The Rich People's Game

 

If you've been a follower of this joint for a while you've probably noticed that I'm a bit of a soccer fan.

And you'd be right; I've supported the local soccer clubs, the men's Timbers and the women's Thorns, since before the men were up in the Show and from the day the women started playing over ten years ago.

Plus I've been a Newcastle supporter for even longer - the Toon caught me back in the Shearer years of the 90's (I've never forgiven Ferguson and the ManU mob for stealing the crown in the 1995-96 season. Bastards.) - and so for the past thirty-odd years my life has been steeped in the Beautiful Game.

I'm a founding member of the "Axe Society", the season ticket holders from the Timbers' first big-league season in 2011.

I've stood and sung in the cold rain of October and the burning sun of August. I damn near tore out the walls of the cheap hotel in Medford, locked out of the playoff run of 2015 by a work assignment, during the insane 22-round-of-penalties "Double Post" game. 

 

I've been, as the tifo says, a Rain or Shine Supporter since the beginning of the modern Timbers era in 2001.

But no more.

Last year, with retirement looming and the cost of my season pass reaching almost $1,000 I gave up the place I've had in the Shed End for over twenty years.

And this season the club has moved its televised matches to the Apple+ streaming service...meaning that even to watch the Boys I'd need eighty bucks for the service AND another eighty for the MLS "Season Pass".

And that's without the cost of any single game tickets I might hope to nick off the spendy SeatGeek app. 

Look.

I get it. This is what I and you and all of us should expect from Late Stage Capitalism. Soccer is Big Money. Everyone in the game - players, owners, broadcasters, sponsors - wants a piece of the action. Nobody wants to leave a penny on the ground if there's cash to be made.

Here's the thing, though.

We. We, the fans, are the cow that's being milked. It's our wallets that all these people are hoovering, our support that's being mulcted to make the providers of the game a fucking buck.

And that's just getting real tiring.

I love this game. I love my town. I love our teams and I want to support them.

But it's getting real fucking old that every time I put my scarf on I turn around and there's another sonofabitch expecting to be hit in the palm.

I don't expect the Boys to play for free. I get it; it costs money to run a big-league team.

But.

It seems self-defeating to monetize every fucking aspect of the sport. It seems stupid to price everyone but the wealthy out of the "people's game".

Footy rose on the shoulders of the working men and women of England, Scotland, France, Argentina and Brazil and even here in the Americas.

But now?

When my beloved Toon is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Saudi oil sheiks?

When I can no longer sit down and enjoy seeing my Timbers struggle to a dreary midweek draw with the Houston Dynamo without paying Steve Jobs' heirs?

When it seems like the entire sport is sloshing with money yanked out of the people's pockets?

I just feel like Smokey the Bear standing silent as all the forest around me burns.

Cup Final

Meant to get back earlier, but Cedar and I were utterly waxed by the high drama of the World Cup Final...

Not my doggo, BTW; she's a friends', and a very sweet girl.

Anyway, yeah, the Final. 

I have a weird relationship with Argentine soccer. The Albiceleste are, have been, and can be, a magnificent squad that plays gorgeous, engaging football. 

I'm not exactly a Lionel Messi stan, but I respect the guy's skills and was vaguely happy that he finally got to the top step after all those hard years and disappointments.

At the same time, it's hard for me to get around the ugly things also associated with that blue-and-white kit. The Dirty War Cup of 1978 and the brutal chicanery that the junta put into ensuring that their team took the gold, including the shiking of another truly great side, the Clockwork Orange of Seventies Holland.

Then the second star in 1986, which is indelibly linked with one of the great and appalling characters of the game, Diego Maradona. 

His quarterfinal against England sums up my feelings about the Albiceleste; a moment of utter shame followed by a moment of unutterable brilliance. 

We're all a bit like that, I suppose; we can be thugs moments before or moments after being kind and gentle. The hard part is getting beyond the way we tend to save the kindness for our "own" and the brutality for "them". 

I'd like to pretend I don't share that failing. I do.

So it was with mixed emotions I watched the Argentine fans and their team celebrate, because I couldn't entirely forget the past to revel in the present. They had no such constraints, and that's what makes this game so compelling. It's the long, slow, grinding oppression of anxiety and fear as you watch your hopes teeter on the brink...

...and the sudden, wild, manic explosion of joy when they win...

...but with the lurking understanding that that joy is never completely free of the shadow of grief and loss.

Which is what gives the game whatever weight it has. It's a bit like life; sun and shadow, joy and pain, hope and fear.

Which, in turn, leads me back to what I meant to talk about this past weekend. But sufficient unto the day is this rumination on the import of a kids' game. I'll be back later to day to talk about what is bugging me about the goings on out in the unpaved parts of my crib.

Away from home...

 ...after the holidays; it's either one damn thing or the other around here.

