Me and the Crew

This is a story about some of the things my relationship with a professional soccer team has meant to me. Unfortunately, I have to start with the betrayal that’s threatening the relationship. On October 16, 2017, Sports Illustrated writer Grant Wahl reported that Anthony Precourt, owner of the Major League Soccer team Columbus Crew SC was going to move the team to Austin, Texas, by the start of the 2019 season unless Columbus built him a downtown stadium.

That’s what he said, at least. But in the days and months following that statement, tone-deaf corporate statements and interviews with Precourt, along with research conducted by journalists and fans began to make it seem more and more like Precourt had already made up his mind. Worse, it began to appear that the move was the culmination of a four-year campaign of sabotage; window-dressing on Precourt’s longstanding intention to move the team to Texas, hell, high-water, decency and good sense notwithstanding. There’s a lot to read about that side of things, but you can get started here and here.

Months have passed, 2019 looms, and nothing has been officially decided. The intervening months have been a period of grief, anger, and reflection for me. Grief at the potential loss, anger at the callous disregard and disingenuousness of Precourt, and reflection on what the Crew mean to me, and how the club came to mean so much. This is some of that reflection.

***

There’s a story my dad tells about how my family fell for soccer. According to Dad, it happened in our van in a sweltering Meijer parking lot, listening to Brandi Chastain score the winning penalty in the 1999 Women’s World Cup. He was an adult, and I was nine years old, so I can’t say for sure that he’s wrong, but I can tell you what I remember: my love affair with soccer and the Crew started with the July/August 2000 issue of Lego Club magazine.

The “magazine” was a thin coat of content spread across ten-or-so pages of advertising for Danish toy giant Lego. Literature, it wasn’t, but for a maladroit Mennonite kid growing up below the poverty line in rural Ohio, it was enchanting. The enchantment reached its zenith with the July/August 2000 issue. I found it in the mail, set devotedly upon it, and discovered a short interview promoting Lego’s new Soccer line--white text against a green backdrop--with Brian McBride, #20 of the Columbus Crew.

Columbus? I checked again. Columbus. My city. The city I claimed even though we lived in the farming country along the western outskirts. The city where I’d won a scholarship for Saturday morning classes at the Columbus College of Art and Design, where I went to with church groups to serve food and sing hymns at Lutheran Social Services’ Faith Mission, where I went to the Columbus Symphony Orchestra’s annual educational concert; my city. My city in my magazine.

A switch flipped in my brain and never flipped back. My siblings and I stacked red milk-crates in our lawn, pressed a rubber ball from a dollar-bin at Wal-Mart into service, and started playing soccer. We didn’t have a television or usable internet connection, so we learned the rules, history and nature of the game through books borrowed from the Plain City Public Library.

Summer waned, the season faded, and the realization began to steal over me that perhaps this was a phase I’d never grow out of; it started to change me. I skipped the comics in the Columbus Dispatch, so I could head to the Sports section and scour it for Craig Merz bylines or tidbits about the Crew in Bob Hunter’s Rumblings. On Saturdays I hunched over the clock radio in my parents’ bedroom listening to Dwight Burgess’s smooth baritone slide through waves of static, narrating the triumphs and tragedies of Columbus soccer. And in time, Dwight’ voice and I moved out into the living room with the rest of the family.

Trips to the library started to include visits to online soccer forums where I behaved as badly and was treated as scornfully as one would expect from a 10-year-old who’d never watched a real game. They also included diligently checking for new editions of Crew historian Steve Sirk’s “notebooks.” The first time I stumbled across them, I went home and told my mom there was a guy who wrote for the Crew’s website who was as funny as Dave Barry.

***

I’d never been to a real game, but in the fall of 2001, in the lingering shadows of 9/11, that changed. My dad splurged on discounted tickets for Boy Scout night, and took me and my brother to a playoff match against the San Jose Earthquakes—Landon Donovan’s first visit to the future home of Dos a Cero. Columbus was down 3-0 by halftime, two of the three courtesy of the 19-year old future face of American soccer (“Baby Jesus” on my soccer forums). The result was devastating; the experience euphoric.

