The United States team for the 1950 World Cup, held in Rio de Janeiro.

The Missing Miracle Worker

In 1950, Joe Gaetjens helped the U.S. pull off the greatest upset in World Cup history. Fourteen years later, a Haitian death squad came for him

By Leander Schaerlaeckens

What happened to Joe Gaetjens, the mysterious Haitian-American soccer player whose goal felled mighty England at the 1950 World Cup in Brazil?

My quest to find out the fate of Gaetjens—the dishwasher who engineered what became known as the “Miracle on Grass,” the greatest upset in World Cup history—led not only to the grim answer but, eventually, to my book on the cockamamie history of the U.S.M.N.T., The Long Game: U.S. Men’s Soccer and its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts.