common.

And it was Bahr’s big adjustment — after his players told him they wanted to play to win — that helped Frankford win that city title. He dropped Peffle from striker to midfield and bumped Snyder to striker after he scored in the first half from the midfield. The move worked.

“He said, ‘Billy, you’re going to do it.’ It was my time to do it,” Snyder said. “Bobby Peffle served me a ball from about 30 yards out, I went up to the keeper, flicked it over the keeper into the goal, and that was the end of the game. It was a great game and a great finish, but we were so tired that we just went our separate ways.”

The Frankford kids saw at practice how talented their coach was and then saw in his office how influential he could be. Bahr called Penn State’s coach, telling him he had three kids who could play for him but needed scholarships. The coach never saw Frankford play, so Bahr told him they were good enough.

“He hung up the phone and said, ‘You all have scholarships to Penn State.’ That was it,” Albright said. “That’s how much drag he had back in the day.”

Albright lasted just a year at Penn State after arriving on campus as a 17-year-old from Juniata Park.

“They told me they had a keg of beer and they played cards every night at the fraternity,” Albright said. “I said, ‘What the hell. It doesn’t get any better than this.’ So I stopped by for my cup of coffee and lost my scholarship at the end of my freshman year.”

He returned home, enlisted in the service, and went to see his old soccer coach after he was done. Albright said he was ready for college, and Bahr made another call, landing him a scholarship at Hartwick College in upstate New York. Albright’s car was packed to leave in the morning when Bahr called. Albright couldn’t go to Hartwick, Bahr told him.

“I just got the job at Temple,” Bahr said. “Would you play for me at Temple?”

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Albright played at Temple for Bahr, where he coached for four seasons before moving to Penn State. Albright met his wife, Patty, who attended the Temple games because her brothers — the Sullivans from North Catholic — played for Bahr. Their son, Chris Albright, scored a memorable goal at the 2000 Olympics, was on the 2006 World Cup roster, and played 14 seasons in MLS to join Bahr as one of the city’s finest soccer exports.

“To say he was influential in my life would be an understatement,” John Albright said of Bahr. “He had a hand in our entire life.”

Sullivan coached for years at Father Judge and Villanova, and his son Brendan was a captain at Penn. Brendan’s son, Quinn, plays for the Union and could be in the Olympics in two years. Cavan Sullivan, Brendan’s youngest son, is a promising prospect in the Union’s academy.

Snyder was a longtime coach at Frankford and his three sons became coaches in South Jersey after playing in college. Peffle coached La Salle High for 28 seasons, retiring in 2014 as one of the Catholic League’s all-time great coaches.

Soccer seemed confined then to the Northeast Philly neighborhoods, but the kids who froze that day at 29th and Clearfield ended up spreading the game throughout the region. It all traces back to Bahr, who put his players in position to create a moment they could hold onto like the one he had against England. And when it was over, they just went home. It was finally time to get warm.

“I tell the story all the time about when people ask me who my high school coach was,” Snyder said. “I say, ‘If you don’t know my high school coach, you don’t know soccer.’ It’s one of those things.”