January 11 (1942)

Future U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame journalist Dent McSkimming is on hand to cover a second-round National Challenge Cup match between Natural Set Up and Schumacher’s at Walsh Stadium, 5224 Oakland Ave. The Set Ups win 2-1 on a controversial game-winning goal by Art Garcia. The losing side claims Garcia directs the ball into the net with his arm and lodges a protest with the cup committee secretary in New York. McSkimming writes his usual blunt account the next day in one of his legendary stories that appear every Monday for four decades during soccer seasons in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The crooked kicking of Fullbacks Puttin, Lyons and Fuchs tended to give the game an amateurish look,” he writes. “The success of the Naturals in the next round may depend upon how seriously in the intervening days the boys train and practice at real soccer, not at just running about the landscape.” McSkimming will be best remembered as the only U.S. reporter at the epic 1-0 upset of England scored by the United States, with five St. Louisans in the starting lineup, in the 1950 World Cup played in Brazil. The Post-Dispatch will refuse to send him to the World Cup, so McSkimming will take vacation and will pay his own way to the games. “Dent McSkimming wasn’t just a soccer writer; he was THE soccer writer,” Monsignor Louis Meyer will say many years later. Meyer grew up in the 1920s and knew McSkimming during Meyer’s decades of promoting soccer in St. Louis.