There is a link between the penalty and SoccerTown, USA, Kearny, New Jersey, and it is a player, a good player, good enough to have been a three-time, Scottish international. Look at the alphabetical list of them and he is the first. He is Jimmy Adams.   

James Adams was born in 1864 in Edinburgh. And he played all his Scottish football in that city at Hearts twice and St. Bernard's. A full-back he was not endowed with great speed but could tackle. It lead to him making his debut at Old Tynecastle in 1885, the year before the more to the current stadium and a total of nine years with the club first time around. It also lead to three caps, albeit minor ones, two against Ireland and one against Wales. However, in 1894 at the age already of thirty he chose to move south and turn professional, having previously worked as a stone- and ornamental mason, like his father.

He went to Everton, staying two seasons and making forty appearances, at which point in 1896 Hearts, now professional, came in for him once more. In fact his second stay at the club was not an obvious success. He stayed just a season and four games only before a further move across the city for another and final season at New Logie Green.

However, whilst still at Hearts first time around Adams had changed football forever. In a Scottish Cup quarter-final against East Stirlingshire in 1890 he deliberately handled a ball to prevent a certain goal. It resulted, well, in nothing. The aggrieved club protested and, whilst the following year, the penalty-line but not yet the penalty-spot would be introduced, the match was lost, Hearts going on to defeat Third Lanark in the semi-final and Dumbarton in the final itself. Thus it bought Adams a Cup-winners' medal, a measure of infamy and yet another Scottish mark on the modern game. 

Curiously enough on retirement Jimmy Adams would take up refereeing but within three years he, his wife, Fanny, again from Edinburgh, and family were on their way and to America. There from 1901 they settled in New Jersey, in Kearny , since become known as Soccer Town USA. In 1910 with four children born in Scotland and one in America they are living on Devon Street, he working as a stone-cutter. In 1920 they are on Halstead Street. In 1930 with three children still at home he is working at the High School, listed as a Marble Cutter but thought to be janitor and coaching football at the school that was a beacon of the game as it struggled elsewhere. Whilst it would be another forty years before US soccer would revive, with John Harkes, the son of Dundee, father of Ian, Tony Meola of Italian and Tab Ramos of Uruguayan descent and all of Kearny High taking the USA to the 1994 World Cup it is questionable whether it would have happened without the input of Adams and the many other Scots, players and fans, who in the town flew the flag. Meanwhile, in 1940 Adams still on Devon was finally retired. It was three years before his death aged seventy-eight, in 1943, buried according to Presbyterian rites and in the Arlington cemetery, three thousand miles from his first and a short mile away from his final home.