Author Archives: octoberthoughtspdx

It’s 8:30 Friday night. I’ve got clothes in the dryer, an open suitcase waits for them in the living room. I’m on a 5 a.m. flight tomorrow for the first leg of a trip that will take me through three airports and as many time zones.

By this time tomorrow, I’ll be in Columbus, OH, home of the Columbus Crew, Mapfre Stadium, and the site of the 2015 MLS Cup final.

Personally, this has been a ridiculous week. Every minute has been four minutes long. Some hours have been two days long. I have sat at my desk at work and cried every day this week. Encouragement from both editors and writers, extreme generosity of friends, a hurried email to a friend’s wife to beg her to let him come with all of us to Columbus.

She said yes. I cried when I wrote the email and I cried when she replied.

There was the part where I sat in my car in the driveway and talked to the first Timbers beat writer for The Oregonian, a man who covered the team in ’75 and ’76 and later went on to be the director of communications for US Soccer.

There was the part when a friend put up his hotel points so I could have my own room because, as he put it, “No one over the age of 26 should sleep in a room with six strangers.”

There was the part when my TA coworker got to leave work today an hour and a half before I could. Still kinda mad at him.

And there’s the realization that we are going to experience history. Me and something like two thousand of my closest friends will be there in person. Thousands more will watch on tv here in Portland, as well as across North America and around the world.

A friend, the one who’s putting me on a plane in the morning, sent me a message today: “Write something positive regardless of the outcome, k?”

Regardless of the outcome, we will have had one more game together before the darkness of the offseason. We will have seen a magical playoff run. We will have seen history made.

It’s Halloween night and I’m sitting at the dining room table in a friend’s house in inner NE Portland. I didn’t expect to be here, but here I am.

That’s maybe the truest statement of the entirety of my sports fandom and my connections to the Timbers Army, the Rose City Riveters, RangersFirst, ProstAmerika, WATP Magazine and TheCup.US. I didn’t expect to be here, but here I am.

Seated at the table are people I know pretty well and people I’ve just met. The two that I know well are soccer people: both TA, one a player with Old Growth FC.

As it always does, the conversation over dinner eventually turns to soccer. But this time, it’s not about the game itself, but about how we ended up so engrossed in the community that surrounds it.

It’s a thing I think about a lot. How did we all end up here? How did we get so lucky to stumble into this ready-made family?

My story is simple enough. A ridiculous number of you have probably heard it before. I was a baseball fan. I went to Beavers games. The hotel where I worked got Beavers tickets from Jack Cain and, occasionally, Timbers tickets, too.

When the announcement was made that Portland had been awarded an MLS franchise, I put down a deposit for tickets. I did it on a whim, not knowing if I’d actually use the tickets or not. And when it came time to wholly buy in, I did that, too. On my birthday in 2010, I bought two tickets, the cheapest I could get: section 221, row R, seats 1 and 2.

I took 17 credits at Portland State that fall. I worked 40-45 hours a week. I was exhausted. And then I was done with school in December, lost my long-term job the first week of January of 2011, and felt utterly lost. I no longer felt like I was me. I was adrift.

But I knew I had these tickets. And I knew the season was going to start in a few months. At least I had that to look forward to, though I had no idea what it would mean to me in the long run.

I talked a friend into buying my other ticket. We went and got our axe pictures taken in a little pop-up store a couple blocks from Pioneer Courthouse Square (we’re both on the poster and on the councourse at Providence Park). We stood in line in the rain opening day.

Walking into the stadium, feeling the crowd around me, it was like coming home. I felt like me again. I felt again.

My story isn’t as dramatic as some. I’ve heard stories of newly-single parents buying tickets so they knew they would have something to share with their kids, stories of grief and loss and sadness. These stories become stories of a search for refuge and companionship, of a desire for community that is nothing short of tribal.

They find it in the North End of Providence Park. They find it among the Timbers Army and the Riveters. We find friendship and love and acceptance and support and so much more.

“My soccer family in 107 for Thorns got me through a break-up and a brief couch-surfing period last summer,” one friend tells me. “For me, getting involved with this particular group of soccer fans meant more than having soccer friends; it was a support network.”

Another says simply,”The TA made Portland my home.”

