Come on, you Irons!
You only get to go to your first baseball game once, but recently, I had the chance to replicate the experience, sort of. Let me back up a bit.
Until recently, I'd never been much of a fan of soccer. Other than a few times in gym class, I never played the game. The game wasn't on television much, and I didn't watch it when it was. In 1998, my friends and I went to a Chicago Fire game. It was my first professional soccer game. We went because we wanted to watch Bo Deans perform after the game.
Six years ago, I went to London with a couple of former co-workers. One of them had spent a summer studying in London when she was in college, and we stayed with an Englishman she had befriended during that summer named James. A few months after our trip, James visited Chicago, and at his urging, he and I went to a Fire game. He taught me a few things about the game that night. For instance, he explained the offsides rule to me. Having watched a fair amount of hockey, offsides, to me, had to do with a line on the field. It just had to. So I was wondering as we watched the game: Is it the center line? Is it the bigger box in front of the goal? (Yeah, I didn't even know that that was called the penalty box.) The game made a whole lot more sense to me after I stopped expecting the players to clear the offensive zone when the ball passed over the center line.
That was it until I watched some of the 2002 World Cup. I even got up early to watch the U.S. team play in the quarterfinals against Germany. The American team lost 1-0, but it was quite a game. They had plenty of chances, including one near-miss that I thought had gone in for the equalizer. I leaped out of my recliner and yelled, "Gooooooooooooooooooal!" It looked like it was in the back of the net, but the ball was just sitting on top of the side netting outside the goal.
After that, I didn't watch much soccer over the next few years. I recall tuning into a Fire playoff game a couple of years ago. I was just flipping around and stopped on the game, as there wasn't much else on. I think it went to extra time and the Fire won. I think. If I recall correctly, Justin Mapp came on as a substitute and made a great run down the right sideline and a good cross to the front of the net on the winner.
It was a similar situation last spring that brought me to watch
West Ham United. I was just flipping around the dial on a weekend morning last spring when I came across an
FA Cup match involving West Ham on Fox Soccer Channel. It's a part of my basic cable package on RCN. I decided to watch the game because I have a good friend named Phil who roots -- no, lives and dies -- with West Ham. Phil is an Aussie, but he lived in London for a few years and became a West Ham fan. "I'll watch Phil's team play," I thought. The Hammers (also known as the Irons, because they originated from the ironworks in the West Ham area in the East End of London) won that game and went on to lose a heartbreaker in the FA Cup 2006 finals to Liverpool, 3-3 on penalty kicks. Liverpool tied the game late with a spectacular goal from about 30 yards out, a simply unbelievable strike that made a lot of "goal of the year" highlight lists.
I watched some of the World Cup last summer, too. The Marquette Grad and I watched the second half of the England-Portugal quarterfinal match in a bar near Wrigley Field on my birthday, which happened to fall during the Cubs-Sox series at Wrigley. We went to John Barleycorn to have lunch and meet some friends who had tickets to give us for the Sunday game -- the one in which
Mark Buehrle got completely bombed in the first inning and gave up a home run to, embarrassingly, Neifi Pérez. The England-Portugal match captivated the entire bar -- and if you've been in the Wrigleyville John Barleycorn, you know that's a pretty big space. It was a scoreless tie after 120 minutes (90 minutes of regulation plus two 15-minute overtime periods). Portugal won on penalty kicks, but TMG and I had headed home by then to make the first pitch of the crosstown game. Still, the match reminded me how much fun it can be to watch top-notch soccer.
Last fall, I started watching English Premier League matches on FSC, including the Irons occasionally. About the same time, TMG and I began talking about visiting her sister and brother-in-law in London. They are about halfway through a three-year work stint for an American company's London-area operations. So as we were trying to pick a long weekend to make the trip, I consulted the West Ham schedule. A little over a month ago, we asked TMG's sister to buy us tickets to West Ham's home match against Watford on Feb. 10. There weren't many tickets available to the public beyond the season-ticket holders, but we managed to purchase four tickets near the top of the stadium. Boleyn Ground at Upton Park, as their pitch is known, seats just under 35,000 and is a short walk from the Upton Park stop on the London Underground.
