April 24 (1927)

The professional St. Louis League champion Ben Millers, National Challenge Cup finalists of 1926, come from behind to squeak past the Muny League amateur champion Killarneys, 2-1, on a cold, snowy day at St. Louis University Field. Jimmy McCarthy (pictured) scores a goal after earlier missing a penalty kick for Killarney. The Ben Millers battle back from the 1-0 deficit with goals by Joe Hennessy and George Schweppe later in the first half. The game is billed as deciding the city soccer championship. Soccer fans are decidedly unimpressed with the supposedly superlative Ben Millers. “Superiority of pro team very slight,” reads part of the headline in the next day’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The St. Louis Athlete, a short-lived newspaper of the late 1920s catering to area sports, disgustedly reports “only a slight shade of difference between football that plays to a pay gate and football that is free to the public.” The angst over the state of St. Louis pro soccer began two weeks earlier when the Ben Millers were ousted from the National Challenge Cup (today’s Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup) in the Western Division semifinals, 1-0, by the foreign talent of Sparta of Chicago on April 10. That defeat ended a run of six appearances by St. Louis teams in the previous seven National Challenge Cup finals. The only break in that streak came in 1925, when no St. Louis team entered the Cup competition.