Solving the United States’...

Solving the United States’ oldest soccer mystery: Wee Willie McLean’s disappearance

June 14, 2022

By Pablo Maurer and Matt Pentz

Read on The Athletic

February 5, 1946

The entrance to Mount Pleasant Mental Health Center in Henry County, zx Iowa scales a gentle grade; a long, wide driveway passing through rows of oak trees, past manicured lawns and flowerbeds. If you’ve never been here, you’d assume you were entering the grounds of a botanical garden, or maybe an elegant estate.

Then the facility’s main building comes into view, a brick-and-concrete goliath that eventually consumes your entire field of vision. It is cold, dark and imposing. Function over form, a warehouse for the unwanted.

Patient No. 23902 arrives here in the back of a police car. He’s led through a pair of double doors into a facility that is overcrowded and unsanitary.

A physician welcomes his new patient into a room for his intake interview. It starts with the usual questions: What’s your name? Do you know where you are? Are you hearing voices? He probes deeper, pushing this new patient into uncomfortable territory, forming a sketch of this person’s family history, excavating the wreckage of his life.

After the interview, Patient No. 23902 is taken to one of the hospital’s wards. They all look similar — wide corridors, massive wooden doors, institutional tile floor. He peers through windows and into patient rooms. Some are large and full of beds. Others are smaller, reserved for the hospital’s truly disturbed residents. He casts a glance at a few fellow patients as he passes by; some offer blank stares, while others threaten. He passes through the “untidy” ward of the hospital, along walls covered with human excrement.

Therapy for these patients is largely an afterthought. About half of the patients at Mount Pleasant will depart through the front door, having achieved some degree of rehabilitation. The other half leave through the morgue after years spent in darkness. They’re buried in the center’s graveyard — a green, rolling field largely devoid of any headstones.

A keyring jangles on the attendant’s waist as he unlocks a heavy oak door to a dormitory, swinging it open and leading the new patient into the room that will be his home for the next decade.

Two years later, another doctor walks into the records room and examines this patient’s file. All of the findings from the entrance interview have been neatly typed up and organized. His new caretaker scribbles a note at the bottom of his file, something patient No. 23902 just told him, surely in a fit of madness. The skepticism, the tone of disbelief, come through as clearly 70-odd years later as the day it was written:

“9-3-1948: Patient says he was picked on an all-American soccer team — went to Rome for a World Championship and was interviewed by the Pope. About 14 years ago.”

1930s-era U.S. soccer team patches. (Pablo Maurer)

September 30, 2020

The U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame archives are filled with crumpled brown boxes, stacked high on 15-foot shelves that ring the perimeter of a massive warehouse in Hillsborough, North Carolina. In the 1930s and ‘40s, they built furniture here; now, this place is filled with anything and everything that’s not on display at the hall itself in Frisco, Texas.

It’s toward the end of what everybody hopes will be the only pandemic year. We’re here on a quest to solve America’s oldest soccer mystery.

Weeks earlier, boredom had led us down a Wikipedia rabbit hole to a page with an instantly gripping intro paragraph:

“William ‘Wee Willie’ McLean (born January 27, 1904, disappeared 1938) was a Scottish-born American soccer player…Position(s): Winger… A dominant player through the 1930s and a member of the U.S. national team at the 1934 FIFA World Cup, McLean disappeared without a trace in 1938.”

Disappeared… without a trace.

McLean’s Wikipedia page, which listed him as alive at the improbable age of 117, contained a few other breadcrumbs:

That he collapsed during a match in 1936, only two years after that World Cup, then spent some time in a local sanitarium.

That after his disappearance, he supposedly traveled up and down the Mississippi River, stopping every now and then to send postcards to his family.

That in 1944, Aetna Life Insurance placed an ad in the Midwest Soccer News seeking information as to his whereabouts. That detail, like the other chunks of information we’ve found, inspired skepticism.

Cold calls to Willie’s surviving family, scattered all over the country, yielded little. The process of building out his family tree was an ordeal all its own, requiring days of research. The scant bits of information gathered are often contradictory — the few extended family members willing to talk vaguely remember “Uncle Bill” being around during the holidays later in his life, but they cannot be certain.

Willie was spoken about in guarded, hushed tones, a folklorish family legend best left alone. It felt like we were chasing a shadow, like the defenders who tried to contain the slippery little winger he was in his prime.

Correspondence with caretakers at the Hall of Fame yielded at least one promising lead: they may have a collection of photocopies of old Midwest Soccer News editions buried somewhere in the warehouse. We’re more than welcome, they said, to poke around for a few days and see what we can find.

Now that we’re here, we’re mostly left alone with some of American soccer’s greatest treasures. Our only company is Striker, the canine mascot from the 1994 World Cup. From on high, his stuffed, disembodied head keeps watch.

Poring through this collection is the ultimate rush of geekiness for anybody interested in the history of soccer in the United States. Many of the boxes are labeled or scrawled on in black sharpie, offering clues of what’s inside them. Others offer no hint at all.

The collection here feels a bit like the history of the sport in America itself — haphazardly organized, with decades unaccounted for. Yet dig deeply enough, and you’ll find some underappreciated gems.

Shelves are scanned, boxes torn open. Day one passes without any sign of Willie’s existence, let alone the life insurance advertisement. Midway through day two, as optimism wanes, we spot something breathtaking on the floor, of all places. It’s a cloth badge precisely of the type sewn onto the uniforms of the ‘34 World Cup team. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that it was worn by McLean himself. Running a thumb over the faded fabric, the past becomes more real. We’re heartened; the dig resumes.

A few hours later, in a crate on the floor, off in one of the corners — buried under a stack of miscellany that includes a mystery novel penned by Pele and an Alexi Lalas CD — sits a pile of binders, labeled “Midwest Soccer News.” Frantically, we flip through the pages, past match recaps from long extinct leagues and wartime holiday advertisements. And then… there it is.

“Anyone having any information concerning his whereabouts …”

A clip from Midwest Soccer News, the ad searching for McLean appears in the upper left corner.

Pure, uncut elation, the type of stuff that can fuel an obsession for months.

As satisfying as this find is — proof that Wee Willie McLean really did exist, and really did disappear — it doesn’t answer any of the big questions. Who was this man, really? Whose lives did he touch, and was anybody still around to speak to his influence? And how did somebody who played in the most popular sporting event on the planet drop off the face of the Earth so completely?

How could anybody just accept the disappearance of a World Cup player as a bare fact?

