August 4, before the training camp (originally planned for five weeks, although it ran longer) began, the Tornado were allowed onto the hallowed turf of the Bernabeu, Real Madrid’s famous stadium. But briefly and only for publicity purposes; where they met the great Ferenc Puskas, Honved’s, Hungary’s, Real Madrid’s and finally Spain’s ‘galloping major,’ the godfather to Kap’s daughter.
Prepared and able, the first week of camp proved hugely disappointing for the squad of young players, all of whom were eager to put foot, head and or hand to ball. The training kits and game uniforms had not arrived, the practice field was not yet available; and Kap seemed more interested in wooing the Spanish press and in showcasing his charges, as well as himself, than with coaching his team, who one newspaper headline referred to as KAP’s MUCHACHOS (young boys). Renshaw added fuel to the ‘disorganization theory’ when he related that Kap told him to report to Speke Airport, now the John Lennon Airport (approximately 25 minutes from the center of Liverpool) for a flight to Lisbon, but was handed a ticket for Madrid.
Book, who kept a diary of the tour, said “we had too much time on our hands,” a highly unusual occurrence at training camp, where time not spent training is most often devoted to resting, recovering and preparing, and the impression grew that the camp was not at the top of Kip’s list of priorities. The first training session occurred on Tuesday, August 8, when the squad played an impromptu pickup game amongst themselves, in their street clothes. The second, the first official training session, the practice field secured, was held on the 10th, where Kip was finally able to lay out the way he wanted the game played and assess the talent arrayed before him; the contracted and those seeking contracts.
Book, when asked about the highly publicized two-a-days, replied that most of their second sessions, when held, were termed ‘strategic meetings,’ where Real Madrid game films were shown and each player given a task, e.g. evaluation of Real’s set plays, or how many passes were made before shots on goal were taken. During these ‘strategic meetings’ the Tornado head coach, who Book said “hated the long ball English style of play,” extolled the virtues of the short passing game.
Players recall Kap, in his sometimes uncertain English, repeatedly urging the team to “PUSH the ball under the ground,” his version of ‘PLAY the ball on the ground,’ which can be extremely effective when you have the players to perform it. His concept in motion, the time had come for Kip to forge his players into a team that could compete at the top level of the North American game.
From Madrid the camp moved to Alcala De Guadaria, the second of their five training camp sites, to Seville, their third, both in southern Spain; to Tangier, Morocco, their fourth; and finally to Oviedo, their fifth, in the north of Spain. During this period the team played five games, four in Spain and one in Morocco (5 in 28 – a game every five to six days) which enabled Kip to evaluate his players under match conditions, and to make what he hoped would be his final squad selections.
During the tour the Tornado travelled the world as an American soccer team, with just one American on the team, Jay Moore, from St. Louis, Missouri, who made one appearance for the club during the 1968 NASL season. They spent hundreds of hours in buses, of varying quality, including trips in the Iranian mountains over dirt roads, estimated at over seven hours. And in planes, also of varying quality, the journey from Manila, the Philippines, to Brisbane, Australia, said to have taken 18 hours.
They were introduced to a diverse range of climates, foods, cultures, languages and entertainment; lounged on some of the finest beaches in the world, in Cannes, Bondi, Fiji and Tahiti; and visited some of the world’s most popular historical sites, among them Christopher Columbus’s Tomb in Seville, Spain, the Acropolis, in Greece, and the Taj Mahal, at Agra, India. The team, who played in front of crowds numbering up to 47,000, drew attention wherever they travelled and were frequently mobbed, usually by the curious, though occasionally by the not so friendly. And they experienced a number of close calls.
In East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) a mob beat frenziedly on the team bus with sticks as it edged toward the border check point with India, the players genuinely in fear of their lives; the onslaught abating only when a quick thinking player threw a large portion of the club’s practice balls out of the back of the vehicle. At the checkpoint, half of the squad were refused entry to India and spent over 36 hours in the Bengali jungle. In Calcutta, India, they were forced to hide in their hotel for 48 hours, due to political riots, before sneaking out in the wee hours on the morning.
Stones were thrown at the team in Singapore, by the mostly Chinese crowd, after which they were forced to wait in the dressing room for a few hours, before being escorted from the stadium by armed police. And as a special pre-Christmas treat, the club arranged two games in Saigon during the Vietnam War, December 14 & 16, only 45 days before the Tet offensive. Brian Harvey, who played for the club through the 1970 season, recalls seeing tracers when the squad flew into Saigon, while Book said that “when we went up the river, we could hear the bombing and see the smoke.”
Billy Crosbie, who kept a separate accounting of the tour, remembers standing on a street corner in Saigon with Eddie Hall and being screamed at by an American MP, who had mistaken them for G.I’s, and told in broad language to be on the lookout for a female who rode passenger on a scooter. Who travelled around looking to throw hand grenades at Americans.
But the closest call of them all, the team believed, that has been frequently reported, was one they were not part of and could not relate to until after it had occurred. To repeat the story: On October the 12th 1967, the Tornado squad – the Angel of Death perched securely on their shoulders – missed their scheduled flight from Athens, Greece, to Nicosia, Cyprus, that was blown up. Kap calculated he had time during the layover from Istanbul to show the team, “his boys” as he referred to them, the sights of Athens, including the Acropolis, and the nearby ancient port of Piraeus (Piraievs) and still make the flight. Thankfully he didn’t.
