Peter Vermes: An American in Communist Hungary

Note: This is the seventh part of my American Soccer Road Trip, which will involve me traveling across the country, finding stories that exemplify the diversity that exists in American soccer. Check back soon for further updates.

In 1977, when Peter Vermes was 11 years old, his father took him to see a World Cup qualifier in his homeland between the Hungarian national team and the USSR. The young boy was in awe of the stadium and the players out on the field. He told his father, “One day I’m going to play in this stadium. I’m going to play for the United States and we’re going to play against Hungary.”

Vermes’s desire to play for the US against Hungary reflected his family’s background. He was born in Delran, New Jersey in 1966 to Hungarian parents. His father, Michael, had been a professional player, a member of the great Budapest Honved FC team in the 1950s. Things were on course for the elder Vermes to play in the 1958 World Cup, but the Soviet invasion of 1956 forced him to flee his homeland. He eventually settled in the United States, although he would later return most summers to Hungary with Peter, seeking to instill a connection to his homeland in his young son.

The elder Vermes also taught his son the game of soccer at which he had been so skilled. Peter was a star college player at Rutgers in the late 1980s and began playing with the Olympic team as it prepared for the 1988 Seoul games. While at a pre-Olympic tournament in Lille, France, Vermes was approached after a game by a man speaking Hungarian. “[He] asked if I spoke Hungarian and I said yes … He asked me if I had any aspirations of coming to Europe and I said yes.”

Peter Vermes (photo: sporting-heroes.net)

The man, it turned out, was an agent and said that he could set up trials with European teams for Vermes. The agent said he would set up a trial with Belgium’s Standard Liege (the club where American defender Oguchi Onyewu plays today), but first Vermes should go to Hungary to train for a couple of weeks and get up to speed on the European game. The agent had contacts with a team called Raba ETO (known today as Gyori ETO FC) and so Vermes began training with them.

Instant impact doesn’t even begin to explain what Peter Vermes did in his first day of training with Raba ETO. He was placed on the reserve team in a scrimmage against the first team.

Five minutes in, the first team scored against us. Five minutes later, I scored to tie the game up. The coach, after the goal was scored, put me on the first team. Within ten minutes of that, I scored a goal for the first team and we won 2-1 … They stopped the game, we all went inside, and they offered me a contract right then and there.

Vermes talked it over with his father and they decided that it made sense for him to sign with the Hungarian team. He could play there for a year or two to gain experience and then move to a bigger league in Europe. Vermes signed with Raba ETO in 1989 and became the first American to play first division soccer over a whole season.

In signing a contract with a Hungarian team, Vermes was also going behind the Iron Curtain. He had chosen to play with a Hungarian team, at a time when Hungary was still under communist rule. What did it feel like, I asked, to be an American in Hungary at that time?

“Someone who had never been there before would have looked at it with different eyes,” Vermes told me. Having been there nearly every summer as a kid, he knew what he was getting into.

The manifestations of the country’s economic system were relatively limited, Vermes has said. He is quoted in David Wangerin’s book Soccer in a Football World as saying, “I know there is communism there, but it’s not something I notice in my everyday activities. What I notice more is how much more culture and tradition there is … everywhere you go to eat, there are violins playing.”

That is not to say that communism was completely invisible to Vermes while he was playing in Hungary. While contact between capitalist and communist nations was often minimal, the American Vermes got up close and personal with many Russians.

We would play on Saturdays and we would get Sundays off. Saturday night after the game, I would usually take the train to Budapest because I had a lot of relatives there. When I would get on the train, a lot of the Russian soldiers would travel [into Budapest] when they would get a day or weekend [off]. I would end up being on a train with a bunch of Russian soldiers.

Vermes said he almost always felt perfectly safe in Russian-occupied Hungary. But one night, driving home from dinner, he got quite a fright:

I was driving home and all of the sudden … out of nowhere fifty yards ahead of me, a Russian tank came out into the street and it was heading straight toward me. And I’m like, “Holy s***, what am I going to do here?” All of the sudden, [the tank] turned down another street.

The tank’s trip through the city tore up the streets and it was one incident among many that led Hungarians to take a dim view of their Russian occupiers. Even though he was in a communist country, Vermes told me, he noticed Hungarians’ unhappiness about their occupiers and rebelliousness which would lead the country to freedom shortly after he left (he moved on to FC Volendam in Holland after one season with Raba ETO)

Like many of the American “pioneers” of his era (he mentioned Tab Ramos, John Harkes, and John Doyle), Vermes had to go abroad to earn a living, and doing so was a transformative experience for him. He told me that it “hardened [him] as a player” and taught him how to be a professional.

Right before the 1990 World Cup, Peter Vermes achieved a long held goal. With his father in attendance, he represented the United States in a game against Hungary played at the same stadium he had been to as a child.

Peter Vermes (in blue) playing for the US national team (photo: BBC)

That summer, Vermes achieved a goal his father had long ago dreamed for himself: playing in the World Cup itself. Even though the US lost all three of its matches in Italy that summer, Vermes was simply proud to have played in the tournament. And his father was just as proud of his son. Vermes told me of his father:

I think for him it was full circle. He was a professional player, he played in Hungary. He had to leave because communism was coming in, he had to escape the country and cut his career short. And then here I was, his son, who eventually become a professional player, and was playing in Hungary, his old country that he wanted to play for some day and probably would have if he had stayed. And then finally, his son was going to a World Cup. … [M]aybe he couldn’t finish off his career but he saw it happening for me and I think he was extremely proud of that fact.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under American Soccer Road Trip, Economics, Europe, History, North America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.