On Frame: The impact of Pelé's visit to Howard University

Washington, D.C., has no lack of soccer legends. Many of the game’s greats have plied their trade in the District — names like Johan Cruyff, Mia Hamm, Abby Wambach, Hristo Stoichkov and Marco Etcheverry.

The city has hosted World Cup matches, Olympic matches and more U.S. men’s national team matches than any other city. D.C.’s population is diverse and multicultural and, for years, has been enamored with the game of soccer.

To locals, though, one name might rise above them all.

Lincoln “Tiger” Phillips, who moved to the United States from his native Trinidad in the late ’60s, was a standout goalkeeper and a mainstay on a series of professional teams in and around the District in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He’d go on to coach in nearby Virginia and Maryland and, for a time, was a goalkeeper coach for the U.S. national teams. Scores of children attended his goalkeeper camps.

But none of that work rises to what Phillips did during the early ’70s at Howard University, the famed historically Black university in Northwest D.C.

Years ago, while researching a piece on MLS’ near-total lack of Black head coaches, I spoke with Phillips. I also flipped through a collection of his papers and photographs, relics that spanned five decades of his career. In that collection, I spotted something remarkable — a photograph of Pelé, arguably the sport’s greatest player ever, alongside a collection of Howard players in 1973. The caption offered little in the way of guidance.

It simply read: “Pele visits Howard University. L to R: Ian Bain, Trevor Mitchell, Desmond Alfred, William Aboko Cole and asst. coach Michael Billy Jones.”

The story of Pelé’s visit to Howard isn’t as simple as a standard photo-op. To understand how he ended up posing alongside a handful of Bison players, you first have to understand what Howard University’s men’s soccer program was in the early ’70s. Howard’s story is far from untold. It has been expertly told by several writers, from the late Grant Wahl to Meadowlark Media’s Mark Wright, whose documentary “Redemption Song” is essential viewing.

Yet decades later, the story still captivates.

Lincoln Phillips arrived at Howard in 1970 as a part-time coach; he also was a player/coach for the American Soccer League’s Washington Darts. Howard hadn’t made the NCAA tournament in nearly a decade, something that changed quickly upon Phillips’ arrival. That same year he was hired, the team not only qualified for the tournament but also advanced to the final four. Impressed by the immediate turnaround, Howard offered Phillips a permanent contract and let him attend classes for free, giving him a chance to earn a master’s degree.

Then 28 years old, Phillips was young, charismatic and had the experience to command respect from his charges. He also had a shrewd eye for talent, and he set about recruiting players in areas that other schools had traditionally ignored. He brought in talent from Nigeria, Ethiopia and Jamaica. Perhaps most importantly, he brought in a handful of players from his native Trinidad, all attracted by the possibility of receiving a first-rate education.

His efforts immediately paid dividends. Howard’s 1971 team played a style of soccer entirely foreign to the NCAA ranks — a brutally fast-paced, high-pressing mode of play that left every opponent in its wake. Ian Bain, a pacey midfielder who’d go on to play professionally with the North American Soccer League’s Washington Diplomats, remembers one of Phillips’ core tenants.

“If I got the ball out wide, let’s say 40, 45 yards from goal, and I looked down the field and it was just me and one defender, I ran at him,” says Bain. “I can tell you this much: If you got the ball in that situation, and you didn’t run at your man, coach was going to take you off the field immediately.”

In ’71, Howard was historically dominant. They won every game they played, and they never trailed. They packed the stands on a hilltop stadium on their campus and played on a field sometimes labeled the “Dust Bowl,” a nod to its subpar playing surface. Howard matches were parties, with the university’s instructors sometimes allowing students to leave classes early to catch games, which often started in the middle of the day.

Howard stormed through the NCAA tournament and played a tense final against eight-time NCAA champion St. Louis University, the most dominant program the college game had ever seen. In the end, Phillips’ side emerged victorious, becoming the first historically Black college or university to claim an NCAA soccer title. In tears, Phillips was carried off the field by his players.

His joy would be short-lived. Just weeks later, an anonymous complaint was made accusing Howard of fielding ineligible players. The NCAA launched an investigation and immediately removed five of the team’s players from eligibility for the 1972 campaign. Howard was still competitive but hamstrung by the penalty, losing in the semifinals of the ’72 tournament. In 1973, the NCAA finally drew its investigation to a close and levied an unprecedented penalty: The school’s 1971 championship was stripped — it still remains vacant — and they were banned from postseason play in 1973.

Theories have been batted around as to why the alarm was raised on Howard. Other teams, some have speculated, were jealous of their success. Unquestionably, the team faced racial abuse from opponents and sometimes dealt with biased refereeing. Howard’s matches, almost exclusively against White opponents, were littered with red cards.