The quest to answer those questions will lead us on a years-long obsession that still hasn’t really ended. The previously-unknown story of Wee Willie McLean that we uncover is a journey of discovery that leads down some dark passageways, so be forewarned: mental illness, acts of violence and suicide attempts are parts of Wee Willie’s story. But it’s also not entirely bereft of grace notes: overcoming trauma, the complexities of family life and achieving great feats against long odds. It’s a human story — flaws, triumphs and all.

Feb. 14, 1928

Willie McLean walks down a Chicago street, keeping a brisk pace in the bitter winter wind whipping in off Lake Michigan. It’s a scene painted in vivid detail in records unearthed nearly a century later.

It’s well past midnight, the sky inky black. Stragglers and troublemakers spill out of bars as they close their doors for the night. True to his moniker, “Wee” Willie is all of 5-feet-3-inches tall. Now 24 years old, he wears his brown hair swept back from his widow’s peak, his blue eyes wincing against the cold. Willie pulls his heavy coat tighter to himself. The whiskey in his stomach can only do so much to warm him.

Five years off the boat from Scotland and McLean has found his footing in Pullman, on the outskirts of Chicago, a company town if ever there was one. During the day, McLean helps to assemble The Pullman Company’s iconic sleeper railcars; on the weekends, he stars for the company’s soccer team, playing well enough to draw the attention of Bricklayers and Masons FC, the top team in the city and one of the preeminent clubs in the country.

Soccer in the United States is largely semi-pro at this point, and there is no such thing as easy labor for a poor Scottish immigrant in booming Chicago, with its belching steel mills and bloody stockyards.

For Willie, this was nothing new: Clydebank, his hometown, was a hard-scrabble place in a hard-scrabble time. It was a manufacturing city — ship building, mostly. Willie got his first job in his teens, at a box-making factory, doing his best to help his family make ends meet.

Things were no easier at home. Three of Willie’s six siblings died before the age of seven. His father, Daniel, was a stern disciplinarian. Family lore says that things grew so bad at one point that Margaret, Willie’s older sister, had once stepped in front of their dad when he was going at one of the boys with a switch. Wielding a fireplace poker, she managed to thwart him. Not long afterwards, Willie would leave his parents an ocean away, drawn to the United States by the promise of a better life.

He arrived in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, and even if he didn’t get to share in the spoils, the energy was infectious. He was on the cusp of something, his spirits buoyed by a regular income and a rare talent in a sport quickly gaining prominence. Soccer was the world’s game, and the world brought it to the States through Ellis Island. Huge crowds, in the tens of thousands, were turning out to see matches between company teams.

Willie gazes down at his boots as they press into the snow. He trudges onward, his knobby knees hidden by his long pants.

The first blow arrives seemingly out of nowhere, out of the dark. He’s knocked to the ground, defenseless. The assault continues — punches and kicks landing on him from all angles. Then, everything goes black. Seven hours later, in the morning light, a passerby finds McLean incapacitated in the street.

He awakens, bleary-eyed, surrounded by doctors and nurses. For weeks, he struggles to regain full sensation in his arms and legs. The recurring headaches and hallucinations last far longer. From then on, something feels different, his entire being knocked off kilter.

McLean wonders if he’s lost part of himself in the assault, something he’ll never quite recapture.

McLean (bottom row, third from right) and the 1930 U.S. select team.

September, 2020

The line in the Wikipedia entry about the insurance ad being the last mention of McLean isn’t totally true. There’s a newspaper column written by Archibald McKinlay, Willie’s nephew, son of his sister Margaret. It ran in the Northwest Indiana Times during the 1994 World Cup, a local tie-in while the U.S. was hosting the tournament for the first time.

Archibald describes how Willie made his way to the U.S. under his sister Margaret’s guidance. “The eldest of my mother’s three charges was William Lang McLean, a teenager and already a world class football (soccer) player,” he wrote, going on to lay out Willie’s on-field exploits: multiple U.S. Open Cup titles, making the 1934 World Cup team, going on to play exhibitions in Germany where “Wee Willie gained the distinction, or stigma, of playing a command performance before Adolf Hitler and his fellow soccer buffs.”

For our purposes, the last line of his column is the most intriguing — as well the most baffling. Willie has no known death certificate, and again, Wikipedia considers him to be alive and well. But according to Archie: “We buried Uncle Bill in Calumet Park in 1977.”

Maybe this mystery has already been solved?

Archibald died in 2015, and his widow, Pat, tells us she never met the soccer star uncle her late husband idolized, and knows little beyond the sparse details we’ve already unearthed. The search goes on.

Out of the blue, we get a call that provides a dark hint to the origin of Willie’s disappearance. On the phone is Kimberly Kiwa, McLean’s great-niece. She doesn’t know much, she confesses up front, but she does remember Willie hanging around various family functions when she was growing up. That doesn’t really square with the mystery, we think, but she pushes back that it absolutely does.

“I think it was hush-hush because he had some kind of nervous breakdown,” Kiwa says. “And it was not really talked about because it was not really proper to talk about it in those days.”

McLean (far left) and members of the U.S. national team on their way to the 1934 World Cup.

May 6, 1934

The members of the U.S. national team stand on the teak deck of the S.S. Roma, the ship that will carry them to the World Cup in Italy. They’re in full uniform, wearing even their game socks and boots for a photo-op, squinting in the brilliant sunshine.

Willie stands on the far left, the shortest of the bunch. His height isn’t the most noticeable contrast with his teammates, though. It’s his build. He is so skinny, his long-sleeved jersey falls loosely on his frame. Wee Willie’s thighs look like saplings next to the tree-trunk legs of the squad’s defenders.

Don’t let appearances deceive you, though: this is one of the most lauded, fearsome attackers in the United States. He’s coming off back-to-back U.S. Challenge Cup national championships with St. Louis powerhouse Stix, Baer & Fuller, scoring important goals in both finals. Newspapers refer to him as the Mighty Atom.

Willie is described as an aggressive, clever outside left, as adept with his right foot as he is with his favored left. “He’s the real goods,” wrote Herman Wecke of the St. Louis Dispatch on April 19, 1933. “McLean is a complete player. He can dribble, is one of the trickiest players on the team and he can shoot goals. He may be small, but he’s been a thorn in the side of many a Stix opponent in his two years of play in this city.”

“Above all,” Wecke continued, “he is one of the cleanest athletes who have ever performed in this city. A real gentleman — on and off the field — that’s Willie McLean.”

Willie missed out on the U.S. squad for the inaugural World Cup in 1930, judged to be too small to compete on the international stage. But his exploits in St. Louis over the four years that followed have made him impossible to overlook. Now, Willie stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the best American players of his era, like Aldo “Buff” Donelli and Billy Gonsalves.

