Life Goes On Me and the Crew, 2019

Here’s one way to sum up how the 2019 season felt to me as a fan of the Columbus Crew: life went on.

What happened with the me and Crew is what happens with everybody and everything. The wave of a narrative crests and breaks, and another one comes churning up from the depths before we’ve got our wits about us. We thrash in off-balance and bewildered, and just when we begin to feel steady—Time chugs on, separating us by degrees from the moments that define our lives. New moments arrive to muddy our definitions and the narratives trail off and get swallowed by new stories and new concerns.

This going-along-without-stopping nature of life is a, like many of the appalling philosophical truths Crew fans ruminated on from March to October, a prominent theme of human thought, even outside of reflections on the 2019 Crew season. Heidegger, eventually disgraced by his association with the Nazi party, worried about it while still in the good graces of the world. So did Camus, a less problematic figure whose work is a meditation on the gentle indifference of the universe. John Mellencamp (RIP ”Cougar”) complains that life continues to move forward when it’s no longer exciting to experience said forward motion. Kurt Vonnegut put it most succinctly: so it goes.

So it went for the Crew. It was the first saved season, the last best hope for a core group of players to go from Legends Without Silverware to Legends Without Asterisks. It was time to score all the goals that never came in the “the goals will come” era. Time to reinvigorate a staling system with new-but-related ideas. It was to be effective and aesthetically-impressive soccer, a nine-month on-field celebration of off-field triumph, the sublime reward for emotionally used-up fans, weary from the fight. CrewsMas was a beautiful day in a cold and drippy month. I couldn’t make it, but there were plenty of games to come, I told myself.

In retrospect, the tone was set when Milton Valenzuela’s knee gave way on the first day of training camp. As the season started, the brief discomfort the harbinger occasioned faded into delusions of grandeur brought on by a hot start. This was the dream season—the nine-month victory tour for the Greatest Team the World has ever seen. And then Harrison Afful broke his jaw. But like, he was going to be back, we were going to be okay—then Ted Unkel fouled Luciano Acosta and stole a goal by Pedro Santos. And finally, by the time Pipa went down for the year, we understood that the year was beyond rescuing. The Crew sucked and the season sucked and by the end, I wanted the season to be over so I could look forward to Crew soccer again.

***

—here’s another way to sum up what the Crew’s 2019 season was like for me: I couldn’t get home until thirty minutes after the game started on Decision Day. When I finally got home, I watched the team sag to one last defeat on DVR alone in my living room.

My record-keeping is poor, but it feels like I watched almost as many games recorded as live in 2019. I absolutely watched more games via DVR than in-person. On April 27, I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. lying on the couch watching a dour Crew XI shuffle to a 2-0 defeat against the Houston Dynamo on my phone. I could hear the door creaking shut on the season.

With the season finale, as with most games I watched as warmed-over digital leftovers, I avoided social media. It’s a little thing, but one of my favorite discoveries from those grim days of Saving the Crew was the pleasure of joining in a thousand-tongued wrathful howl. I howled along in person when I could, and on Twitter when I couldn’t. I hasten to clarify that Twitter pile-ons can be dangerous and devastating, so don’t take this as a wholesale endorsement. Still, social media is a great place for getting things off your chest in non-threatening ways. Instead of joining in the many-throated roar, I sat someplace hunched around a phone, trying to wedge the Crew into a few spare corners of my life.

And like the season, Decision Day kicked off with enthusiasm, plunged toward despair, and ended with a drift into indifference. The wrathful, united howl fractured into little sets of fans snarling amongst ourselves and gnashing our teeth at this and that, and finally sighing to ourselves in resignation and buttoning up our coats for the winter. Gentle indifference as a kick to the teeth.

***

But life goes on after rough moments, too. We saved the Crew, and the team regressed into malaise, but it’s hard to argue that this is a worst-case scenario. A year of celebration existed concurrently with a season of anticlimax and flubbed notes, but hey, we had something to celebrate. We stayed in our seats after the symphony and they sent out a clown, sure, but at least there was a symphony.

It didn’t help matters that (at least for me) as discontent and euphoria mixed and muddled, the debts of energy and emotion from a year of uncertainty came due. My active involvement with Save the Crew was modest at best, and even I was thoroughly tuckered. If the emotional hangover wasn’t the problem with the team, it sure was with me. Last-second collapses and dead-eyed 90-minute snoozers rolled by, each one from a greater emotional distance.

Sometime in July, deep in the doldrums, I thought I’d try to see how people were feeling. I planned to wrap their thoughts up inside some of my own. I wanted to make sense of the season in real-time. As it turns out, it’s harder to have articulated feelings about an existentially safe team that’s terribly unpleasant to watch than about one you’re fighting to save. I didn’t have much to say and only one person got back to me with some thoughts. All he had to say was that if he approached his occupation at the same level as Crew players were demonstrating, he’d be out of a job.

