When the Wood family left Scotland for America in 1921 they clearly did it with a plan. They headed straight to Gary, Indiana, just across the State Line from Chicago and where United Steel, "Carnegie Steel" had a large works. In Lochgelly in Fife, William, the father had been a Coal Miner. In the States he clearly found something better. But he did it not only with a twelve year old son, who clearly had learned something of the game in their home-town, but had something of the footballing gene not in but with him. His wife, Jeanie, was the cousin of Tom and his elder brother, Johnny Duncan, both about to start out on professional careers, which in the case of the latter would lead to legendary status at Leicester City and in 1925 the winning a single cap. So Alex and the two Duncan brothers were second cousins with Alex by that time about to start out as a full- cum half-back on a football career of his own. 

It would begin in Chicago and then Detroit as an "amateur" and include inclusion in and all four games for the US team at the first World Cup in 1930. That would lead to him being signed by Brooklyn Wanderers for a season as US soccer more or less collapsed about him and in 1933 a move into the English game that would take him to the Second War and start at none other than Leicester for three of the six seasons.

In 1930 ad still in the States Alex had married and in late 1939, he his wife and their son headed back across the Atlantic and to Gary once more. There he found work again in the steel-mill till retirement and there he would live out the rest of his days, in 1986 be inducted, a Fife boy, into the US Soccer Hall of Fame and pass away at the age of eighty just the following year.