We headed down Green Street from the train station with a huge crowd of fellow fans, including a few from Watford, another London-area club. The fans filled the sidewalks and spilled into the street, where cars and buses crawled along. My head might as well have been on a swivel, as I tried to take in the scene in all directions. After we picked up our tickets at the window -- we didn't receive tickets, actually, but little hard plastic cards with our names on them that we'll use if we ever return to Boleyn Ground; you place them in a reader that controls a turnstyle of metal bars similar to those that you might use to exit a CTA station -- we headed into the
team shop. TMG's sister and brother-in-law had found a West Ham scarf for me before we arrived in London the day before the game. When I walked into our room and saw the scarf, I was floored. "Wow" and, eventually, "Thank you!" was all I could manage. To the scarf, I added a knit winter cap and a claret hoodie. TMG bought a knit cap with blue and gold polka dots on it that symbolize bubbles -- Irons fans
sing a popular song from the 1920s called "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" before each home match -- a keychain and a nice postcard with a photo of Boleyn Ground.
Just a few minutes before 3 p.m., the four of us made our way up to our seats. Boleyn Ground was sold out and the fans were starting to get into it. I had learned the words to the chorus of "Bubbles" and proudly sang along with the rest of the fans before the match got under way: "I'm forever blowing bubbles/Pretty bubbles in the air/They fly so high/Nearly reach the sky/And like my dreams/They fade and die/Fortune's ever hiding/I've looked everywhere/I'm forever blowing bubbles/Pretty bubbles in the air." Then the fans clap their hands rapidly three times and shout, "United!" This is repeated twice more.
Unfortunately, this was the high point of the afternoon. The Hammers had plenty of chances against Watford, who were at the bottom of the standings (or table, as it is known in English football), but they essentially missed two scoring chances with wide-open nets and lost 1-0. I'm a novice fan and don't know a lot about the intricacies of the game, yet, even I knew that West Ham had missed on two great scoring opportunities. Looking at some of the pictures I was in that afternoon, I can tell that I was frustrated with the outcome, although I was having a great time and enjoying the experience immensely.
All of this is a very long set up to explain how much I'm enjoying this sport for the first time and how much my trip to Boleyn Ground reminds me of my
first White Sox game nearly 30 years ago. Things didn't go nearly as well for the home team in the East End as they did for the Sox that day back in 1978, that's for sure. I had been to a couple of Chicago Fire games before. And, of course, I was only seven years old for the first Sox game, while today I'm 35 years old and supposedly less prone to wonder and amazement. Despite those differences, I still felt something close to the same excitement at beholding something for the first time -- in this case, top-level English football.
I'm at a stage where I'm soaking up information about the game as rapidly as I can. I watch as many games as I can through FSC and ESPN's coverage of the European Champions League (I'm watching a recording of Porto-Chelsea in the Champions League as we speak). I'm a newly minted subscriber to
Four-Four-Two, a copy of which I picked up in London and read nearly cover-to-cover on our flight home from London. I just purchased
The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, which came in the mail today. The reviewer in Four-Four-Two made it sound like something that I couldn't pass up as a new fan of the game. I'll let you know how it is after I read it.
West Ham's season is not unlike that of the 1978 White Sox, a season of disappointment after a surprisingly good season the year before (especially regarding West Ham's runner-up finish in the FA Cup). The Irons are fighting relegation -- demotion to the second English league, known as the Championship -- and the cause does not look good at the moment. West Ham are one of the bottom three as I write this, and the bottom three are relegated to the Championship (while three Championship clubs qualify to move up to the Premiership each season to take their place).
Maybe West Ham's predictament is one of the things that is making me such a devoted fan in such a short time. Maybe it's the idea that, like with the Sox, I'm not picking up on a top-level team that is a perennial winner, so if they someday come through, the reward will be all the sweeter. I'll keep you posted as West Ham fights to avoid relegation.
(Music to write by: "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah" by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, "The Good, the Bad and the Queen" by The Good, the Bad and the Queen and "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" by Modest Mouse.)