US President Donald Trump celebrated his 80th birthday on Sunday by watching UFC 250 on the South Lawn of the White House, the first professional sporting event to be staged at the residence.
The event underscored Mr Trump’s decades-long association with elite sport, from high-profile boxing promotion in the late 20th century to hosting golf tournaments at his luxury resorts and attending the NBA Finals in New York this year, where he was verbally assailed by the Madison Square Garden crowd. Memorably, Mr Trump was also an active participant at the trophy presentation of the Fifa Club World Cup final last year after Chelsea defeated PSG, much to the bemusement of some of the players.
Next month the octogenarian president will trade the UFC octagon for being at the centre of the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations. While the schedule to mark the semi-quincentennial events will include formal commemorations, Washington will host more anniversary-related elite sport with the staging of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix. Philadelphia, the cradle of American independence, will be the venue for a round-of-16 Fifa World Cup knockout match on July 4. Mr Trump is also expected to attend the final on July 19 in New Jersey and to be a central figure in the trophy presentation ceremony once again.
It is fitting, perhaps, that the Fifa World Cup will continue at venues across the country until July 19, because there is a long-running tradition of significant birthdays in the US coinciding with major sporting events.
The birth of modern baseball can trace its lineage to 1876, the country’s 100th birthday, with the founding of the National League. The occasion of the 150th birthday of the US in 1926 was the year of the boxing title match between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney at the newly built Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia, watched by a record crowd delivering huge gate receipts and setting the stage for every high-profile, big-money fight spectacular since then, including UFC 250.
Intriguingly, football was a central part of the 200th birthday celebrations in 1976 with the American Bicentennial Soccer Cup contested by Italy, Brazil, England and Team America, a now largely forgotten curio from a time when the short-lived North American Soccer League was in its pomp.
US President Gerald Ford, once an elite-level college football player and arguably the most athletic US president of all, had played keepy uppies with Pele in the Rose Garden the previous year, raising the level of “active participant” far beyond those of today and underscoring soccer’s mid-1970s moment in the country.
In the absence of a formal national side in 1976, Team America was made up of the best of the foreign imports to the then wildly successful North American Soccer League, including Pele and Bobby Moore, and a smattering of domestic players. A modern-day equivalent might be a collection of MLS all-stars, including Lionel Messi, turning out in an international summer tournament.
Other household-name NASL imports from the UK, such as George Best and Rodney Marsh, were called up to the squad in 1976 but declined to participate. Italy’s Giorgio Chinaglia, who had joined Pele’s team New York Cosmos earlier that year, led the line for the US in typically muscular fashion.
The domestic press was just as combative in its appraisal of the sport in general. A piece in The New York Times published a few months before the tournament asserted that “soccer will not replace any of the popular professional sports in the US”, confirming its status back then as a sometimes mistrusted or misunderstood interloper.
The scratch nature of the Team America side meant they lacked cohesiveness in the bicentennial cup, made worse by Pele deciding not to play against the country of his birth.
The soccer dream team became the stuff of nightmares, with Team America slipping to three defeats: sinking to a 4-0 defeat by Italy, stumbling to a 2-0 defeat against Brazil and losing 3-1 to England. Brazil won the group and the cup, England finished second after a stirring comeback 3-2 win against Italy and Team America propped up the table.
Fifa describes the tournament as “groundbreaking” in hindsight, as it proved there was a market and the venues to stage a World Cup in the US. While that historical narrative is broadly accurate, it may also be overstating the bicentennial cup’s reach, given its largely forgotten status 50 years later.
Returning to the present, the US men’s soccer team started the World Cup in impressive fashion last week, brushing Paraguay aside 4-1 during the tournament’s opening weekend. If that provides an early indicator of how the summer will play out, the national team will still be competing long after the July 4 fireworks have crackled and fizzled across the nation.
While hosting rights proved a burden for Team America five decades ago and a mixed bag at the 1994 World Cup for the US national side, they have propelled other hosts to hitherto untouched heights, including Russia in 2018 and South Korea in 2002 this century.
This year’s US squad will do well to emulate their forebears, however. The US’s best finish at a football World Cup was third in 1930.
