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Edited on Fri Mar-20-09 10:29 AM by bconngemini
![]()  SOMEWHERE OUT THERE is a grim recession. Thursday night at Qwest Field, it was undetectable.
As only soccer can among sports, it made riotous party out of a quiet game in a bad time.
To top it off, in their inaugural game in the American version of big-time futbol, the Sounders swabbed the pitch with the New York Red Bulls. The 3-0 rout -- a spread roughly equivalent to 30-0 in American football -- also produced Seattle's newest sports star.
Fredy Montero could probably fit into the glove box of Mitsubishi's Montero SUV, but he was a colossus who dwarfed the hated (or at least modestly annoying) New Yorkers.
The 5-foot-9 star of Colombia's national team had two goals and assisted on the other score as the sellout crowd of 32,523 chanted, sang, cavorted and generally made a fiesta out of Seattle's newest pro sport.
"Having spent my whole career in Europe, I was worried about being let down -- why come home for this?" said a beaming Kasey Keller, the goalie from Olympia who stepped down to Major League Soccer. "But there's probably not a better atmosphere for soccer in America."
Sounders coach Sigi Schmid reported that midfielder Brad Evans suggested that the team develop hand signals because of the crowd noise.
"I've never heard of that," he said, "in any MLS city."
For a rookie outfit in its debutante ball, the night was about as glorious a stimulus package as could have been federally devised. The Sounders became only the second expansion franchise to win its opener.
"A lot of the players on the New York team are extremely envious of what we have here," said Keller, who didn't have to deal with a shot on goal in the first half, then made a couple of dramatic saves in the second half.
In fact, it appears the Sounders did the game and the production so well that they have become almost instantly the template for the rest of the league.
"This team is raising the bar for what our teams could achieve," Don Garber, MLS commissioner, gushed at halftime in the press box. "There's a belief by some that the sport has to base itself in cities with large Hispanic communities. But Seattle is an active international city, with a diverse population and large youth soccer base and a little less (sports market) competition than in other cities.
"We have to learn from this."
Garber arrived from Vancouver, B.C., where he announced this week an expansion team for the city in 2011. Friday, he will do the same thing in Portland, creating a Northwest rivalry that the NBA once had for a few years until the league lost control of itself, somewhat in the manner of the old North American Soccer League into which the Sounders were born in 1974.
"It warmed my heart to see how far the MLS has come," Garber said. "It was an emotional day, as it was in Vancouver, and there will probably be another historic moment in Portland tomorrow."
As part of the pregame ceremony that was otherwise filled with flags, dancers, smoke, confetti and music, Joe Roth, the Hollywood movie producer and part-owner of the team, was equally exhilarated.
"This is the most successful launch in MLS history," he told the crowd. "We proved Seattle is the capital of soccer in this country."
He listed four long-term franchise goals: Making the playoffs, winning the MLS Cup, seeing players from the state youth program make the roster, and elevating the MLS's play to the level of the best in the world.
He's at least as ambitious as he is sports literate, because he took the obligatory shot at popular punching bag Clay Bennett.
"There will be no midnight exodus out of this city," he said. "This team is here to stay."
The crowd ate up Roth's populism, as it did most everything on a night that went so well it was nearly scary.
Among those bearing witness in the press box was what passes for Seattle soccer coaching royalty -- former Sounders coach Alan Hinton, former Seattle Pacific national champion soccer coach Cliff McCrath and former Seattle University national champion coach Pete Fewing.
Before they gathered for a pregame show on KIRO radio, they gathered briefly to talk about soccer past and present.
After telling stories of the 1970s glory days, Hinton found one word to summarize the renaissance of the old name and the pro game:
"Unbelievable," he said.
It's true that the night lacked moats, cops on horses and hooligans, but there's much time to catch up on some of soccer's other traditions. There was only chance to get it right the first time. http://www.seattlepi.com/thiel/404046_thiel20ww.htmlYet more proof that seattle is the city of effete, starbucks cafe sipping, "cosmopolitan" eurowannabe bookworms who like liberal no-winner sport of soccer. The stereotype confirmed. What say you Seattleites? |
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