My second Crew game I owe in part to those Saturday morning classes at CCAD; I won an art contest sponsored by the Columbus Dispatch. My ballpoint-pen-and-colored-pencil drawing of a player with long black hair captured mid-shot was stilted at best, but good enough for the judges. My picture was printed on tickets for the season opener, I got four tickets to the game and an invitation to a reception with Crew players and staff at the Columbus Museum of Art.

The reception was dizzying—my first experience of meeting stars and being shocked to discover I had nothing worthwhile or interesting to say. I remember both goalkeepers, Presthus and Busch, being among the nicest guys in the room. My hero, Brian McBride, showed up late in khaki capris. The index card he signed for me hung on my bedroom wall for a decade.

***

Rewinding to 2001, to around the time Landon Donovan was wrecking my hopes and dreams for the Crew, my life of soccer lurched forward in a different way. One night after our small-group from church met at our house, my siblings prevailed on the other kids to play some soccer with us. The second time it happened, some of the adults joined in. One of the men suggested that we get together some evening for a pickup game.

We got together on a Thursday, and then on the Thursday after that, and we’ve been getting together for a game of pickup soccer every Thursday through the summer for seventeen years.

As those years passed, my soccer-hating friends came trickling in from their softball diamonds and basketball courts to try it out. People played barefoot. Kids and farmers who didn’t own athletic shoes or who wore workboots shared a field with people who’d played in high school, in college, even one or two who’d played semi-pro.

Thursday Night Soccer brings people together by filling the field with a melting pot. Players are male and female; Mennonites, Muslims, Catholics, and Nones; straight folks and LGBTQ folks, a mixture of races and immigration statuses--we play the beautiful game, yell at each other, and slap each other’s backs and stagger off the field smiling when it gets dark.

It’s a highlight of my summer—heck, it's a highlight of my life—and I owe it to the Crew.

***

I also owe the Crew my love of the World Cup, and of sporting spectacle in general. In 2002, I convinced my longsuffering dad to wake up in the middle of the night to drive my sister and I an hour to Crew Stadium so we could huddle with other soccer-loving night owls under the tent on the west side of the stadium and watch USA/Portugal.

As the sun rose over Columbus, and we chewed our fingernails, the United States hung on for a famous 3-2 victory. Even before the final whistle, I remember a rush of fans, American flags draped over their shoulders or clutched in their outstretched arms sprinting around the outside of the tent, bellowing in the thrill of victory. I owe a big part of my continued allegiance to American soccer to that morning, and I owe that morning to the Crew.

Later that year, on a wet and gusty evening in Columbus, I celebrated by myself next to the radio as the Crew captured their first-ever trophy. After the game, LA fans consoled themselves by sniping at the disappointing attendance (6,054).

In 2008, the year the Crew became Massive, I watched MLS Cup from a corner of a Buffalo Wild Wings with a small cadre of yellow-clad fans, roaring with exultation loud enough to turn the heads of the NFL fans in the room as Frankie Hedjuk appeared through a hole in the fabric of space and time and headed home an insurance goal that guaranteed that not only were we massive, we were Massive Champions.

Just like Thursday Night Soccer, the shared spectacle of sport was bringing people together and building a community that sang and laughed and despaired together. Because of the Crew.

***

In 2011, I spent six months in Nepal, much of that time in remote villages. I got scrapes, bruises, infections and friendships from playing dusty and/or muddy pick-up games. I hung out in the back of cafes watching fuzzy broadcasts of La Liga and the EPL.

In 2013 a group of friends and I bought a 1989 Subaru station wagon in Santiago, Chile and drove all over South America for five months. In the Patagonian outpost of Puerto Natales, the desk clerk at our hostel was wearing a hat with a pirated edition of the original Crew logo. Later, in Buenos Aires, everyone knew about Columbus because they shared our love for Guillermo Barros Scheletto, and we found the imprint of the Maestro’s footprint outside La Bombonera. Everywhere we went, at hostels and in restaurants, at barbershops and the homes of friends, we watched soccer and argued about Messi and Ronaldo.

Soccer is a universal language that I speak because of the Crew.