”Our opponents sometimes brought out the worst in both sides,” says Bain.

The violations that Howard was punished for were relatively minor, and Phillips hadn’t made any real attempt to break or exploit those rules for Howard’s favor. Some students were exempted from entrance exams to the university after having completed equivalent work abroad. Others had played in leagues that could at best be described semi-professional in their home country. All of Howard’s players, though, were studious. The team had a higher average GPA than any of the school’s other teams, with some crediting Phillips, who at the time was still a student himself, with keeping his players on the straight and narrow.

Five months after the NCAA levied that penalty, Pelé, along with Santos, paid a visit to the U.S. capital to play a series of friendlies against the NASL’s Baltimore Bays. It was not his first trip to D.C., and it wouldn’t be his last. In 1966, playing against the Washington Whips of the newly-minted ASL, O Rei, was a one-man wrecking crew, setting up all three of Santos’ goals in a 3-1 victory. Only a single snippet of footage exists of the match — in it, Pelé nutmegs a pair of defenders and leaves a third in his wake before setting up his side’s opener:

Pelé was a worldwide sensation in the late ’60s, but by the time he visited D.C. in 1973, his legend had been solidified by his performance at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. After leading Brazil to a third title, the Brazilian government declared him a “national treasure” and forbade Santos from ever selling him. Thanks to Pelé, Santos became a globe-trotting force throughout the ’60s and early ’70s, and the United States was a popular stop. The NASL, where Pelé finished his career in the late ’70s, was still in its infancy and didn’t have any broad appeal.

But Pelé was a different story. People turned out in droves to watch him — even the president of the United States. Richard Nixon invited Pelé to the White House ahead of Santos’ first match against the Bays in ’73. Nixon, well-known for his love of sports, had previously invited the Howard team to the White House to celebrate their championship in ’71, but the players refused, wary of being used as a political tool during the Vietnam War.

Now, Nixon couldn’t resist cracking a joke. “Howard has our nation’s finest soccer team,” Nixon told Pelé with a wink.  “But they had a little bit of a problem with eligibility.”

Nixon himself was facing a much bigger scandal, and a year or so later, he’d get run out of town.

Phillips was in goal for the Bays during one of the matches Santos played on their ’73 tour, a wild, 6-4 affair where Pelé scored Santos’ third goal directly off a corner kick. After the match, the Brazilian was pursued by a throng of adoring fans who were eager to get his jersey. When Pelé obliged, the fans persisted, asking him for his shorts. By the time he completed his jog to the locker room, he was wearing nothing but a pair of “bikini-syle underwear,” according to the Associated Press. The fans wanted that, too.

“I always wear a spare pair of underwear underneath,” Pelé told the media after the match, “just in case.”

Phillips had been dizzied by the Brazilian during the match. He had no chance on any of the three goals Pelé knocked past him.

“He got lucky that day, he knocked a few in,” Phillips told The Athletic some 50 years later. “Ronaldinho, Messi, all these guys are very tricky. They surprise you with all their whimsical and mysterious movements. Sometimes even they themselves don’t know what they’re going to do in the next quarter second. Pelé’s main thing was deception. Sun-Zu once said, ‘When you’re fighting your enemy, make him feel like you’re near when you’re far, or far when you’re near.’ Pelé was an expert at that. He always had you thinking he was going to do something else.”

Few were more well-connected in the local D.C. soccer community than Phillips, who decided to invite Pelé to Howard. Aside from playing and coaching, he’d also taken up a role as a spokesperson for soccer for the D.C. department of parks and recreation.

“The problem we had in soccer at that time was that not many Blacks were really involved in the game,” said Phillips. “And so at Howard we did a lot of work in the inner-city, we did a lot of promotions, we had posters in all the recreation departments of our players demonstrating skills and what not. I thought it would be a good idea for him to bless Howard University with his presence.”

Howard’s players needed the pick-me-up. Banned from the postseason in 1973, some felt they had little to play for. There was talk, of course, of reclaiming the title, of redeeming what many felt was a grave injustice, but there was also internal strife amongst the squad, and it showed. Midway through the ‘73 season, they started to do something that had been previously unthinkable in years past: lose games. Pelé’s visit came at a fortunate time.

O Rei did not say much — his English, which he never really perfected, was rudimentary at the time. Watching his appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson”, recorded just a few weeks before his visit to D.C., is instructive.

“We all kind of gathered in the bleachers and on the field,” says Bain. “He was just a kind, generous spirit. He told us we must always play the game passionately, something along those lines. I remember him saying that to us. He had heard that we were a good team and that we’d had success and he just told us to keep playing the game with passion. If you love something, do it with passion.”