The assumed targets, Greek Cypriot leader General George Grivas and his staff – who were rumoured to be on the plane, and on a ‘secret’ peace mission – also missed the flight, deliberately it has been suggested, changing to a later departure on a premonition… sloppy timing and a sense of foreboding allegedly saving the lives of both parties. It’s a gripping story, but it’s not true, at least from the Tornado end, for the players were still in their beds in Istanbul when the explosion occurred, and they were not booked on the flight.
The Aviation Safety Network report confirms that the British European Airways de Haviland DH-106 Comet 4, registration G-ARCO, flight number 284, left London-Heathrow airport for Athens at 21:45 hours on October 11th, and arrived at the Greek capitol at 1:11 hours on the 12th. Changed to Cyprus Airways flight CY284 bound for Nicosia, refilled and serviced, the plane left Athens at 2:31 hours. Reporting in at 2:36 and 2:46 hours, the flight was later cleared to change to the Nicosia FIR frequency.
The Aviation Safety Network report stated that ‘immediately after contacting Nicosia, contact was lost. At that moment a high explosive device detonated within the cabin under seat 4A or 5A.’ The explosion caused the plane to break up and the loss of 66 souls (59 passengers and 7 crew). An enduring Tornado myth, a number of the players I talked to at a World Tour re-union in Dallas in 2,014 still felt it was the flight they were booked on.
Father to the boys Kap might have been, but he was also a stern taskmaster, who according to Wilson “was the boss and wanted everyone to know it.” He was also never slow to offer his opinion, particularly when he wanted to score a point. At the training camp in Spain, in front of Hunt, Kap referred to Dundee United as the team “who masqueraded as Dallas.” And when Ed Fries briefly joined the tour, he was quick to snub him, and to inform Hunt of his dislike for the club’s GM, which turned out, for him, to be a seed well sown.
His rules laid down early, he expected them to be followed, and acted as the sole adjudicator when they were not. When he considered that a player or players had failed to live up to his expectations, on or off the field of play, the offender was dispatched, a number suddenly and ruthlessly. The first to leave the tour, Swedish player Olle Svenson, had been released in Madrid for complaining about the lack of organization at training camp. One of the Dutch players, along with a couple of his teammates (bored or seeking a trip home) for dropping a Stetson full of waste water, his allegedly, onto Kap’s steak dinner from a hotel balcony left soon after; though it has been suggested that the player, disillusioned with the organization of the tour, called his father who recommended that he return home. Englishman Graham Stirland was given his marching orders in a restroom at the Tehran airport, with Dr. Frank, the hatchet man, soon to be released himself in Australia.
Wilson wrote that Kap told Randorf to “get his (club) jacket. Get his pants. Get his shoes (boots). Give him a ticket and $100.00. He’s out!” The player was then escorted to the departure lounge and was gone which, as the club’s public relations officer explained; “Put the fear of God in all of us.” According to Renshaw, the contracts the players had signed allowed Kap to release them at any time, with the condition that the club provided transportation back to the player’s homeland. As the tour progressed other members of the squad were to test Kap’s patience.
A shrinking talent pool and Renshaw’s ruptured appendix (he soon rejoined the team) led to a player crisis after the fifth game in Oviedo – the last of the five training camp games, September 20 – by which time the active squad was down to a lean 13, two of them goalkeepers. (This did not include Dr. Frank, who had been named as a substitute for the game. The former bellhop continued to be listed in newspapers as a player, but none of the team I spoke to remember him making an appearance. Though the lone game report I have seen, in Stoffels’ book, from the first training camp game in Cordoba, shows Randolf played at right back and received a ‘mediocre rating-which almost certainly was the game where he was ‘found out’).
With the more intense part of the schedule due to kick off in 20 days (a punishing 40 games in 125 days) Kap was desperately short of players. He moved the squad to Nice – having allowed them to vote on the destination, they were told to “pick anywhere in Europe” – and departed for points north in search of more young malleable football talent. Kap left the squad under the supervision of Dr. Frank, who Renshaw wrote in his memoir, Just a Life, “had no hold on us.” Alone for 10 virtually unsupervised days in the heart of the French Riviera, the squad did pretty much as they wished. Renshaw wrote: “I can vouch for the fact that there are many, many worse places in which to have to spend ten days, with a seemingly unlimited budget, in the hands of a former bellhop from Copenhagen.”
Kap returned from his recruiting trip with the signatures of Crosbie, Bobby Roach, John Stewart and Graham Stirland, Englishmen all. All, except for the soon to be released Stirland, who made it to Dallas to represent the Tornado in the NASL.
Crosbie, who played seven games for the club in the 1968 season, had not been asked to join the team at the first go round and felt the opportunity had passed him by. But a telegram to meet Kap at the Regent Hotel in Liverpool, if he ‘was still interested,’ changed his plans for the evening and the next few years. Signed and a short haircut later (Kap insisted on tonsorial neatness, clean shoes, firm handshakes and good manners) Crosbie, accompanied by new teammate Bobby Roach, took the 8:00 a.m. train from Lime Street Station to London the next day. Those two then made the short journey to Heathrow Airport for their flight to Nice, where they landed on September 30. It was a close run thing though, for if Crosbie had been working that night – he was a Liverpool Corporation bus conductor – he would not have received the telegram in time and therefore would have missed the meeting.
Part Three: The 40 In 125+4-Reality
Part Four: Kap’s Recruitment Methodology – Life Changing
Part Five: The Combined Training Camp, World Tour and Mini-Tour Game Results