The damn thing is dirt-nanny work I'm doing for a friend of mine. He needs the help, but it sucks ass like all dirt nanny work. So I figure I earned my week off.

The not-damned thing is that we got some snow yesterday; not enough to be a real nuisance but enough to be pretty, so I just enjoyed the winter wonderland and put out seed for the wild things who weren't enjoying it nearly as much.

I've been enjoying all the soccer (and, yes, I know; Qatar is a hissing, and FIFA exists to make the IOC look like a bunch of saintly contemplatives. I'm not pretending to be a good person about this...) but I'm going to miss the insane energy of the Japan fans. 

Apparently the soccer world will, too; they've won some sort of weird fame for policing up the stands after their games.

So will the otter. Ah, well; live and learn, Taiyo the Otter. Soccer. It's a cruel game.

Speaking of cruel, the Girl just laid down the law: no more singing "Hong Kong Phooey" because it's racist.

Yeah, well, no shit; it was a Seventies cartoon about a dog, voiced by a Black guy, pretending to be a Hong Kong kung-fu star. 

And let's not eeeeven go into "Rosemary", the horny switchboard/9-1-1 operator who spent the entire show constantly trying to hook up with the randos that called the cops.

The layers of "this is some fucked-up-racial-and-sexist shit" go about basement deep.

But it's Seventies phooey racist style! Sorry, kiddo...Yah!

Anyway. I'll get right back on this blogging thing later this week; I've got a break coming up.

The thieves of glory

One of my passions is soccer (no, really..?) and particularly the local soccer teams, the Timbers on the men's side and the Thorns on the women's.

Laid up as I am I spend a fair bit of time watching both teams - and the Timbers are, after a pretty awful start, on a bit of a tear so Howay you Timbers! - as well as thinking and writing about them over at my other gig, Riveting!

So it was with sickened horror I read this past week that the Thorns' coach during the 2014 and 2015 seasons was a loathsome rapey scumbag who was savaging his own players while we all cheered and sang for him and them and then got away clean after being fired for fucking up the 2015 season on the pitch.

It's a sad, tired, familiar old story, but carries a heavy blow because it comes so close to home.

Anyway, I'm still immersed in this mess as I go through the boring daily round of my rehabilitation, and though I don't want to go any deeper into it here (you can read my full thoughts on the mess over here), I just thought I'd mention it briefly. 

I'm sick, sad, and angry at everyone - in my club, in the league - who had a role in this desecration of the young women of my beloved Thorns and, through them, many of my own happy and cherished memories.

Whoa-oh-oh, it's magic!

  

In my other avatar (soccer punditry on the topic of Portland's women's soccer team, the Thorns, and you can read that stuff here if you have a mind to; it's under "Thorns FC:", it's good stuff, and there's not even a subscription fee, so, go, read!) I've been constantly running into this person who is violently opposed to the way the U.S. women's soccer is set up.

Because, you see, it screws over the players; the ur-scream about this comes together in a piece entitled Drafted and Shafted: Life in the NWSL in the online magazine Twentytwo.

And here's the thing about that; yes. I totally agree. 

The way American women's soccer is set up, the rules under which it operates, is designed to keep player salaries low, in much the same way that the rest of the U.S.'s economic life is designed to keep a thumb on the pay scale of everyone outside the C-suite.

But in the National Women's Soccer League the thumb is brutally visible because there's a side-by-side comparison that isn't as brutal to the players, and that's the big European women's leagues; the English FAWSL, the French D1F...in fact, most of the European leagues work very differently from the one here.

And I keep pounding on her about that. The primary reason that the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different is because the U.S. leagues and the E.U. leagues are different. 

Not better. Not worse. Just different.

The European leagues came together through a long period of accretion, and the primary factors that dictates their forms, and drives their economics, are 1) the ubiquitous nature of soccer in Europe, and 2) the promotion-relegation system.

Europe is soccerland.

Across the continent no sport is as popular, no sport is as rich, as soccer. That's where the money is. That's where the best athletes go. That's where the fans are.

There's a huge pot of cash sloshing around there...and...there's about a gajillion teams sucking it in.

Because the other part is that there's no way for some Richie Rich to "create" a team out of nothing. There's no empty place waiting for soccer; every little town and city has its own team playing in whatever league it plays in, from the megalopolis - usually the capitals - where there may be half a dozen huge clubs, to the tiny little villages where the baker is the goalie and the local gigalo is the star striker. 

There's no way for a team to come into a soccer league by "expansion" the way, say, American hockey or baseball or football leagues "expand".

So what you do, if you're a Russian criminal oligarch or a grubby Tuscan plutocrat or an Emirati oil sheik looking for secondhand sporting glory, is you buy into an existing team and turn on the firehose of money to buy good players and fancy facilities and take advantage of "promotion"; the system where if you finish on top of your little podunk-y league you move up to the next bigger one.

