Kicking Back: The Tragedy of Colin Fowles
Art by Cory Mizer
On August 29, 1985, just 23 days after his 33rd birthday, the Fort Lauderdale Strikers original was shot to death during a local soccer tournament at an Opa-Locka park in Dade County, Florida. Initial accounts found in the South Florida Sentinel, dated just two days after the event, state that no motive for the shooting of Fowles was clear – Patrick Horne writes in his book Black Pioneers of the NASL (1968-84) that he died from gunshots fired at random during a fracas amongst fans at a soccer game in which he was playing. In a statement immediately following the tragic incident, former Strikers head coach, Ron Newman recalled that “Colin was very strong and fast, a bread-and-butter player who gave everything he could, despite average ability.”
Fowles was born to born to Phyllis and Colin Fowles Sr. on August 6, 1953 in Savanna-La-Mar, Westmoreland, Jamaica; however, the late 1950s and early 1960s were an unstable time in Jamaica and his family moved to England where Colin, with brother Normand and sister Judith, learned to play soccer. Sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, Fowles moved to Brooklyn, NY where he attended Long Island University and had a fantastic collegiate career as a LIU-Brooklyn Blackbird from 1972 to 1975. At the end of the season, he was drafted 19th overall into the North American Soccer League by the team who had just won the 1975 Soccer Bowl, the Tampa Bay Rowdies.
Largely, Fowles grafted as a defender or a hard-nosed midfielder and when he joined the Strikers camp, the rookie found it difficult to win time away from the likes of Alex Pringle, Mark Lindsay, the capped Haitian International Arsene Auguste or team captain and English International Tommy Smith. In fact, Colin went the whole season without an appearance. Tampa finished with a better record than they had in their first season, again won the Eastern Division, Atlantic Conference, losing in the Conference Championships, a match away from appearing in back-to-back Soccer Bowls.
Often thought of as an expansion side in 1976, the Fort Lauderdale Strikers were just the franchise rights of the Miami Toros, 1973-76, who were previously the Miami Gatos in 1972 and were actually the residuals of one of the league's founding teams, the Washington Darts, who played in the U.S. capital from 1967 to 1971. They won their division three times, were declared the league champions without playoffs in 1968 and won the league championship in 1969. All of that is to say, there was an infrastructure and roster in place – this was no pushover team and in fact, during his time playing for Fort Lauderdale, Colin Fowles hung with some of the best players in the world, the likes of George Best and “Der Bomber” Gerd Müller. In his first season with the team, the Strikers won the Eastern Division, American Conference, going 19-7, losing in the Division Championships to the eventual champions, Pelé’s own, New York Cosmos. Fowles made 24 appearances, scored 5 goals and assisted on 4 more.
Colin Fowles would go on to play in 12 seasons, both indoor and outdoor, over the next 6 years, playing at least 147 times for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, scoring 8 goals and 9 assists – and it should be noted there are no stats for the 1980 indoor season; however, he is listed as having been on the roster. Fowles made South Florida home and when the franchise did in 1984 what all NASL franchises eventually did and moved to Minneapolis to become the Minnesota Strikers, he stayed in town to join up with expansion side Fort Lauderdale Sun of the fledgling United Soccer League. In his first year with the Sun, alongside Peruvian legend and fellow former NASL Striker, Teófilo Cubillas, the Sun made the playoffs, defeated Buffalo handedly, and beat the Houston Dynamos to win the one and only USL league title.
The Fort Lauderdale Sun returned in 1985, along only three other teams and after only six weeks, the league collapsed. Later that year, the North American Soccer League would also fold. Leaving only indoor and regional competition as options for players like 32-year-old Colin Fowles. During his time playing for the Sun, Colin gave back to the community of Coral Springs, Florida, and was a coach of the Under 16 team as well as the head coach of the St. Thomas Aquinas High School JV team in Fort Lauderdale. He and his wife Allison were raising their daughters, Cherise, Colleen, and Chantal – his time as a professional were over, but he never stopped finding time to coach and play soccer for his local team, Lauderhill Men’s Soccer.
Art by Derek Reese
Just weeks after his birthday, Colin was lining up just in front of goalkeeper Mark Johnson, in a tournament match at Bunnche Park in Opa-Locka. Johnson reported to police that “the game was cleanly played with no incidents that would indicate anything was about to go wrong.” Johnson goes on to explain that Fowles was set up at the sweeper position just in front of him and then “I heard shots that were just like a pack of firecrackers going off,” Johnson continued, “I hopped a fence and kept running.” According to additional witnesses, after most of the players scattered, Colin approached one of the four or five reported gunmen calling for calm, he was shot twice. “He was struck by gunshots in the stomach and pelvis,” according to the Dade Medical Examiner’s Office. According to multiple sources, he was still alive when loaded into the ambulance, but the vehicle had mechanical trouble and Colin had to wait to be transferred to a second ambulance – he was declared deceased at the hospital.
Amongst his already listed achievements, Colin Fowles was also a capped US National Team player who played everywhere from Restelo Estadio in Lisbon, Portugal to the Azteca in Mexico City. He played in a Cold War era “friendly” vs the USSR at Candlestick Park, San Francisco and travelled to Reykjavik to play Iceland in front of 2,500 in 40-degree weather. In total, Fowles was capped 18 times for the United States as a midfielder, defender, or as a forward. His death shocked people from New York to Florida and everywhere in between because he was considered a local who had done well by anybody who had ever met him. The death of Colin Fowles is truly a tragedy and we’re left to wonder what type of impact he would have had on soccer in Florida, New York, or even the US, had fate intervened.
- Josh Duder
Sources:
Horne, Patrick Black Pioneers of the North American Soccer League (1968-84)
New York, NY. Page Publishing, 2019
Plenderleith, Ian Rock n Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League
New York, NY. St. Martin’s Press, 2014
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/09/01/sports/fowles-slain-ex-soccer-star.html
https://www.nasljerseys.com/Players/F/Fowles.Colin.htm
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1985-08-31-8502060012-story.html