Maybe it’s just a Saint Louis thing. Modesty’s a prized virtue in this Gateway City. Ask 87-year-old Bill Eppy, winner of the 1957 U.S. Open Cup with Saint Louis Kutis, what it felt like to lift the trophy. He’ll take out a piece of paper, put on his reading glasses and rattle off the names of his teammates. “Ruben Mendoza, he was some player. We had Butch Cook too. God only knows what his real first name was,” extols Eppy, a tough-minded midfielder in his day. “Looby and Herman Weckie. And, of course, there was Harry Keough…he ran the whole show.”

Sam Fink sounds a little like the late Harry Keough too, part of that same Kutis side of 1957. He was captain of the U.S. National Team that beat England in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in one of the greatest underdog stories in the history of the World Cup. Keough never bothered much with his own part in that seismic result. He turned his attention instead to Frank Borghi, the goalkeeper who grew larger and larger until he filled the whole of the goal. The English couldn’t breech him. “With those big hands of his, he was without a doubt the star of the game,” Keough said of Borghi, a fellow son of Saint Louis and a two-time Open Cup-winner with Simpkins-Ford in 1948 and 50. “They should have carried him off the field twice!”



“Sam leads by example on the field,” Saint Louis FC coach Anthony Pulis says of his foraging captain who, born and raised in Bridgton, Missouri, came up through SLFC’s youth system. “He’s an old-fashioned center-back who just loves defending. He has fantastic leadership qualities – he’s got everything we want in players and in people. He always wants to get better and learn and he’s a joy to work with.”

Not one of Fink’s teammates will contradict that. He’s the kind of leader you break your back for. He’s the first one in when the going gets rough. He tackles hard. He never dogs it and he’s in among them doing the dirty work when it counts. And when the hard work was done, three minutes into second-half stoppage time against FC Cincinnati in the Round of 16, it was Fink who rose highest at the back post to slam the ball home with a towering header.