It was true enough. And yet, hadn’t we just trudged through the depths with these same players? We fought for them, they fought for us. Now, it didn’t feel like anyone was fighting for anything, and it was hard not to begrudge some of the listless, error-filled performances. How, less than a year from the spiritual highs of Save the Crew day, could that relationship feel so strained?

***

A couple of days after the Decision Day deflation, I made a wrong turn on my way to the groundbreaking because—for the last time—it was an unfamiliar destination. Somehow, in a season of not being able to make it to games, I had the time and capacity for a special event during weekday working hours. So it goes. Coming into town on I-670, I caught a glimpse of the smokestack decked out in Crew colors to the right of the skyline, and something lifted in my stomach and prickled along my hairline.

I sorted out my directions, and, like I did on a Sunday afternoon now nearly two years in the past, I joined a steady stream of black and gold gathering in the heart of the city.

If the last time we gathered downtown wasn’t a funeral (and it wasn’t), this day was nevertheless a rebirth.

And still, as we strolled through the gates and into the groundbreaking hubbub, everyone I could see seemed happy. Crew fans, less than a week removed from the ugly end of an ugly season, were smiling. We smiled and laughed taking pictures of ourselves pretending to break ground. We chatted with genial strangers and speculated about Higuain and Santos’ futures. And really, no one could stop smiling. Not as far as I could see.

We beamed through Kyle Martino’s speech about the Crew as a family—the kind of speech you don’t make and which doesn’t hit home until you’ve almost lost that family—we smiled as a rotation of the heavy local political leaders reminded us that, in fact, Columbus can do it, together. No matter what it is.

Even when Don Garber reared his head, the steady rumble of discontent and undertone heckling never fully exploded into a roar; because why spoil the mood for him? Let him fumble away at reframing his role. He opposed Columbus, he supported the former owner’s plans. Let him fumble through arguments about how it’s possible to set out with good intentions to destroy communities for the sake of a billionaire’s bottom line.

I remember liking Dee Haslam’s speech, but I don’t remember the particulars of what she said. Mostly, I remember appreciating how pleased she seemed to be there with Crew fans in the dirt and gravel and sunlight with all of our nerves still a little raw. I’m no great reader of people, so it's possible that Dee's flag-brandishing enthusiasm was a performance. There’s no obvious way for me to know. But sincere or not, it beat any owner’s performative enthusiasm we’ve had since Lamar.

Dr. Pete’s speech was every bit as lovely as every public appearance he makes; gentle and self-effacing. He was generous in his praise and his compassion, presenting himself as a man standing at the confluence of other streams that ran together to overwhelm the dam. The entire speech was a tribute to other contributors to the effort, each presented with a “not without you.” All true, no doubt, but wheels need axles, not just spokes. Dr. Pete is, if experience has begun to teach us anything, never going to say “but mostly, not without me, Dr. Pete,” even if it’s true. And it is.

***

Groundbreaking was a reminder that the Crew make strangers into friends and friends into family. The crowd at the groundbreaking was dotted with familiar faces—folks I knew from matchdays and Save the Crew. And yet, when I walked through the press around the good trucks, took a shovel photo, and hovered at the back of the crowd during the speeches, I was with a friend I’ve known as long as I’ve known the Crew.

Al, a Crew Twitter acquaintance with whom I’d never interacted at all before October 2017, highlighted the community-building spirit of Crew fandom in response to an invitation to hear folks’ thoughts about the groundbreaking. He told me that, at this point, what excited him about events like the groundbreaking, was the opportunity to spend time with other fans who saved the Crew. “We’ve formed thousands of friendships that didn’t exist when we were “just” fans going to a soccer game,” he told me.

Dana, whom I first talked to in January about how his son’s passion for the Crew was contextualizing and increasing his own emotional attachment to the team, pointed me to a tweet thread. In the thread, Dana marveled at the accessibility of the Crew’s new leadership, but mostly, he talked about the groundbreaking as the tangible sign that he gets to go on supporting the Crew together with his son for decades to come. That someday, the possibility still exists of sharing the Crew with his grandchildren.

A new stadium is a rebirth, but one that affirms the history that came before it. A symbol of the enduring power of the relationships built around the team, and the promise of a family with strong roots, and branches that never stop growing.

***

Life goes on, progressing in cycles and patterns. History repeats itself, and so on. What goes up comes down, and what goes around—at least insofar as gravity has anything to say about it—comes around.

Sometimes, inevitable natural cycles coincide with more erratically timed sequences, and even with events that seem random. Coming into 2019, we knew that the Crew’s core was aging. The Crew have rarely—no matter who’s in charge—been a team to keep legends on the roster past their obvious usefulness. Change was coming.