These are common refrains. People are lost, they take a turn somewhere and find themselves in the midst of this thing where we hold their hands, help them through their break-ups, their divorces, their sadness and despair. We help them find their voices and, with a little luck, the teams give them something for which to cheer.

We saw this again today when a newly-minted Timbers fan posted an open letter to the Timbers on her Facebook page:

As it turns out, Allison and her mom will be at Providence Park. They will be there because someone in the TA posted this on Twitter and someone else made sure that Merritt saw it and, if it wasn’t clear before, Merritt’s a pretty emotional guy. Now it’s on the Timbers to make sure they get the win for Allison and her mom.

**

Regardless of the result, this is the last home game of the year. This is one last chance to be together as a group, as family. One last chance.

For all the things this team has given us, chiefly this common focal point around which we’ve all come together, we will rally to give them all we have.

So, the Thorns are back where they were two years ago, only without the hardware.

It was announced today that the out-of-contract Paul Riley will not be invited back for a third year at the helm of the Portland NWSL team. Is it a good choice? Was it the necessary choice? What happens now?

No idea. I’m not even entirely sure what happened.

Even recently, Riley espoused his love of Portland and her soccer culture, but tempered his enthusiasm with a good measure of what might best be called homesickness. His home is on Long Island, where his wife presumably has stayed over the last two seasons.

The post-season presser with GM Gavin Wilkinson a few weeks back told us the possibility of bringing Riley back was being evaluated. Oddly, it felt to me that it would be more Riley’s decision than the team’s, but the team dropped the news today in a short-but-sweet news release. Here is a very fuzzy screen cap as I am completely devoid of any technical prowess:

Okay. The team has stepped up and made the decision. And I’ve been through a range of emotions and opinions since the drop.

First:

Well, okay then. The team faltered for two years under his guidance, failing to make the playoffs this year after struggling through the World Cup absences of eight players. The team was disorganized and never quite came together the way you’d hope a team full of international-level players might. There was little spark, little motivation among the players, even knowing (and, as I’ve said before, I’m 96% sure they did know) that the championship game would be played at their home ground.

Second:

I dunno. Maybe the Keep Riley folks are right. Maybe he just needed that third year of his three-year plan to get things settled and to play the game he wanted to play. What’s the saying? Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.

Third:

This is serious. This is a team with infrastructure and atmosphere envied by women’s clubs worldwide. Proper facilities, complete staff, full stadium. Fans that chant and sing and travel to follow the team. A front office that is organized and professional. Running water.

And, with this major change, this is them stepping up and saying, okay, we’re going to get the on-field part right starting now.

***

It’s this third part that has me a bit shaken. Third coach in four seasons. The Timbers are on their second in five years of MLS and, if some folks are to believed, this one’s on shaky ground. With five games left in the season, three of which are on the road, the Timbers are one point above the red line, tenuously holding onto sixth place in the west. This is a far cry from where we were in Caleb Porter’s first season here.

He got here and seemingly turned things inside out. He had a bit of a smolder, a fire deep within him that pushed him to create a winning side. Everyone was on notice from that introductory press conference. The sentiment? Earn your keep. Work for your place in the XI, in the eighteen.

Both the sentiment and the smolder have been replaced with excuses and defiance. The company line, despite the denial of Merritt, seems to be that sliding into the playoffs in sixth place is good enough and Porter has gone from Sunday night’s disappointment in his team’s performance to taking the blame for their lack of execution.

I’m usually right on the edge of about seven different conspiracy theories when it comes to Portland soccer, and this has me wondering what’s going on behind the scenes. I’ve said it a couple times on social media: Porter’s lost this team. I just wonder what triggered it.

It certainly isn’t the first time a Portland soccer team has walked away from its coach. There’s a bigger issue at hand.

The 2015 NWSL Championship will be held in our city, Soccer City, USA, and, in all likelihood, it will feature two teams not from Portland.

So, what happens here? I know there are some loyal Thorns fans who won’t be there if their team isn’t there to support. That’s fine. There are some who will be up on the Bluff, taking in the University of Portland match at Merlo. Nothing wrong with that, either.

I’ll be at Providence Park.