Willie is in a good place in his personal life, too. He’s, 30, an American citizen, has a steady job at a department store in St. Louis and he’s a married man, having met and fallen in love with a nurse named Elizabeth, whom he wed in 1931. Willie is still plagued by the occasional migraine, a lingering side effect of that assault years prior. He has suffered multiple head injuries on the field, as well — the most gruesome involved his skull thudding against a brick wall positioned too close to the endline behind a goal at DePaul Field in Chicago, home of the Bricklayers. That might be another explanation for those headaches. But on the whole, things are going well.

The weeks after the ship arrives in Italy are surreal. Who would have ever guessed that Willie would return to the Old World wearing the U.S. crest on his chest? The team is offered an audience with Pope Pius XI; there’s Willie at the Vatican, looking dapper in his three-piece suit.

McLean (front row, fourth from right) and the 1934 U.S. World Cup team at the Vatican.

In an odd quirk, the U.S. team has traveled such distance but still has to earn its way in via a qualification playoff against Mexico held three days before the tournament proper kicks off. With Willie in the starting XI, the U.S. triumphs 4-2, as Donelli bags all four goals.

To stay loose between matches, the squad divides into teams for an impromptu sandlot baseball game the day before their round of 16 showdown against host Italy. That might have been a strategic error, but it probably didn’t matter. With Benito Mussolini looking on at the Stadio Nazionale del PNF — the National Stadium of the National Fascist party — the Italians roll over the Americans, 7-1.

These days, or in practically every other World Cup ever played, the U.S. would’ve been given the opportunity to regroup and play on. In 1934, every match was an elimination game. Bounced out of the tournament, the U.S. went on to play a handful of friendlies in Belgium and Germany in search of competitive minutes. This was the whole of Willie’s experience on the world’s grandest stage: one qualifier and a single knockout match. He started both, but it was over in a blink.

Barely a year later, Willie learns a hard lesson — even the most popular sport in the world isn’t immune from the effects of the Great Depression. He declines to play in a match for the St. Louis Shamrocks, his new club team, when he finds out his pay for the match: a single dollar. Willie, at one time a reliable, essential player, all of the sudden starts behaving erratically. He misses training, sometimes for weeks at a time. Newspapers begin speculating: will he ever play in St. Louis again? Some say he may even head back to Chicago, to rejoin the Bricklayers.

On New Year’s Day 1936, McLean is “stricken ill,” according to a newspaper clipping. Subsequent reports add more detail. At first, he’s described simply as being hospitalized. Over the following week, a bleaker picture emerges: Willie is under treatment for a “nervous disorder.” Eventually the papers come to grips with the fact that they might not see the great Wee Willie McLean on a soccer pitch for the foreseeable future, if ever again.

It’s the last time McLean is spoken about in the papers, at least in the present tense. From there, he will become the stuff of St. Louis soccer legend. This goes on for decades, and he’s almost always compared to some rising young star on the left wing — one who shows promise, but is no Wee Willie McLean. You young whippersnappers should have seen the Mighty Atom in his prime.

October 2020

While we’ve uncovered a few bare details regarding Willie’s disappearance, each revelation muddles other elements of the story further. Something about our interactions with the surviving family members feels off. There is a lingering sense of a coverup, that Willie was not acting alone when he dropped off the face of the Earth. And we’re missing the essential elements of how and why.

So we decide to recruit some professional help. We reach out to James Brown, a researcher at the Society for American Soccer History. His grandfather, Jim Brown, starred for the United States in the 1930 World Cup and James has dedicated years of his life to researching the early history of the game in the U.S. His excitement about joining our quest is palpable.

It takes an actual researcher less than 24 hours to land upon some tangible, invaluable evidence. “I’m in touch with a distant relative in New Zealand who will help me connect with family in the U.S,” he writes in a follow-up email. “Apparently he died on 14 Nov, 1977.”

James includes a list of links to the Facebook profiles of a half-dozen surviving extended family members.

“Frightening what you can do with the internet,” notes a fellow researcher who helped James dig all of this up.

A few days later, we unearth more valuable information: a burial notice and a paragraph-long obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times. We spend an afternoon calling graveyards in Chicago and in nearby Indiana, and finally, we learn that McLean is indeed buried at Cedar Park graveyard in the Calumet Park neighborhood of Chicago.

In the obituary, details are scant, but the usual bits are there — surviving siblings, the date and time of his memorial notice, including a request to “please omit flowers.” Most importantly, we gather that Willie had a surviving daughter named Nancy Barris.

Not only is Nancy still alive some 45 years later, she is willing to meet with us to tell us what she knows about her late father.

Constance, Nancy and Alex at Nancy’s home. (Pablo Maurer)

Nancy Barris sits on the couch at her daughter’s house in Belleville, Illinois, about 40 miles from St. Louis. Even at 88, her eyes are bright and full of life, her makeup carefully applied, her hair neatly done up. She’s sharp-witted and talkative, traits that shave years off her appearance. Her shoes — Vans slip-ons emblazoned with a tattoo print — do the same.

She is joined by her daughter, Constance, and her son, Alex. They are the grandchildren Willie never knew he had.

Nancy has but one memory of her father, who disappeared when she was two years old. It’s a random, unremarkable moment but it remains present in her mind 86 years later. She remembers her dad sitting at the kitchen table of their home. She remembers running down the hallway to meet him there and sitting in his lap. She remembers nothing else.

Weeks after that memory, as Nancy tells it, McLean went to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes.

“That was the last time I ever saw him,” she says.

Nobody in the room has spent their life pining over Willie, or even thinking much about him at all. There was no search for news clippings, or epic quest to find out what happened to him. His absence came so early in Nancy’s life, she says, that she never really bothered to wonder about him. To Alex and Constance, if it weren’t for the facts of biology, their grandfather might never have existed, so rarely have they heard his name.

They do know plenty about Nancy’s mother, Elizabeth Selfridge, a Scottish woman who had quite the story of her own.

“My mother’s passage was paid for by a rich family,” Barris says. “She said that the woman was so mean, she could hardly wait to get away.”

When she did, she moved to Chicago, working as an aide at a local hospital — where one day, she met an injured soccer player named Willie McLean. Soccer was an absolutely brutal sport in the 1920s and ‘30s. Game recaps in old newspapers often read like war stories. The description of the Bricklayers’ 1928 Challenge Cup final loss to the New York Nationals paints a vivid picture:

“A Nationals player tangled with no less than four Brickies. Spectators threatened to take a hand into the melee, but police rushed onto the field, drove back the wild-eyed fans and separated the combatants. As things went on, feelings grew more bitter, arguments were frequent, incipient clashes flared up repeatedly and in the resultant rough play Willie McLean, tiny right winger of the Brickies, and Dave Coutts, center forward, were injured so badly that they were carried from the field. McLean, Chicago outside right, was kicked in the mouth.”