And up, and up, until finally you're in whatever your country calls your top flight, "Premier League" or whatever.

And then you keep splashing out the cash to win trophies (and money from broadcast fees and endorsements and everything that goes with being a Big Side) and get spots in "Europe"; the UEFA Champions League that brings you even more money.

One problem with this - for the sheiks and oligarchs - is that there's a downside - "relegation".

Your team has a shitty year? Down you go! Back to the second division, where your TV money is less and your endorsements are crappy and you're out of "Europe". If you're really unlucky you might have to sell your good players to cover expenses. You might go out of business! It's rare, but it's happened.

And the other downside is that because there's no league-wide rules on pay for any of these leagues...you're in an open bidding war with the other owners for those good players. You have to pay them the heavens and the Earth. The last figures I read suggested that a typical US soccer team in Major League Soccer passes on something like 40-50% of the revenues in the form of salaries, while a typical top flight English club (a Premier League team) has to pay out something like 70-80% to the players.

The recent attempt by the big European clubs to form a "Super League" was largely about changing all that.

The idea was to create a structure more like American sports. No promotion or relegation, no risk of losing out on the big paydays. What do you bet that the next step for the SuperLeague would have been a pay cap?

 

Right now, the way they're set up, the European leagues are good for the players, not-bad for the owners and the league, and not all that great for the fans.

Outside of their passion for their clubs, a lot of French and British and Italian fans will tell you about the way those clubs, desperate for money, strip-mine their wallets. Punitive ticket prices. Broadcast rights - many of the biggest E.U. clubs have set up their own streaming channels that you have to pay for if you want to see the away matches. You're gouged on matchdays and away days both.

We do things differently here in the U.S.

Here things are set up for the owners (well...sorta except in Major League Baseball, where the owners were too stupid to realize that the Reserve Clause was a fiction until the Messersmith Case tore down the free agency wall and set the players loose upon them. But the collusion the baseball owners replied to Messersmith with shows that they haven't given up trying to regain the whip hand over those damned players, and though MLB doesn't have a hard cap it has a "luxury tax" that tries to do the same thing).

Every other U.S. league has a hard cap. Every league restricts free agency in some form. Every league has a "draft" system by which players are brought in not through negotiations between the player and all the clubs in the league but through a system that funnels players at the drafting clubs. Every league is a closed system into which new clubs can come only through "expansion" - meaning cash on the nail.

That puts the players behind the owners in line for the lolly, which sucks for the players.

It also puts the fans in a weird position; dependent on the largesse of the owners for a way to be there to support the professional team of their choice. Their ticket prices don't depend as much on the paydays of the players as the profits of the club. And there's the problem of access; unless your city has a rich person who wants your sport in that city...you don't have it. Most U.S. leagues prevent fan ownership of professional sports clubs in that league.

IT also kind of sucks for the fans because the relatively low pay in the U.S. soccer leagues is a big incentive for the best soccer players - who have the option that the baseball and football and basketball players don't, of going outside the U.S. for a bigger paycheck - to leave the U.S. teams and fans behind for greener playing fields.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because in my conversations with this person they kept crying out with anger at the way the U.S. women players were being screwed and demanded that change to the way the European leagues work.

And I kept repeating that to change the way the players got paid you'd have to change the way the U.S. leagues work to the European model, and that was exactly what the people who controlled the league didn't want and wouldn't allow, so that this person might as well demand that we all get rich, be cute, and get a pony. 

Nice idea, not gonna happen.

And that as a fan this person might also want to be careful what they wished for, because if that change that isn't gonna happen DID happen the competition within U.S. women's soccer league would also very likely change to what the way the competition in the European leagues work, or, more accurately doesn't work; a tiny handful of top clubs bankrolled by criminal oligarchs and plutocrats and oil sheiks would win all the time, and a collection of impoverished tomato cans would constantly lose to the rich fatcats.

In the top French women's league the fatcat is Olympique Lyonnais Féminin, owned by some plutocrat named Aulas. This outfit has won their league fourteen years - fourteen fucking years - in a row (their rivals, Paris Saint-Germain, finally kicked them off the top step this past season to stop them going to fifteen) and that's not uncommon.

So alongside the chance that such a change would be financially good for the players but not the fans, the chance that such a change would be also not be good for the fans of most of the clubs who want their clubs to actually win something worth a shit is pretty high.

We bang on about this every time the subject comes up, every time we do I say all these things, and every time it makes absolutely no impression on this person. 

They insist that the magical solution is just to change things! Change things! Then everything - for owners, players, fans - will be better! Change is better! Just change things in the U.S. women's league to be more like Europe that in some magical way can totally just happen regardless of the social and political and economic differences and the utterly incompatible priors and all.

Not only can't I convince them that the change they're demanding aren't just improbable but impossible...but that if they could happen they might not be good for them. Good for the players, good for the league, good for the owners...but not for them.

