Jimmy Fryatt, scorer of 4-second soccer goal, dies at 79

Las Vegas Review-Journal

4 years ago

Jim Fryatt was a prolific goal scorer in his native England, and once held the Guinness Book of World Records mark for fastest soccer goal — four seconds after kickoff. (Courtesy Val Fryatt)

Jim Fryatt is shown singing the national anthem before a Philadelphia Atoms game during their 1973 North American Soccer League championship season. (Courtesy Val Fryatt).

Jim Fryatt and wife Val were married for 58 years. Jim, a prolific scorer in England’s lower divisions, once scored a goal four seconds after kickoff. He died at his home in Henderson June 5, 2020 following a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. (Courtesy Val Fryatt)

Jim and Val Fryatt raised three children: Sean, left, was a soccer star at Philadelphia Textile under former UNLV coach Barry Barto; Nicola, center, is a Las Vegas real estate marketer; Edward, right, was a golf standout at UNLV who went on to play on the PGA Tour. (Courtesy Val Fryatt)

In the 1994 World Cup soccer final played in the Rose Bowl, Brazil and Italy went 120 minutes without scoring a goal.

Jimmy Fryatt, conversely, who was 79 when he died Friday at his home in Seven Hills, once scored one four seconds after kickoff.

The native of Southampton, United Kingdom, Fryatt was a former assistant coach for the North American Soccer League’s Las Vegas Quicksilvers and the father of former UNLV golfing great Edward Fryatt. Some time before that, he found the back of the net in a blink of an eye while playing for Bradford Park Avenue against Tranmere Rovers in a English Football League game.

This happened in 1964.

Sports writers on the other side of the pond still talk about it.

“Fryatt kicked off, Charlie Atkinson, the right half, took it on, passing to outside-right Sam Lawrie. He cut back in, giving it to inside-right Kevin Hector, who played a through ball to a charging Fryatt to smash home.”

James Corrigan of the London Telegraph was born a few years after Fryatt tallied the hypersonic goal.

“But it says so much about the scope of its celebrity that, more than a decade after it, at least five of us children in a small South Wales town would try desperately to re-enact it on a daily basis,” Corrigan wrote in 2019.

Like so many of us who have not scored a professional goal in four seconds, or even 120 minutes, Jimmy Fryatt never left Las Vegas after arriving here with the Quicksilvers.

Head above

“Self-spoken, great sense of humor and probably one of the best headers of a soccer ball I’ve ever seen,” said former UNLV soccer coach Barry Barto, a teammate of Fryatt’s with the 1973 NASL champion Philadelphia Atoms who would coach Fryatt’s son, Sean, at Philadelphia Textile (now Jefferson University).

That skill is what separated Jimmy Fryatt, who scored 205 goals over an 18-year playing career in England’s lower divisions, from the other goal snipers of his era.

It also may have been responsible for turning the last 10 years of his life into a foggy haze representative of a homeland he no longer remembered.

“We think he probably had CTE,” Val Fryatt, Jimmy’s wife, said about the degenerative disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy. “I had already arranged with Boston University for a sliver of his brain tissue to be tested and analyzed.”

Sean Fryatt was a former high school soccer star at Valley High who was inducted into the Thomas Jefferson athletic hall of fame after scoring 38 goals for Philadelphia Textile. He said before his dad’s memory faded, they often spoke of striking a heavy leather soccer ball with a sudden flick of the head on sodden English evenings.

“There were guys who would intentionally miss the ball because if they made contact, they would get knocked out,” Sean Fryatt said of an inherent risk of heading a crossing pass onto goal when it rains.

Added longtime Las Vegas soccer referee and family friend John Kennedy: “The (leather ball) bladders were like concrete, and Jimmy probably scored more goals with his napper (Scottish word for head) than anybody I’ve known.”

Goals and whiskers

Dick Calvert, UNLV’s longtime public address announcer and former play-by-play voice of the short-lived Quicksilvers, was Fryatt’s roommate during the 1977 NASL season. He said Jimmy’s mutton chop sideburns were thicker than the sod on some of the pitches on which the team played.

“He didn’t have much hair on top of his head, so he let it grow down the side of his face,” Calvert said with a fond chuckle. “Jimmy and Derek (Trevis, the Quicksilvers’ head coach) taught me the world of football — soccer, as we know it.”

Val Fryatt said she and Jimmy had a wonderful life and raised three wonderful children (daughter Nicola has a successful real estate business in Las Vegas).

Toward the end, when Jimmy said little and recognized even less, she would tune the radio to the country stations. Jimmy would sing along to “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and the other standards almost as well as he once sang the national anthem at Veterans Stadium before an Atoms game.

She said when he died, he was surrounded by his family.

She took comfort in that, and in the number of his old teammates who have called, and homages to his head and bushy whiskers that have been posted to the websites of many of the clubs for which her husband played.

While many soccer fans knew of Jimmy for those four seconds against Tranmere, Val Fryatt was married to him for 58 years. She said she cherished each and every one.

Contact Ron Kantowski at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow @ronkantowski on Twitter.