It wasn’t uncommon, then, for a soccer player to end up in the hospital. Willie seemed as though he ended up there more often than most. On one such visit, he took a liking to Elizabeth.

Barris has a single photograph of her parents together, taken during a happy stretch in the mid-’30s. McLean is dressed in a neatly-pressed suit, his face glowing, his hand lovingly at rest on his wife’s forearm. Elizabeth looks comfortable, hopeful even. There’s a golden chain around her neck. On it is a tiny soccer ball.

Elizabeth Selfridge and Willie McLean.

The chain with soccer ball pendant. (Pablo Maurer)

McLean (bottom right) and the title-winning Stix, Baer & Fuller team.

Almost a century later, Nancy presents the necklace. It’s beautiful. On one panel of the ball, in tiny lettering, it reads “NCCC, 1932-1933.” On the other side, the name of Willie’s team, Stix, Baer & Fuller. It was a gift given in commemoration of the club’s 1932-33 title in the National Challenge Cup, the predecessor to today’s U.S. Open Cup.

Again, Willie McLean feels suddenly close. This necklace was in his hands once, and now it’s in ours.

Constance and Alex have their own questions. You get the sense that this is maybe the most they’ve ever seen their mother open up about their grandfather, and they seize the moment. They ask why their grandmother never spoke of their grandfather’s disappearance. Nancy doesn’t have much to say.

“He just kind of disappeared,” she says. “You could do that back then. There were no social security numbers, you had no way to track people — I mean it’s legendary. The guy goes out for a pack of cigarettes and we never see him again.”

He disappeared in 1937, the very height of the depression, leaving his family destitute. Elizabeth and a toddler-aged Nancy moved into a boarding house, with Elizabeth taking a job at a local factory to try to make ends meet. She even turned to Willie’s family for help, Nancy says, writing to her mother-in-law, pleading with her to take them in. The response left her even more downtrodden.

“It was cruel,” Nancy remembers. “His mother wrote back and said, ‘Well, we have room for Nancy, but we have no room for you.’”

At a certain point, our conversation reaches an impasse, an awkward silence creeping in. It’s just a weird thing, after 88 years on this earth, to have a stranger in your living room asking you about the father you never knew. We’re wary of pushing Nancy too far, but she seems intrigued by what we’ve found. Maybe it’s an opportunity to get closer to her father, or to understand her mother better. But we’re left with a nagging feeling that she might bail on this project at any moment. Willie remains a mystery to her just as much as he is to us. There’s a sense that at least part of her would rather keep it that way.

Before we leave, we press Nancy on one final detail — the reports that Willie spent a stretch in a local mental hospital in 1936. Had her mother mentioned anything about it later in life?

“I never knew about it,” Nancy says. “I mean — it was never brought up. I think she just couldn’t bring herself to talk about it, I guess. I do think Willie got suicidal at some point, though… Because my mother told me that he’d wanted her to turn on the gas jet and kill us all.”

The full weight of Nancy’s recollections — Willie abandoning his family in the middle of the depression, the alleged attempt at a murder-suicide — is tough to process. The emotional impact is physical, landing like a punch in the gut.

Still, as awful as it sounds, neither of us are willing or able to turn our backs on this knobby-kneed immigrant who dropped into our lives from a bygone era. Poke around every nook and cranny of somebody else’s existence and you can’t help but pick up on details and character traits that soften them, or that you identify with. Keep digging further and you might even start to labor under the delusion that you understand them and their motives.

We have also uncovered some extenuating circumstances behind Willie’s behavior. There were the veiled references to his father’s abusive tendencies, and research has long shown that that sort of abuse can prove generational. A surviving family member told us that, right up until the end, his sister Margaret referred to him as her “gentle brother.”

It is more than possible that we’re giving him too much of the benefit of the doubt — and none of this excuses his actions nor the damage that he did — but the sense that we get the deeper we dig into this is that Willie was somebody whose behavior was at least to some degree corrupted by his family history, the Depression and the violent nature of the game he played.

Willie’s long documented history of head injuries was laid out plainly in the newspaper archives. It took nearly a century after McLean’s playing days for head trauma to be taken seriously, the idea that repeated blows could cause brain degeneration, personality changes and worse. Our understanding and acceptance of mental health has come a long way, too, from the days when, as Willie’s great-niece put it, those things were improper and “hush hush” and better swept under the rug.

Maybe we didn’t want to believe that Willie could have done something so irredeemable. How could we leave it at that? What we wanted was maybe not a justification, but some kind of explanation. Nancy was owed that, too.

Before we leave Belleville, we make a detour. We’ve tracked down Dennis Nilsen, the surviving son of Werner Nilsen, Willie’s teammate on those dominant Stix, Baer & Fuller sides and with the U.S. at the ‘34 World Cup. Dennis tells us he still has his father’s things — some photo albums, a few news clippings, his old shin guards, even. We swing by his house in the St. Louis suburbs around dinnertime.

Dennis and his wife Betsy are warm, welcoming, insistent, even, that we stay for dinner. He pours us a drink — a gin and tonic, mercifully heavy on the gin — and lays out his father’s collection in front of us on the kitchen table. After Nancy’s final revelation, it is a relief to shift our focus back onto Willie’s soccer career, at least for a moment. We crack open a pair of massive binders.

The collection is a treasure, particularly the photo albums. There are candid photos of Nilsen, McLean and the rest of the Stix crew along with some wonderful snapshots from the 1934 World Cup. Near the end of the album, we spot something truly incredible: a photo of that 1934 squad in Bremen, Germany, the entire team standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a dozen or so Nazi officers.

It’s another bad look for McLean: him smiling broadly next to a bunch of literal Nazis. It’s been a long day.

McLean (front, third from left) and the U.S. national team with Nazi officers, 1934.

November, 2020

A few weeks after our sitdown with Nancy, an email arrives from the Scott County Genealogical Society in Davenport, Iowa. We’d asked them to chase down Willie’s death certificate — if it exists. And now, here it is, dated 1977, along with our biggest clue yet, written in typewriter print right in the first line.

“Deceased, name: William S. Lang, aka McLean.”

Turns out that we really had been chasing a ghost. Wee Willie McLean did vanish from the face of the earth in 1938, never to be seen or heard from again. But another story was just beginning.

Enter William Stewart Lang.

January, 1946

William Lang is covered in grease.

