Why Soccer? (Part 1: My History)

This is the first in a three part series I'll be writing on how I became a more rabid, proselytizing soccer supporter than for any other sport I actually have experience playing in. I grew up idolizing the Jim Paxson and Calvin Natt-era Portland Trailblazers. The first sporting event I can remember attending was a 156-116 laugher over the Denver Nuggets in November of 1983. So how did I get here? In part 1, I'll talk about the slow evolution of a fan, with the role of the PC and cable in breaking down barriers of access. In part 2, I'll be using the hallmark of bad bloggers everywhere, the tortured metaphor, to the explain the appeal of the game and the distance between supporters and non-supporters. In part 3, I'll talk about the specific role the city of Portland and the Timbers franchise has had in my development from casual fan to committed convert. So buckle up because it's going to be a bumpy, if hopefully somewhat illuminating, ride.

The Genesis

 Like many people my age, my path to fandom starts with the 1994 World Cup. Prior to that, there wasn't much of anything to follow in the United States when it came to soccer. PBS would occasionally show a match from the German Bundesliga, shot in film so grainy it may as well have been the Zapruder film. Kids knew the name Pelé, maybe Maradona, but didn't know why they knew them. They were just "the names you knew from Soccer". It was the 1994 World Cup, and the provision that FIFA wrote requiring an American domestic league in order to host it, when everything began to change.

So, this story begins on June 17th, 1994. Actually, that's the day OJ Simpson made his epically glacial getaway in that white Ford Bronco. It was the following day, the 18th, when the US kicked off the World Cup with a draw against Switzerland. Maybe I'm the only one who has these two events inextricably linked. 4 days later, they scored a miraculous victory over a hugely talented Colombia team which meant qualification out of the group stages of the competition. This led to a match against the eventual Cup winners Brazil that remains one of the most talked about matches in American soccer history.

At the time, the US team was managed by Bora Milutinović. This Serbian had a record of getting teams out of the first round of the World Cup (Mexico 1986, Costa Rica 1990) by playing compact football with a stiff defense. Maybe because of this, my strongest memories are of the stalwart back line: Alexi Lalas, Marcelo Balboa, Paul Caligiuri and Fernando Clavijo, with Thomas Dooley acting as a sweeper to clear attacks. They protected Tony Meola between the pipes while Tab Ramos, Eric Wynalda, John Harkes and a young Cobi Jones tried to sneak in goals through counterattacks. First time viewers in living rooms all over America watched breathlessly as the US worked valiantly to hold back wave after wave of attack. Each minute they stood firm ratcheted up the tension. This couldn't go on. The US was going to have to lose. They were going to have to surrender to the pressure. Weren't they? Could they really hold their own? All told, nearly 3.5 million fans attended what is still the largest ever World Cup and a new generation of kids began to dream of a future in a sport which they loved.

A Step Back and a New Door Opens

After the World Cup, interest started to fade since TV coverage was still difficult to come by. ESPN covered many of the national team's games, giving us the chance to watch the transition of players from one tournament to the next. At the World Cup, we had been treated to a gritty team of relatively anonymous battlers; now, expectations started to rise and we had a crop of promising young talent eager to display their talents, specifically Jovan Kirovski, Joe-Max Moore and Roy Lassiter. Kirovski was in the famous Manchester United youth program, Roy Lassiter probably the most physical and athletic player the US had fielded to that point, and Joe-Max Moore plying his trade in the German league. Unfortunately, Kirovski was often injured, Lassiter looked the part but had no discernible soccer skills, and Moore was game, but often went missing in the big games. Only Moore was part of the 1998 World Cup Squad.

Around this time, I had suffered from several bouts of severe insomnia and began staying up late into the wee hours of the night watching anything I could find until my eyes couldn't take it any more. Some channel, I forget which, began to show the Premier League Review, a recap of highlights from all the games that weekend in the English Premier League. It became an habitual watch for me as I started to appreciate the weight of the history surrounding the game. Eventually, I settled on a club to support... Liverpool. They played attractive football under Roy Evans, had a history of success which was slowly fading into the past, underachieved enough to make them approachable and featured 2 dynamic attackers: Robbie Fowler and a 17-year old dynamo named Michael Owen.

Truth be told, before I made my choice two other teams had also caught my eye. Leicester City featured a young American goalkeeper named Kasey Keller who even I knew played for the University of Portland and was singlehandedly trying to keep Leicester from being relegated that season. The other team, I freely admit, was Liverpool's arch-rivals: Manchester United. And like Leicester, it was almost completely due to one player: Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. The "baby-faced assassin" was a marvelous player to watch, knew exactly when and where to pop up to score a goal, and was a decent guy to boot. United were scoring for fun and winning practically every trophy available. I was far too self-conscious to support a team like that, having spent most of the 90's being angry at how many Michael Jordan 23 Chicago Bulls jerseys I had seen on the streets of Portland. There's no joy in supporting the favorite, only matched or unmatched expectations.

And speaking of unmatched expectations, the 1998 World Cup squad was a disaster. The selection of the members of the team was controversial, the tactics were bizarre, and the squad was housed far outside any host city, keeping them away from the atmosphere and build up. The players were restive and ambivalent. The team finished 32nd out of 32 teams, gaining no points out of their group. It was to be nearly 4 years of indifference to American soccer before the Portland Timbers and the 2002 World Cup shook me out of that funk. In the meantime, I had the nascent Fox Sports World (now Fox Soccer Channel) to entertain and entrance me with broadcasts of soccer from around the world.

The PC Age

It's hard to understate how important the internet has been to help expand the popularity of professional soccer in America. Soccer fans spread out all over the country now had a way to communicate, organize and even taunt other fans. Soccer was no longer largely a solitary pursuit for me and many others. Usenet groups popped up for fans of individual teams, leading to "invasions" by rival supporters. Around the same time, the proliferation of soccer games began to appear in our stores. Who can forget the wonderfully terrible FIFA 97? For whatever reason, I used to play as the Germans, headed by the majestic Jurgen Klinsmann and Oli Bierhoff up front. Then I moved on to the harder stuff: Championship Manager.


The most popular game in Europe no one in America has ever heard of, Championship Manager (now Football Manager) is a sports simulation game. As manager of virtually any team in the world, you can hire coaches, sign players and formulate tactics. What you can't do: shoot, pass, dribble or control a player in any way. Gobs and gobs of data pouring over you...thousands of players at hundreds of clubs waiting to be sorted, categorized, compared. When the Timbers signed OJ Obatola, my first instinct was to fire up my newest copy of Football Manager to see what his stats were in the game. From Obatola's former team of Gombak United in the Singapore S-League to the Portland Timbers to Liverpool, hundreds of researchers attend games and try to quantify what they see on the pitch. It's certainly not a game for everyone, but if you have the patience and of a saint and the heart of an accountant it's the Rosetta Stone for learning about the minutiae of the sport.

Every step of the way, technology, popularity and convenience have conspired to put soccer information into the hands of an information nerd. Having followed soccer on a daily basis for well over a decade now, I'm still learning and try to come to grips with the huge amounts of shared experiences that comes with being a soccer fan. I'll talk more about that common language in the 2nd part of this series, but I believe that soccer is one of the great levelers on our planet. Literally billions of people representing different nationalities, religions and socioeconomic backgrounds come together in a freewheeling discussion about the game. Why soccer? Because I want to be part of that conversation.