***

My work necessitates travel, much of it on summer nights and weekends, and I’m a young father with a limited budget, so it’s historically been hard for me to make it to more than four or five games in a year. Still, as often as I can afford, I drive 45 minutes to the concrete and steel bowl of Mapfre Stadium, and stand in Nordecke and sing and chant and let off guttural howls. I’ve been there in rain, in snow, in storm delays, through gut-wrenching losses and transcendent heights. You remember I was there for Landon Donovan’s first visit? I was also present for his last.

The simple pleasure of a night out, the thrill of coming together with my city, the emotional turbulence of sport, sharing joy and pain with strangers, family and friends—it’s what a good life is made of, and I get to have that because of the Crew.

Even now, as the grassroots movement Save The Crew becomes a globally-recognized phenomenon, I’m witnessing again the power of soccer to bring people together. We email, we call, we rally, we chant, we hand out signs in the cold with our noses running, we tweet and tell all our friends that it isn’t over, and they can help. It’s something special.

But…

...Like I said, there’s been an almost constant hollow in the pit of my stomach since October 16. Fear and hope and gratitude and grief churn together in ways I can’t articulate. I work hard to not let the pit consume my home life, my other hobbies, my work, but I know it sometimes encroaches. I worry that I’ve given too much of myself to a sports team.

I know that this is how it works: people in power make decisions, and the rest of us carry on as best we can. Sometimes, good things come of it: Lamar Hunt’s decision to invest in a team in Columbus in 1996, and Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen and the Lego Group’s decision to sell soccer toys in 2000 combined to deliver unimagined richness to my life. We can suspect them of higher motives (especially Lamar), but they did what they did because they’d made some money, and had designs on making more.

I’ve looked it up. I know that Lamar Hunt, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen and Anthony Precourt were all born with sufficient wealth that they could’ve spent their lives as competitive thumb-twiddlers and never gone hungry. They make money because they like making money, not because the wolves are circling.

Consider, then, the Precourt. Unless appearances and research are highly deceiving, he doesn’t need money from the Columbus Crew; but he’d like it. The man himself acknowledges that turning a profit is just part of a higher aim. In a conference call with media on October 17, (source) he said, “I know the Crew fans are avid fans. I want to make the statement that I recognize their love for the club and that they put their heart and soul into this club every Wednesday and Saturday.”

“But,” he went on, employing a comparative conjunction to indicate that the first clause is just context for the pivotal point of the second, “But we’re trying to be a successful club here. We’re trying to take the next step. So I hope you guys recognize the ambition.”

Hearts and souls of avid fans aside, this whole to-do appears to be a question of his successfulness; the meaningless consolidation of unnecessary wealth as a measure of self-actualization.

As I understand his quote—and I don’t think I’m being unfair—Precourt hopes that through the haze of our heartbreak, we can see and accept that we’ve been double-crossed in the service of a greater good--Anthony Precourt succeeding and feeling nice.

Fair enough. We all like to imagine that someday, our obituaries will impress and intimidate those left behind to read them. But that’s just the thing—underhanded skulduggery is a fine approach to hoarding gold, but not if said golden hoard is your ladder to the top of Maslow's hierarchy. No matter how successful, how community-driven and focused and vibrant a potential franchise in Austin becomes, any achievement is eroded by the disingenuousness and betrayal in Columbus. Exerting the power of millions of inherited dollars while grinding down thousands of people is maybe all the success he hopes for, but it’s a caricature.

Not that I think Precourt agrees with me. I think it’s probable that no matter the outcome, he’ll feel fine about it all. But using inherited money to treat a team and a fanbase with casual, vacuous contempt means the Crew can never enrich his life as they’ve enriched mine.

I’m taking my son to games this year—a friend and I scraped together the pennies and split a pair of season tickets, ‘cause if this is the end, I want to be there for it, and in the end, my couple of hundred dollars means more to Precourt than it does to me—and I don’t know if the Crew will mean anything to him. He’s one, and for all I know, by his second birthday, the team will be gone.

But I do know this—my life is immensely richer for the Crew being in it. I have seventeen years of stiff upper lips and clenched jaws, of triumphs and agonies, community and comfort; I have a life soaked in black and gold and a smile on my face.

No matter what he does, Precourt can't take that from me. And if he tries, it only means he'll never find it for himself.