He’s midway through his shift at Davenport Motors, a bustling Packard and Pontiac dealer on a corner in downtown Davenport, Iowa. Business is booming, spurred along by the end of the war and optimistic consumers ready to leave the Depression, conflict and strife in the rear view.

Willie spends his days in a pit, greasing ball joints and driveshafts, suspension arms and the like. He changes oil on car after car. By the end of the day, his ruddy complexion is barely visible under the caked-on muck.

It’s hard work, but it’s good work, and it’s steady.

Willie arrived in Davenport in 1941, a half-decade earlier. He told people he was from New Jersey, came to Iowa in search of work and was unattached. Never married. Nobody knows that William Lang is actually somebody else, or that he has a child and a wife. They certainly don’t know him as a soccer player, much less as one who appeared in a World Cup. His co-workers at the shop know him only as Willie, as do his friends at the bar down the street, and his landlord — a stern old lady who rents him a one-bedroom apartment in the building right next to the dealership.

Back in St. Louis, Elizabeth did her best to move on with her life after Willie’s disappearance. She scraped and clawed her way out of the boarding house, eventually moving into a two-room apartment around the corner. It felt like a huge upgrade; she was still doing her and Nancy’s laundry in the bathtub, and they still shared a bathroom with the building’s other residents, but she was just a bit closer to financial independence.

Eventually, she emerged from Wee Willie’s shadow for good. During World War II, she landed a job on an assembly line, piecing together pistons and connecting rods at Ramsay Manufacturing in St. Louis. She was a real-life Rosie the Riveter. It was good money compared to what she’d been making. The Aetna life insurance ad in the Midwest Soccer News that sent us to North Carolina in the first place? Turns out that was Elizabeth’s attempt at closure; Willie McLean had a small life insurance policy, and to collect on it, she had to make a public appeal to track him down.

For once, she has some stability in her life. She has only herself to thank for it.

Willie moved on, as well. He found a new love in Davenport, one who bore the same first name as his first wife. Elizabeth Cornelia Oakes is a nurse at a local sanitarium. When Willie’s brother Daniel met her for the first time, he was shocked. She looked exactly like his first wife. She did the same job. Willie and Elizabeth’s home in Davenport even sat next to a set of railroad tracks, just like his place with his first wife did.

Willie and Elizabeth were happy together, and in 1943, they married. The couple would have friends over from time to time for dinner or drinks or a card game. They would go to dances and, during quieter times, Willie occupied himself by listening to the radio or reading detective stories. He particularly enjoyed a good mystery. Elizabeth was too old to have children and Willie seemed happy enough to have escaped the responsibilities of fatherhood altogether.

Wee Willie McLean — Lang, whatever you want to call him — seemed to have managed to leave his first wife and child behind, along with his career as a soccer player and most everything else. What he couldn’t manage to shake were his demons.

There were the physical ones — the chronic headaches caused by years of head injuries — and mental ones, too. The constant paranoia, the depression, the black cloud hanging over him from time to time. He had everything he wanted before: fame, a steady paycheck, a doting wife and a lovely daughter. Now, years later, he finds himself similarly fortunate. And again, it’s all about to cave in.

While hidden from his former life, he heard that his parents have passed away — his mother, in 1942, of tuberculosis, and his father just three years later. This affects Willie deeply, and he was forced to cope with his grief alone.

Now, covered in grease, working at the Packard garage, a coworker startles him. He stands up too abruptly, smashing his head into the cast-iron arm of the lift he’s working under. He’s out cold. Weeks later, another head injury: he slips on a patch of ice outside his apartment, cracking his head open on the pavement below.

It all comes undone on January 20, 1946.

Willie finishes his breakfast and makes a shocking admission to his wife: he’d contracted syphilis from a prostitute. It was hardly the only thing he’d kept hidden from her, and the strain was finally beginning to show. Elizabeth is concerned but mostly confused; things have been so great, by and large. They’ll get through this. She hands her husband his jacket and leans in for a goodbye kiss, a daily ritual. Willie draws away from her. Elizabeth is deeply hurt.

Two days later, Willie spirals into madness. He’s hallucinating — he sees lights shooting from the back of his head to the wall in front of him. He can’t sleep, can’t eat. His stomach is a mess and his headaches are ever-present and unbearable. At 3 a.m. he leaves the house, to Elizabeth’s grave concern. It’s January in Iowa. The wind is whipping and it’s dangerously cold. It didn’t stop him in 1928, and it doesn’t now. He returns hours later, freezing and disoriented.

The next day, Willie suggests the unthinkable — he and Elizabeth should just commit suicide, he says. He can’t deal with anything anymore. Elizabeth won’t have any part of it. When she resists, her husband becomes insistent. Willie begins to choke her but then turns his madness on himself. He reaches for a bottle of drain cleaner, Sani-Flush, unscrews the cap and takes a long swig.

In a panic, Elizabeth calls for help. The police arrive, and she watches them haul her husband away.

(Scans: Pablo Maurer, Collage: John Bradford)

December, 2020

We gleaned all of these details about Willie’s life from his mental health records.

The discovery that William McLean lived a separate life as William Lang was a game-changer for our research. Very quickly, we landed on a treasure trove of new information; we found a divorce decree, which painted a detailed picture of his troubles with his second wife. That decree was delivered to Willie while he was a patient at Mount Pleasant Mental Health Institute in Iowa. Improbably, the state of Iowa still had McLean’s records, 14 pages of them, at least. With Nancy’s blessing — she is Willie’s next of kin — we filed a records request with the Department of Health.

In our inboxes, days later, were Willie’s admissions papers from Mount Pleasant.

In them, he tells his life story, in his own words, in excruciating detail. It is here that it turns from a fable about an individual who fell from great heights to something more like a societal failure: a man brought low by economic forces beyond his control and then abandoned by a system designed to conceal the plight of the less fortunate rather than make them better.

February 5, 1946

“Mr. Lang… Mr. Lang… Do you know where you are?”

Willie — Patient No. 23902 — sits in a chair in the corner of an examination room at Mount Pleasant Mental Health Center, still trying to get his bearings. In front of him sits Leo Lindt, a wiry, 69-year-old physician who’s been assigned to his case. In his hands, he holds admissions paperwork from City Sanitarium in St. Louis, where Willie had been hospitalized a decade or so earlier.

Lindt flips through the report, carefully studying McLean’s history.

After returning from Italy and the World Cup, it says, Willie landed a job at the Ford assembly plant in St. Louis. Work was hard to find during the Depression and he felt lucky to have any income at all. In 1935, though, Ford cut him loose as part of a workforce reduction.