Pelé’s presence alone was of extreme importance to many of Howard’s charges. Bain had first seen him seven years earlier, while watching matches from the 1966 World Cup on tape delay in Martinique, where he was studying. Four years later, he was exposed, along with the rest of the world, to Brazil’s free-flowing, expressive interpretation of the game when they put on a clinic at the World Cup in Mexico. The other great players of the era — George Best, Eusebio, Bobby Charlton and the like — did not hold a candle to Pelé in terms of global notoriety.

“He was the guy,” says Bain. “When we scored a goal, we all celebrated like he did — you jump up and you swing your arm. We celebrated like him because he was so big for us.”

Alvin Henderson, a prolific All-American forward on Howard’s dominant sides throughout the early ’70s, remembers that the team’s players would sometimes call each other not by their own names, but by the names of the famed Brazilians of the era. Didi. Vavá. At times he called Bain “Zito,” a nod to the Santos and Brazil midfielder who featured at multiple World Cups.

“Ian was a midfielder, but not of a Pelé quality,” says Henderson, trailing off into laughter. “So we called him Zito.”

“(Pelé) was our idol,” he continues. “From the ’58 World Cup onward. We were just trying to get clippings of him; our best input of soccer at the time was seeing him in little news videos that would air just before movies, before feature films. I probably broke several windows in my house trying to practice his volleys, or his overhead kicks that we dreamed about or read about.”

There was also the matter of Pelé’s race, which was not insignificant to this collection of players from Howard, who had for years faced racial abuse from opposing teams, and who had arguably been discriminated against by the NCAA itself. Just five years earlier, entire blocks of D.C., some adjacent to Howard itself, had been burned in the 1968 race riots. Phillips remembered leaving a movie theater in Baltimore after hearing the news of Martin Luther King’s assasination and seeing “smoke in the air.”

Pelé, possibly the greatest sportsperson the world had ever seen, was a Black man visiting the nation’s most famed historically Black college or university during a very tumultuous moment in the history of the United States.

“It was absolutely one of the reasons Pelé was so adored by us and is still adored by many,” says Henderson. “He was not only a great athlete and a great person but he was a Black man at a time where it was so difficult to be the greatest at anything. Look at Muhammad Ali, and the difficulties he had. To be a Black man and be the greatest in your sport was exceptional at a time when elsewhere, people were fighting for human rights. People were fighting at the time just to sit at the same table — and Pelé had overtaken everybody else.

“Pelé was not just an equal. He was by far the best player that played the game in the ’60s. There was no comparison whatsoever.”

Bain sees things differently. Growing up in Trinidad, he says the sight of a high-achieving Black man was not unusual to him. It was part of everyday life. That changed on his arrival in the United States.

Pelé, though, was transcendent.

“We had to adjust to a culture that saw race differently and spoke about it differently,” says Bain. “But with Pelé in this country, it wasn’t really about race. He was just Pelé. He transcended race, he transcended class, he transcended everything. You just say his name — one word and the world would stop to see this guy jog out onto the field. I wouldn’t say he was colorless, but he sort of transcended almost everything.”

At some point during Pelé’s visit, Tom Terrell — at the time a student at Howard and the photographer for The Hilltop, the campus newspaper — snapped the photo of Pelé I came across in Phillips’ things. Terrell was himself a D.C.-area legend until his untimely death in 2007, a fixture in the local music scene and a renowned DJ, promoter and journalist. Another version of the photo appears in the July 1973 issue of The Hilltop. Pelé appears next to a pair of Howard players and Charles Hall, the president of the university’s student association. It’s a lovely photograph but it lacks the unscripted beauty of the candid shot that we see here.

Howard would indeed reclaim their place as NCAA champions in 1974. They put together the most dominant season in the history of Division 1 men’s soccer, going 19-0 and outsourcing their opponents by a comically wide margin: 63-6. In the NCAA title match, they once again faced off against all-White St. Louis. The press painted it as a battle of White vs. Black; in reality, both sides shared a tremendous respect for each other, according to the Howard players.

There was no penalty shootout in college soccer in those days, so the match, one of the greatest finals ever played in NCAA history, took four golden-goal overtime periods to decide. Howard emerged victorious, bringing some vindication after their stripped title.

The photo of Pelé? It’s mostly a footnote in the history of Howard soccer, but all these years later it still feels unbelievable that the world’s greatest athlete spent a few hours on a sunny day in 1973 communing with a couple-dozen students at the corner of Georgia and Michigan Avenues, NW.

“Everybody looked up to him, all over the world,” said Phillips. “It was very pleasing, for me, as the coach of these players, to bring Pelé to the campus and personally introduce them. And you know, because it was Pelé, I think It kind of put me up a few notches in everybody’s eyes, too.”

(Illustration: John Bradford/The Athletic; photos: Bettmann, Mirrorpix / Getty Images)