It seems appropriate that the World Cup would be in progress when Walter Bahr died. And that soccer blasphemy would be in the air—plucky little Iceland tying the Goliath Argentina, often-disappointing Switzerland drawing with five-time champion Brazil, long-suffering Mexico upsetting defending champ Germany. In each case, the humble being exalted, although Bahr had to wait decades for his acclaim.

Bahr, who was 91, was the last living member of the 1950 U.S. team—a collection, essentially, of weekend warriors who somehow defeated England, the sport’s original superpower. Bahr, in fact, directly facilitated the winning goal 68 years ago in what has been considered the most shocking result in Cup history.

What was so different about Bahr’s grand moment—compared to the televised, monetized, scrutinized 2018 Cup doings—was that approximately nobody in Bahr’s nation noticed his team’s heroics. It wasn’t until 1990, when the United States ended a 40-year World Cup drought and our soccer-illiterate country began to wonder about an activity that didn’t involve the legal use of hands, that Bahr became something of a star.

“We hadn’t even heard of the World Cup until we went and played in it,” Bahr, then 63, told me during a 1990 chat. “When we got to Brazil”—host of the ’50 Cup—“we realized it was going to be a pretty big deal. But at the time, no one knew we left and no one knew we came back.”

If Bahr had been given to telling fish stories when a trickle of U.S reporters began to show some soccer curiosity in 1990, he might have spun yarns of his prominent role against mighty England. He might have described nifty dribbling through the English defense, being an American version of Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Brazil’s Neymar or Portugal’s Cristiano Renaldo. He might have regaled us with recollections of ticket-tape parades and heroes’ welcomes.

On the contrary. He came clean.

“If we had one reporter at our games, that was a lot,” he said. “Dent McSkimming, who was with the St. Louis paper, was a soccer fan. So he paid his own way to Brazil and he’d go to the games and call his office with the score and maybe a paragraph or two. In those days, no one ever interviewed you, anyway.”

Too bad. Bahr was a delightful subject whose front-row seat to those pioneer days in America help orient us Yanks about how far behind the rest of the world we had been in the sport. So far behind that, with virtually no attention paid the ’50 World Cup in the U.S. media, the monumental triumph over England did not become a watershed moment. The founding of MLS, the States’ professional soccer league, was still 46 years in the future.

On that 1950 team, “the closest thing to a professional player we had,” Bahr said, was a Scottish-born defensemen named Ed McIlvenny, who lived in Philadelphia, where Bahr was working as a full-time schoolteacher. Joe Gaetjens, the Haitian-born striker whose diving header converted Bahr’s seemingly harmless 20-yard shot into the winning score against England, worked as a dishwasher in New York City. Defenseman Harry Keough and midfielder Frank Wallace were mailmen in St. Louis. Goalie Frank Borghi was an undertaker in St. Louis. Belgian-born defenseman Joe Maca was an interior decorator in New York. Midfielder Charlie Colombo was a carpenter in St. Louis. Midfielder Gino Paraiani was a cannery worker in St. Louis, with a paper route on the side. Forwards John Souza and Ed Souza—who weren’t related but both hailed from Fall River, Mass.—were a knitting plant foreman and part-time truck driver, respectively. One team member, Ben McGloughlin, didn’t make it to Brazil because his boss wouldn’t give him time off from his job managing flow meters.

“I played on every national team for 10 years,” Bahr said, “but I only had 18 international appearances. You could never get our whole team together for practice.”

Under the radar, Bahr enjoyed a Hall of Fame career as both a player and coach—his Penn State University teams regularly appeared in the national championship tournament—yet for years he was more widely known as the father of Chris and Matt, NFL placekickers who won two Super Bowls apiece. They and a third son, Casey, all played professional soccer.

When people suddenly wanted to hear about the ’50 World Cup, four decades later, Bahr said, “I don’t have any great single memory of the game,” except that “it was a big deal to the Brazilian fans. The crowd for the championship game, Brazil against Uruguay, is still listed as the largest attendance ever—199,000 and something. The crowd for our game with England was 20,000, 30,000. [Officially, in World Cup records, it was only 10,151.] But they seemed pro-American to me. See, England was favored to win the World Cup and Brazil wanted no part of the English. But I thought they were cheering for us.”

In telling these stories, Bahr cautioned, “Make sure that all this is listed under ‘Ancient history.’”

OK. But well worth the retelling at World Cup time.