But the chaos of 2018 meant that a more-or-less loyal core of players came to their last shot at success with no external consistency to support it. Beyond random disasters like Valenzuela’s injury, changes in ownership, the coaching staff, and front office meant that nothing was the same. The life-cycle of the players carried on at the pace of life while the organizational mileage dropped back to near zero. I can’t help but wonder whether that mismatch had anything to do with how things played out in 2019.

Some sequences of events aren’t cyclical, at least they don’t move in cycles we can analyze or articulate. And often those anomolous, unpredictable intrusions on the natural rhythms of things are the moments we use to define ourselves, the moments that the passage of time carries away before we’ve come to grips with what they mean. Like saving the Crew, like the Ted Unkel thing. Other events, arriving with a clang to jar us from our post-Crew-saving reverie are stages of cycles. Things we always knew were coming, someday. The Crew after Mapfre; the Crew after Pipa.

***

Before I think about Pipa’s legacy, though, I want to think of the players who don’t define an era.

Professional sports are ruthless, largely from necessity. Extenuating circumstances don’t matter, because winning is what matters. Everyone understands that, I think.

But it’s not a ruthlessness I can bring myself to inhabit. outside of players with obvious attitude issues, or for whose own good a change of scenery is necessary, I’ve never liked watching players leave. All of them—again, attitude issues excepted—are doing their best, and demonstrating commitment. They run up against either the ceiling of their abilities or the ceiling of their capacity to perform under a given set of circumstances, and that’s that. It’s one of the most regular, predictable seasonal cycles. You’re always playing for your job.

But each departure is a serious personal hardship to players. They’re members of the family, and it hurts that a quirk of how sporting communities work is that eventually, they reject the player qua player, but ask the player to return in the capacity of supporter and friend. And for various reasons, some of this year’s departures stung more keenly than the usual set. A homegrown player being cut adrift from the club hurts more.

Part of the job? Sure. A necessity in professional sports? Also yes. Heartbreaking for at least one part of the family? That, too.

***

Hayden Schiff from Cincinnati, USA [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

So. Pipa.

Pipa is unique, but his uniqueness exists within the framework of a recurring phenomenon. For me, every era of a team is defined by a player or—in the worst of times—by the absence of a defining player. For me, Federico Higuain is the symbol of the Crew for the years he spent in the capital city. They were not easy years. His sevenish summers in black and gold were a succession of atrophy, hope, disaster, relief, exhaustion and at last, more hope. Not much about the team ever felt certain, but it was certain that if you turned up at Mapfre to cheer, you’d have reason to cheer for Pipa.

Embodied by Pipa, the Crew have been characterized by a more effortful, erratic brilliance than they displayed in the era of, say, Guillermo Barros Schelotto. Higuain is a genius of energy and impudence. He cuts against the grain; chipping keepers, flipping the ball to himself for a bicycle kick, charging in from off-screen to press high, one-touching a backheel through the defense to a wide-open Gyasi Zardes. Schelotto's artistry more often took the form of untroubled balletic majesty. I mean the comparison as a compliment to both players. They show us (me, at least) versions of what we hope we and our city are like. Sometimes, we're untroubled in our effortless majesty. More often, we’re somebody’s less-famous brother, making fools of those who underestimate us. Columbus loves flair, but Columbus wraps that flair around the heart of an underdog. We need heroes who remind us of our glittering possibilities, but more often we need compact heroes with chips on their shoulders. For the grind of the past seven years, we needed a player like Pipa. Someone whose moments of artistry always felt unexpected. Pipa never made the All-Star Game, a laughable omission that illustrates the league’s habit of papering over excellence when it isn’t convenient. Maybe it was in consequence of the league’s indifference to Pipa that made every brilliant touch an act of defiance.

It’s hard for me to convince myself that we won't need him, still. That we won’t need someone on the field to remind the league about the cost of underestimating Columbus. Pipa leaves with 193 games played and 55 goals. It’s hard for me not to think that that sometime between now and opening day of that new stadium, we could use seven more games and five more goals.

And hard as it is for me to grasp the notion of the Crew in a new stadium, with a new face and a new identity, that’s what’s coming. That’s what was always going to come. We’ve arrived at the beginning of the cycle. And sure, the jury is out on what that era will be like on the field, and frankly, on whether it ever becomes particularly fun to watch. That’s the risk we take when we let soccer teams matter so much to us. Their fortunes rise and fall in waves, as do many pieces of our lives. So sometimes, you come across a year when the team is terrible, and you can’t ever watch, or go to games, or even feel like you’re participating in the community of fans. That sucks.

But as long as I’m still here, and the team’s still here, I know that there are better times to come. Life goes on, and we go on with it.

And that, perhaps, is the best way of summing up how I feel, a month after the conclusion of the Columbus Crew’s 2019 season: we’re still here, life goes on. As long as that's the case, things aren't so bad, and as long as that's the case, better days are coming.