People are discussing what role, if any, the Riveters should play. Should we take this as an opportunity to express our displeasure with the league, our coach, our underperforming players, with…what, exactly? Do we use it to elevate the other supporters groups in the league? Or maybe just those whose teams are still playing October 1st? There’s no true consensus.

A couple of us talked yesterday about taking up residence in section 223 for the Championship game. Visitors in our own home.

But meh. Let’s go to the South Deck. It’s nice to have a change of scenery once in a while.

It’s a little after 8 a.m. and I’m the only one awake in the house.

A week ago, that I should even be here was unimaginable. A near-frantic Tuesday morning text message changed that.

“If I got you a ticket to the WWC, a ride, and a place to sleep, will you come with me?”

Hold please. Let me think on that.

A World Cup final.

Yes. I’ll go.

We didn’t have a confirmed place to stay until late Thursday, roughly the same time we realized my traveling companion’s passport had expired. Her wife, who we think may very well be a wizard, found her birth certificate late Friday night and, when we got to the border Saturday morning, the border patrol guard didn’t look at the expired passport long enough to even notice it was out of date. So, we may or may not be in Canadaland illegally.

Everything has just fallen into place (including walking into a very crowded Doolin’s in downtown Vancouver just after the ENG/GER match had started and finding a corner table with two comfortable wing-backed chairs.

So, to sum up, I lucked into knowing someone generous enough to give me a ticket. We lucked into a last-minute Air BnB house in a pretty convenient location. And, though less important, we lucked into a table in a crowded bar.

I’m wondering what we’ll luck into today.

This is a feeling I’ve had so many times over the last few years: I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing here.

In a locker room at BC Place after a Timbers/Whitecaps match in 2013. In a bar in Victoria in 2014. Every single time I sit down in a presser with Caleb Porter. I have absolutely no idea how I ended up here, how all these events fell in line to put me in this place.

I’m in Vancouver, BC, tonight. Tomorrow I will go to the FIFA Women’s World Cup  Final. I do not deserve this.

I do not follow women’s international soccer as perhaps I probably should. I do not claim to be a supporter of the USWNT. There are others with a much greater appreciation of the sport, of the contributions of the women playing, others who might gain something from this experience that I cannot being to fathom.

But I’m here.

I sat on a balcony tonight at a house in west Vancouver, a house we’ve been referring to as the Van City Haus, home to a collective of women’s soccer supporters from across the U.S. and, in fact, around the world who have come here to witness this iteration  of the Women’s World Cup. I listened to some of their stories. I heard tell of women who grew up in areas where the schools didn’t offer sports to girls. I heard of parents and grandparents who went out of their way to make sure their daughters and granddaughters had opportunities they were not afforded. I heard the absolute joy of being able to witness and participate in the spectacle of the World Cup.

I met women who’ve been to World Cup matches in years past and those who knew nothing, like me, of women’s soccer before their cities became homes to NWSL teams.

Every story is different, every path is different. The one constant is that we all feel luck to be here. We feel as though we may be on the verge of something great, something historic, something that may be remembered for generations to come.

What will we remember from this experience?

For me, there is an overwhelming sense of gratitude to those who brought me here, for those who came before, for those who made it possible that two women’s teams will meet on a world stage in a stadium that will host 54,000 people from around the globe.

But I have no idea what I’m doing here.

In just a few hours, when we on the west coast of the United States are fast asleep, Rangers FC shareholders will descend on Ibrox Stadium on Edmiston Drive in Glasgow to vote out the remaining two members of the RIFC board and install three new ones.

The road to get here has been bumpy, lined with broken promises and outright lies and every manner of shady dealing. Even this week has been a bit of a roller coaster with stock exchange statements and news releases at every turn. It’s almost as though the football is but an afterthought.

And, I suppose, it has been.

I don’t know how many times I’ve said it, but I know I came to this club at the exact worst moment in its history. I fell in love immediately and I met some amazing people in the process.

Loudmouth blazer-chaser Chris Graham, idiot yank Shane Nicholson, that troll Andrew Dickson. I have learned so much from you. Each of you played a huge part in this story. When the history is written, I hope it is your stories that are told. Thank you for your service to the club.

Even with the coming change in leadership, the work is not done.

It’s nearly 7 a.m. in Glasgow. Today is the beginning of a new chapter.

Good morning, bears.