26 Facts About Joe Gaetjens

Joseph Edouard Gaetjens was a Haitian soccer player who played as a center forward.

Joe Gaetjens won his home national championship in 1942 and 1944 with top-level Etoile Haitienne.

Joe Gaetjens was posthumously inducted into the United States National Soccer Hall of Fame in 1976.

Joe Gaetjens is among the Les 100 Heros de la Coupe du Monde, which included the top 100 World Cup Players from 1930 to 1990, a list drawn up in 1994 by the France Football magazine based exclusively on their performances at World Cup level.

Joe Gaetjens was born in Haiti's capital of Port-au-Prince on March 19,1924, to Edmond and Antonine Defay, a well-to-do Haitian family who lived in an upscale neighborhood of Port-au-Prince called Bois Verna.

Joe Gaetjens's great-grandfather Thomas, was a native of Bremen, in northern Germany, who supposedly had been sent to Haiti by Frederick William III, the King of Prussia, as a business emissary arriving shortly after 1825; although the validity for this claim is uncertain by family members.

Joe Gaetjens married Leonie Dejoie, whose father was a general in a time where Haiti's independence was officially recognized by France.

When Joe Gaetjens was born, his father registered his birth certificate with the German embassy, in case he ever wanted to gain German citizenship.

Joe Gaetjens joined Etoile Haitienne at the age of fourteen and won two Ligue Haitienne championships in 1942 and 1944.

Less than ten minutes after Racing's last goal, Joe Gaetjens rebounded and scored to break the shutout.

Joe Gaetjens went to New York City in 1947 to study accounting at Columbia University on a scholarship from the Haitian government and concluded that he could not make a living from professional soccer in Haiti.

Joe Gaetjens was making $25 per game, while working for the Brookhattan owner's restaurant and washing dishes.

Joe Gaetjens returned to Haiti in 1954 and remained active in soccer, rejoining Etoile Haitienne, and became a spokesman for Colgate-Palmolive.

Joe Gaetjens played a few seasons and then left the game for good in 1957, a few months after the birth of his first son.

On December 27,1953, Joe Gaetjens played in a World Cup Qualifier for Haiti against Mexico.

Joe Gaetjens was not interested in politics, but his family was.

Joe Gaetjens was related to Louis Dejoie, who lost the 1957 Haitian presidential election to Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, and although the family had connections to the new president, Gaetjens's younger brothers Jean-Pierre and Fred became associated with a group of exiles in the Dominican Republic who wanted to stage a coup.

On, 1964, the morning after Duvalier declared himself "president for life", the rest of the Gaetjens family fled the country in fear of reprisal for the younger Gaetjens brothers' rebellious associations, but Joe stayed, thinking that Duvalier's regime would be uninterested in him since he was only a sports figure.

In 1972, Joe Gaetjens was honored in a benefit game involving the New York Cosmos and a team composed of local Haitians at Yankee Stadium.

Joe Gaetjens was posthumously inducted into the United States National Soccer Hall of Fame in 1976.

An unnamed ESPN producer for "Outside the Lines" who worked with footage of the match for a special dedicated to Joe Gaetjens stated to an ESPN journalist that they were "98 or 99 percent sure" that the number was 18.

Joe Gaetjens, although light-skinned, was portrayed by "dark-skinned" Haitian actor Jimmy Jean-Louis in the 2005 film The Game of Their Lives.

Joe Gaetjens was depicted as a practitioner of Voodoo, which outraged his family, leading them to proclaim how ludicrously inaccurate the interpretation was.

When Joe Gaetjens first arrived in the US from Haiti, he was mistaken for Belgian of the Flemish-speaking part of the country, due to the sounding of his surname ending in -tjens and the fact that migration in waves from Belgium were common during the 19th century.

However, his great-grandfather was from Bremen of northern Germany and the Joe Gaetjens name is not common in Flanders.

Joe Gaetjens was a fluent speaker of French, Spanish and English.