It was a devastating blow. He felt “worthless and full of dread — like everybody was out to get him,” Willie says during his interview. He considered himself unemployable; his Scottish brogue did him no favors at a time when even native-born Americans were struggling to make ends meet.

“He became obsessed with the fear that his family would be destitute and had talked incessantly about his concern for them,” Lindt writes in his own notes. “He’d developed the idea that firms had refused to employ him for personal reasons and that people in general were out to get him. He would sit motionless for long periods, staring into space, then suddenly become very hyperactive.”

In October of 1935, right around the time low pay and Willie’s erratic behavior started to end his playing career, his physician recommended that he check himself into a mental hospital. McLean declined to do so. Three months later, on New Year’s Day 1936, Willie’s record says, he had a breakdown. His hands and face turned blue, and he collapsed. The police were alerted and he was taken to the sanitarium. He was taken home for a visit with Elizabeth in September of that year and, three months later, Willie was released and made it home, just in time for Thanksgiving.

After his release, Willie tried to return to the soccer pitch. He was just 32 and he felt he still had something left. But Stix, Baer & Fuller had moved on without him, and Willie McLean — once the greatest left-sided player in America, only two years removed from the World Cup — would never play soccer again. In 1937, he walked out on Elizabeth and Nancy.

“I just wanted a fresh start,” he tells Lindt. “I moved to Chicago, I worked as a baker, and then in a factory, doing whatever kind of work I could find, really.”

For a time, Willie labored at Inland Steel’s lakeside mill in Indiana Harbor, living with his sister Margaret — another detail in Archie’s article confirmed. He doesn’t remember how he got to Davenport, he tells the doctor. He just knows he ended up there in 1941.

Willie is calm for most of the interview, but things take a turn when the doctor asks him about his brothers and sisters and his family history. He’d gathered that his parents had passed away, Willie explains, but he has no idea where they are buried. Suddenly, he starts sobbing uncontrollably. He pleads, “Let me out of this place, please. I have to find out what happened to them. I have to find out where they’re buried.”

After his interview, he’s led back to the plain-walled room that will become his home. It’s a long way from his glory days in St. Louis and even further from the Vatican. This place is closer to hell on earth.

The Mount Pleasant Mental Health Center in 1954. (Courtesy of the Henry County Historical Trust)

December 25, 1955

Christmas at Mount Pleasant is a sight to behold. The auditorium was decked out with fringe and greenery, and carolers roamed the halls, doing their best to bring cheer and joy to those who needed it most. Deer roamed the snow-covered 1,400-acre campus. Inside, patients did their best to stay warm and offer each other company.

The Christmas pageant that year was put on largely by residents of Mount Pleasant’s “sexual psychopath ward,” a 25-man unit comprised entirely of gay men, a few of them actors and musicians by trade. At the height of McCarthyism, police across the state in Sioux City had wrongly pinned a child’s murder on a gay man, and used that as pretext to round up the ward’s residents – an event now recognized as a travesty.

The Christmas performance was far from the mess it had been in previous years, the local newspaper will note. It had real quality, real talent. Workers at the hospital, even local townspeople, all packed the auditorium. By the time the final curtain fell, they erupted into applause.

There were many patients there, as well. Willie was one of them. By then, though, his capacity to feel much of anything had been greatly reduced.

Walter Freeman — the man who popularized the “transorbital lobotomy,” a procedure that could be performed in mere minutes and without anesthesia — had come to Mount Pleasant a few years earlier to train its doctors in his procedure. Freeman would induce a seizure in his patient with an electric shock, then take what he dubbed an “orbitoclast” — a glorified ice pick — and insert it through the patient’s eye socket into his prefrontal lobe, severing, theoretically, the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus.

In a demonstration during his time in Iowa, Freeman, ever the showman, decided to look up and pose for photographers, mid-lobotomy. His hand slipped, and he killed his patient. It was not the first time he’d done so — he’d kill three others in Iowa before he packed up his things and moved elsewhere.

Before McLean underwent the icepick, his brain had already been battered by countless head injuries and an assault that nearly left him dead. He had been shocked into submission by years of electroshock therapy, a common treatment at Mount Pleasant. McLean survived Freeman’s patented procedure, likely performed by a doctor Freeman had trained, but he’d never be the same.

All these years later, it’s unclear why McLean was lobotomized; institutions performed thousands of these procedures for any number of reasons, sometimes viewing a lobotomy as a miracle cure for a whole host of mental disorders, from minor to major. Decades later, when facilities began widespread use of antipsychotic medications, the procedure would be discontinued and disowned as barbaric.

In 1959, after 13 years at Mount Pleasant and with McLean largely “manageable,” by the standards of the institution, he was released. But Willie didn’t return home — there was no home to return to. Elizabeth Oakes had remarried and wanted nothing to do with him. He was transferred to another facility across the state in Davenport: Pine Knoll Home.

The Pine Knoll Home building in the modern day (Pablo Maurer)

January 17, 2021

Pine Knoll Home sits atop a steep hill, empty and forlorn. When we went looking for the place — and for any trace of Willie — we drove along fields of tall, wavy grass, a barren landscape dotted by abandoned farmhouses and windpumps. Then came the smaller towns, followed by half-empty strip malls and the accompanying suburban dreariness. Finally, we arrive at Davenport in winter, with a foot of snow on the ground. Occasionally a rusty plow truck trundles by, but aside from that, the city feels empty.

Pine Knoll closed a few years back, but the local developer who bought the old property has thrown us the keys to the place. We wander through the building where Willie spent 20 years of his life. He roamed these halls, and now we do. Light creeps in through boarded up windows and falls at our feet, casting an eerie glow over the ornate tile work beneath us. The room where Willie spent the better part of two decades is bare, the floor covered in paint chips, the wallpaper peeling away from the walls. The view out the window is stark and gray, the landscape dotted with dead trees.

We’d spent the preceding weeks tracking down anybody and everybody we could find who worked at Pine Knoll. Among that group was Jean Desutter, the director of nursing during the tail end of Willie’s stay.

She remembers arriving at Pine Knoll in the mid-’70s. There’d been a recent influx of patients from the local county home, and wanting to learn a bit about them she’d set about trying to find their charts. There were no charts, only file cards. No treatment plan, just their shoe sizes, whether they had any next of kin and their burial instructions.

“Over the years, I’ve thought, ‘Well, gee, I really would love to have some of these cards to show in the future that some of these people were just completely lost to society,’” Jean says. She pauses. “It’s good you’re writing this story. Because some of these people were just lost to society completely.”

Desutter recalls working with some of the home’s most deeply affected patients, those who had suffered through the same brutal treatments as McLean; electro-shock therapy and transorbital lobotomy.

“Some of the people who came from Mount Pleasant, the people that had been lobotomized, their quality of life, you were charged with that,” she remembers. “What really happens when they do the lobotomy is that it makes the patients completely devoid of emotion. They would kind of enjoy some things, but not really — they didn’t have any joy, and they didn’t have any sorrow.”

Willie, we surmise, was not forgotten at Pine Knoll. Nearly every person we reached remembered him, even if only in basic terms — short, quiet, even-tempered. The staff at the place, many of whom at the time were young, altruistic graduate students and interns who genuinely cared about their work, paint the place out as a far cry from Mount Pleasant.

“Willie had freeness to roam the grounds; patients could go outside and play volleyball, things that now sound so petty but at the time, it was important,” Desutter says. “The patients had friends, they had friends on staff, they had birthday parties, things that were just part of a big family that lived in a group home versus being in a psychiatric institution.”

She trails off in thought for a moment.

“I just can’t believe he was a soccer player before he came to Pine Knoll,” she says. “How interesting.”

The interior of the Pine Knoll Home building, in the modern day (Pablo Maurer)

1969

It had been decades since Willie walked out on his first wife and young daughter. It was even longer since Wee Willie McLean’s name was synonymous with soccer glory — sitting in his favored spot at Pine Knoll, the cheers of the tens of thousands who would turn up to watch him play were a distant memory now; the trophies he helped win were starting to tarnish.

To the general public, Willie was a missing person, lost to the world. But a select few knew differently. Six years after the police delivered Willie to Mount Pleasant, his brother Daniel had tracked him down there. A lawyer by trade, Daniel had moved heaven and earth to find his younger brother. Willie was largely rehabilitated, his physicians had told Daniel, and they’d consider releasing him to his family’s care, should Willie approve of it.

But after a half-decade in the darkness, Willie had become institutionalized. The hospital was his home, as it were, and he expressed as much to his doctors in a letter sent to Daniel in 1953.

“After a long conversation with him,” his doctor writes, “he says that after spending six years in this institution, he is lacking in confidence. He expressed some concern that he did not want to be a burden to anyone. … These years he has spent in the institution must be taken into account, in that it is so easy to lose your drive in wanting to get out and live your own life.”

In the end, it was Willie himself who chose to stay.

For years, his brothers and sisters worked to shield his whereabouts from the outside world — even to his first wife Elizabeth and daughter Nancy.

2021

Having learned of Elizabeth and Nancy’s struggles after his departure, it had been difficult for us to understand why Willie’s family would’ve hidden him for so long. But after uncovering the extent of Willie’s plight, a more nuanced view emerged, one where his closest family members felt some compulsion to protect the man they called their “gentle brother,” wary of his mental state.

To Willie’s larger extended family — his great nieces, nephews and the like — there was a vague general awareness that Uncle Bill was still out there somewhere, some mythical figure. Their memories of Willie felt as hazy as everybody else’s — foggy recollections of brief visits to see their Uncle “somewhere down south” and descriptions of him as quiet, “almost like a mute.”

His influence was felt most directly by his nephew, Archibald. Archie’s newspaper column would periodically spotlight hometown heroes from around their rural region of Indiana; his son said those were the stories he loved to write most, the ones about unlikely successes, and that he thinks that came from his admiration for his immigrant-turned-World-Cup-star uncle.

We reach Heather Mangian, Willie’s great niece — the grandchild of his sister Margaret — late in 2021. She is reluctant to talk at first but, after some gentle prodding by others in her family, she eventually warms to the idea of opening up. What she provides is breathtaking — a treasure trove of letters sent by Willie, his first wife Elizabeth and others in her family, along with an absolutely stunning photograph of Willie seated on the front porch of his home in St. Louis.

In his arms is an infant, Nancy, just months old. Like so many other aspects of Willie’s story, it is heartwarming and heartrending all at once.

Willie McLean with an infant Nancy and an unknown child.

A letter from McLean to his sister.

A letter from McLean to his sister and nephew.

The contents of the letters, too, cause their own emotional response. There are visions of Elizabeth struggling to make ends meet as a single mother during the depression and glimpses into Willie’s daily life at both asylums. Even into the ‘60s, as “Uncle Bill” writes to his sister Margaret from Pine Knoll, Nancy weighs heavily on his mind. Decades after walking out on her, Willie writes that he “hopes to be able to help her someday” and laments his divorce from his first wife.

Willie is coherent in his correspondence, which is written in well-formed, lovely cursive. For many, this might cast doubt on a key element of Willie’s story: his lobotomy. We’d learned that he suffered through the procedure from a pair of medical professionals who treated McLean at Pine Knoll, later in his life. They were certain of it.

Conversations with medical professionals who specialize in psychosurgery do little to solve the mystery — patients who were subjected to transorbital lobotomy, we’re told, had widely varying degrees of functionality, a testament to the barbarically random nature of the procedure itself. To some, the procedure did little to affect their cognitive skills. Other patients ended up needing full-time care, unable to do something as simple as dress themselves.

Doreen Gruber, a great-niece, didn’t know about the lobotomy, but says that it does square with what she remembered. She witnessed it first-hand during her interactions with her Uncle Bill.

“My memory of him was just of somebody that didn’t talk,” she says. “Someone that wasn’t smiling. It’s sad, though. It’s just so sad. Getting older I always assumed it was that he had social anxiety or something like that.”

In the early ‘70s, a few years before Willie’s death, his sister Margaret finally paid him a visit. Margaret: his earliest protector, who stood in the way of their father’s belt and who opened her home to her troubled brother even after he abandoned his first family.

Another of Willie’s great-nieces, also named Margaret after the woman she affectionately refers to as her Nana, tagged along on that trip to Pine Knoll. She’s the last person we manage to track down who saw Wee Willie McLean alive.

Her great-uncle was short and slender, with snowy white hair, and had again found the steady work he craved. Pine Knoll allowed him to work as a groundskeeper, mowing the lawn and tending to the grounds as a way to stay busy and to give him a sense of self-worth. He was wearing his uniform the day of their visit. He was quiet, so quiet that he almost seemed to be mute. Margaret wandered away to give her grandmother and her brother time and space to catch up — maybe even to make their peace.

The last clear visual Margaret can recall is the two of them, brother and sister, sitting on a bench in the distance. They were at the top of a hill, gazing out over the grounds Willie tended, their heads bowed and close. They might have been chatting; they could have been saying nothing at all, lost in their memories.

Willie died of a heart attack on November 6, 1977, almost four decades after his mysterious disappearance, and having spent over half of his life in a series of mental health institutions.

