Brown and Wood, Blair and Battles
From the 1930 US World Cup team two returned home, albeit temporarily, not to America but to their origins, to Scotland. They were Jim Brown and Alex Wood. Brown, having arrived in America in 1928, aged nineteen, came back to for forty games over two seasons from 1932 at Manchester United and then went on to play for Brentford, Spurs and Guildford. Wood, on the other hand, who arrived in America aged fourteen in 1921 with his parents, would start his playing career in Chicago and move almost ever eastwards, to New York in 1930, Leicester City in 1933, then to Nottingham Forest, finishing his playing career in 1939 at Chelmsford. But then both would return to the USA and die there. Jim Brown in New Jersey and Alex Wood back in Gary, Indiana, the Chicago suburb, where his family had settled.
Two more, who might have otherwise been in the running for a place in that World Cup squad, had also followed similar paths but by 1930 already moved on. Both had returned not to play in England but in Scotland and both would go on to win Scottish caps, if in one case only briefly. Danny Blair was Jim Brown's equivalent. Brown had been born in 1908 in Kilmarnock, part of sporting family that would produce footballers and rugby-players, who would represent their country. Blair was born three years earlier, in Parkhead in Glasgow, of a coal-merchant father born in Ireland and a half-Irish, Scots-born mother, and was still there in 1911, before he too crossed the Atlantic first to Toronto in Canada in 1923 aged eighteen before the following year crossing the border into the USA, signed by the baseball-based franchise, Providence Clamgiggers . However, he stayed just a season, returning to Glasgow in 1925, joining Clyde. He was to stay with his local club for six years. It was there he was receive the first of his Scottish caps, in 1928 at full-back. He could play full-back or wing-half. And it was to be one of eight such appearances until 1932, interrupted by a move to Aston Villa at a time when English league clubs would not release its non-English players for international duty. In Birmingham he would play one hundred and twenty-nine times in the league, leaving on the club's relegation to join Blackpool for almost as many games with instant effect. In the Second Division at the time of his joining Blackpool was promoted in 1937 at the end of his first season and he would play on for another two seasons until in 1939 the War brought an end to his career. However, he stay on in the town, working for the Post Office. In fact he and his wife, also Scots-born, would both die there, he in 1985 , aged eighty.
And, as Blair might be seen as a returning Brown, so Barney Battles was Alex Wood with equal talent but a tad more pedigree.Battles had been named after his father, Barney Battles Snr, who had been born in Springburn in Glasgow in 1875, joining Hearts at nineteen and Celtic the following year, remaining, with a couple of excursions at a time when players were free agents, at Parkhead for eight seasons. Like Blair he could play at full- and half-back and he too attracted the interest of the selectors. In 1901 he featured in all three internationals, an 11-0 win against Ireland and two draws against Wales and England. But that was it. He would play his last game for Celtic in 1903, turn out for Dundee and Kilmarnock and by 1905 at the age of just thirty he was dead, of pneumonia and leaving a wife, who was just pregnant. Their son was born that same year on 12th October in Musselburgh, he would die there too, on 15th November 1979, and in the meantime had managed a childhood growing up in Edinburgh and America, a football career that began across the pond and a return home for eight seasons at Hearts.
The arrival in America took place in May 1923. He came with his mother and his elder sisters, was just seventeen, but once more with a Scottish football education, and they settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the river from Boston. A year later he was a naturalised American and three months after that he was playing, unlike his father as a forward, for the Boston Soccer Club. There he stayed four years, made one hundred and sixteen appearances and scored forty-one times. With him in the team the club would finish fourth, third, second and first consecutively in the American Soccer League. At which point the decision was made to return. Having travelled with just his mother they arrived in Glasgow on 1st July 1928. Both Celtic and Rangers are said to have shown interest but he went to Hearts and seemingly straight into summer training. On 3rd August he featured in a first intra-club match, scoring four times, and twice more in the next. In the league that year he would net thirty-one times, sixty-three in all games, this whilst the Boston Soccer Club back in the USA without him was falling to sixth. His goal-scoring would lead to his inclusion in the Scottish League XI team that same year and over the next two, when he would be selected for the Scotland team itself. It was against Wales, a draw at home with Battles scoring the equaliser but that was it. At the age of just twenty-five it seemed he was surplus to Scotland's requirement, replaced by a long, long series of others over several seasons. It seems odd but there were reasons. The first was that Battles was Scots-born but not Scots. Seven years earlier he had renounced "his allegiance and fidelity...particularly to George V King of Great Britain and Ireland" and he already had a cap, at outside-right for the USA in 1925. Perhaps the question of nationality might have been enough for disqualification but the game in Montreal in losing to Canada, 1-0, would certainly have been. England would be sure to point it up, just as they would three years later in the case of
Joe Kennaway, who had played, again in 1925, in the return USA-Canada fixture, in goal but for Canada.
Barney Battles would play eight seasons for Hearts, retiring through injury in 1936. He still holds the club's scoring record, forty-four goals in thirty-five matches in 1930-31. And after playing he would remain in Scotland, turning to physiotherapy, then to sports journalism and finally to running a pub in Edinburgh. And it would there he died in 1979, aged seventy-four. One wonders, if it were still as an American.