Weeks later, Nancy Barris received a letter. With it was a small inheritance. Willie had written years earlier that he hoped to help her some day, should she find herself in need. In the end, she was the sole beneficiary listed in his will.

The letter, Nancy tells us, was how she found out her father died.

“When I received that check,” Nancy says, “I gave it to my mother, for all of the suffering that my father put her through. It was like closing a door for me.”

Six months after we started our quest to uncover the story of Wee Willie McLean, we are back in a room with Nancy. Constance, her daughter, is here, as is her son Alex. We’ve brought an envelope — in it are Willie’s mental health records, the divorce decree, a timeline we’ve assembled of his life after he left Nancy and her mother Elizabeth in 1937. There are transcripts of some of our interviews, bits and pieces of conversations with Willie’s surviving family and the medical professionals who cared for him during his later years.

In the preceding months, we’ve learned to deliver news like this gently. Very few members of Willie’s surviving family knew he had been committed and then lobotomized, and none had ever met Elizabeth Cornelia Oakes, his second wife. None of them knew that Willie had tried to kill her, and most knew little to nothing about his first wife, let alone his only child.

Mrs. Oakes, who remarried and died in the mid-2000s, was another mystery to us. A niece told us what she could remember: she was “a picky ‘ol mama” who lived in California. She worked as a nurse until her health gave out, her mind wandering in old age. She remarried a year after divorcing Willie in 1956, and not once did she ever mention Willie McLean — William Lang, to her — to anyone in the family.

We start by delivering Nancy the basics: Willie was committed in 1936 by Nancy’s mother Elizabeth.

“She never mentioned that,” Nancy says, shaking her head. Nobody in the room has any idea that Willie had spent that nine-month stretch in St. Louis City Sanitarium. “She never even mentioned it later on.”

We move on, filling Nancy in on the rest: he spent the first few years after leaving them with Margaret in Indiana Harbor, hiding out, more or less. He ran to Chicago, then landed in Davenport in 1941, and was committed five years later. We go through Willie’s history of head injuries — the assault in the snow in 1928 that nearly killed him, the crash into the brick wall a few years later that sidelined him for months, the accident at the shop, the slip on the ice. It seems obvious, we say, that Willie had brain damage. Nowadays, we’d call it CTE. Back then, Willie was just “crazy.”

We tell them about Willie’s second breakdown; that he was delusional, that he attempted suicide, that he tried to choke his second wife. We move through his struggles at Mount Pleasant — the electroshock therapy, the lobotomy. Nancy has never heard of a lobotomy — she asks what it is. We explain the procedure, sparing her some of the more gruesome details. She remains quiet, then excuses herself to use the restroom.

For months, we’ve struggled to understand how Elizabeth could have honestly believed that Willie was dead. Nancy and Elizabeth both kept in touch with Willie’s family for years, sometimes going to family functions or weddings. In one of our chats, Nancy mentions visiting Willie’s sister Margaret in Indiana Harbor, where Willie once lived. Did the question of her father never come up?

The answer Willie’s daughter offers is heartbreaking; her mother, she says, truly believed that Willie was dead. But in the late ‘60s, when Elizabeth, Nancy, Constance and Alex stopped by Willie’s brother Peter’s house in Harvey, Illinois, they finally learned the truth. For one reason or another, Peter spilled the beans: Willie was alive and he’d remarried. “His second wife looked just like you.”

“My mother was devastated,” Nancy recalls. “She was absolutely heartbroken to learn all of this. For someone to be abandoned like she was, though, I couldn’t see how she could have had anything other than a lot of hatred for him.”

If she did, she didn’t show it. Nancy shares a curious detail: later in her life, her mother had tried to get Wee Willie inducted into the St. Louis Soccer Hall of Fame. At the time, they refused, saying they only inducted American-born players. She’d hung on to that necklace and the photographs, and she’d never told Nancy — or anyone else in the family — about Willie’s nervous breakdown, or any of the other traumatic details.

“I guess I have to assume she was trying to protect us,” Nancy says, wrapping her head around things. “I think all of this makes me more sympathetic towards my father.”

It’s late afternoon by the time we arrive at Cedar Park cemetery in Calumet Park, just outside of Chicago. The weather is absolutely miserable — freezing cold, rainy and gray. There’s very little daylight left, and we set about trying to find Willie’s gravestone. The graveyard’s visitor center is closed and the entire place is in shambles. There’s no map to be found.

We know where Willie is: Violet Section Northeast, Lot 5, Bloc 3, Grave 1. Many of the elegant, wrought-iron signs that mark the graveyard’s various sections have toppled over. Others are too faded to read. We pull out a laptop, and after a half an hour we find an old map of the cemetery, from the ‘60s. It points us in a general direction.

It’s clear that Cedar Park is not a place where anybody of any particular means is buried, at least not the stretch of it that Willie’s gravesite is in. There are no headstones, only non-descript, in-ground monuments. They are all overgrown, and we realize after a while we may never even find Willie’s stone.

We set about clearing as many graves as we can. One by one, we tear up grass and dirt until a name reveals itself from beneath. After an hour of this, though, we give up.

On our way back to the car, we step over a grave. From between a few patches of grass, we see an L. Down on our knees again, we start clearing the overgrowth away. One by one, the letters appear.

In loving memory

Wm. Lang McLean

1904-1977

The necklace, the patch, the interviews, the family lore. The mystery surrounding the fate of this long-ago World Cup star makes sense, in retrospect. Willie had been cast to the wind, a hundred different puzzle pieces tucked away on shelves, in drawers and in minds. It took close to a century before anybody made the effort to put them all together. And even so, to this day we still don’t feel as though we have a fully formed picture of who Willie was — his dreams, his motivations, the full story of why he did what he did.

In idle moments, our minds are still drawn to him. As fanciful as it might sound, we wonder sometimes how a conversation with him would’ve gone, and how much the Willie we’ve resurrected would have in common with the genuine article.

At his gravesite, we reflect back upon an old negative one of his relatives has given us. It’s of Willie in his Bricklayers uniform, his future still full of endless possibilities, his brush with World Cup glory just a few years away. He gives the camera a wry smile — he looks proud of how far he’d come.

This is how we’d like to remember him, in the prime of his life. But Willie’s story is far more complex, and the photo seems as sad, as bittersweet, as this final resting place.

It’s hard to know how to pay our respects to Willie, so we do the best we can. We clear the remainder of the weeds from his headstone, set an old, weathered soccer ball next to his grave, and head home.

(All photos: unknown photographer except where noted; scans of historical photos and documents: Pablo Maurer/The Athletic; collages: John Bradford/The Athletic)

© Pablo Maurer 2025

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