They are completely certain that the something they want is both just a matter of wanting to do it bad enough and when it happens it will make the magic and everything will be better for everyone.

And the reason I went through all this?

Is because I'm seeing more and more of this sort of magical thinking on all kinds of subjects other than soccer.

Climate change?

Even if you don't slam head-on into the Great Wall of Republican Stupid, there's a crap-ton of people, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, that somehow think that we can have the Late Holocene Thermal Maximum without changing our Netflix viewing habits.

The idea seems to be that somehow we'll all magically be juuuuuust fine when the oceans rise three feet. The idea that our Pacific Northwest forests might burn? Yeah, well...ummm...

A third of our citizenry refuses to be vaccinated against a global pandemic? Sure! That'll be fine!

Allowing private equity execs the freedom to further advance the Second Gilded Age? Sure! What could go wrong?

Auditing votes all over hell? Sure! That'll Stop The Steal, which is totally a thing, and just needs the right magic and you people will see!

Look.

I get it. I mean, religions are concrete proof that humans ever since Olduvai indulge in vast amounts of magical thinking. It's not that I don't understand that people still cling to seeing the world around them as what they want it to be.

But, silly me, I thought that the whole point of the Enlightenment and the primacy of the hard sciences was an indication that the practical alternative to all this magical thinking was actual observation-analysis-deduction-conclusion. That the point of universal education was to make the vast majority of us comfortable with the idea that we don't have to believe in "belief"; that we can examine physical conditions and evidence draw the most-logical inferences from them.

But apparently not.

The problem here is that in the 14th Century us humans had a lot less raw physical power. We could change things; cut down trees, dig canals, build cities...but only to a fairly limited extent.

Now?

Christ, we can destroy ourselves and our planet if we choose to with the push of some buttons.

We're insanely far above and beyond the global Apex Predator. We're an unstoppable force. We're the gajillion-pound gorilla. We're on track to change everything from our climate to our ecology, and we seem unable to get past the way we thought 10,000 years ago when thunder was a message from the gods, in everything from soccer to social order.

That's...probably not good.

Sniper!

Emily Sonnett of the U.S. women's national soccer team demonstrates a perfect backflip-tuck-and-roll in the opening minutes of the second half of the Olympic qualifying tournament match against Canada.

Sonnett played centerback here in Portland for many seasons, and was a player who consistently frustrated me because she would play 89 minutes of great, technical defending and then would undergo some sort of brainfart or mental holiday and make a ridiculously massive derp. She did this as a rookie - which is fine, you're a rook - but kept doing it all the way up until she was traded in the offseason last autumn.

Obviously I hope the Thorns pick up a solid CB who won't take those little mental rest breaks to replace her. I won't miss the tooth-grinding frustration of those derps.

What I will miss is...well, Sonnett.

In the oh-so-serious world of professional sport she's a genuine goof, a real character; funny, playful, silly, endearing...I have NO idea what she's like as a person (other than possibly one of those people who you adore while driving you nuts with their antics) but as a player-character she's just fun.

And she had the best, the very best, faces.

You never have to guess what Sonnett is thinking. Whatever it is, it light up her face like a good deed in a weary world.

Dammit, Sonny...now you've made me go all sentimental over you. Good luck in Orlando.

Except when you play Portland, of course.

Sorry. But there's love, and there's soccer; it's not life and death. It's way more important than that.

Barefoot in the rain

Speaking of fun things to do in Portland...

I often tell this to visitors and they refuse to believe it, but a genuine Portland woman is nearly immune to the cold from the ankles down.

The Timbers match Sunday was chilly and cold, but I saw at least three women who planned to sit or stand for an hour and a half in the cold rain in their flip-flops, like this gal:

Or this one:

My absolute favorite of the day, though, was the twenty-ish woman I bumped into in the Dutch Bros coffee-stand like who was wearing the Most Portland Things Ever - flip-flops on her feet but fuzzy warm gloves on her hand.

I laughed openly and asked her if I could take her picture because she was just so perfect. She agreed and admitted that she knew it seemed strange but that her hands got cold and her feet really didn't. And that she doubted that anyone else had come to the game in their sandals, at which point I assured her that others had, indeed - at least two others and probably more.

I should note that this is 1) typically a woman thing - though I'm seeing more men walking around in sandals in the winter recently - probably because their sandals are nicer and they take better care of their feet so they're prettier to see, and 2) only for the Rainy Season. When the snow arrives even a true Puddletowner finds the cold a little too biting. But...often the retreat is only tactical; it's not uncommon to see sandals-over-socks in the deep Winter months. Even then.

Don't get me wrong; the boots and sneakers and shoes far outnumbered the bare feet. But it warms my heart (if not my feet) that our Oregon gals are out there repping.

Cold feet and warm hearts? Yeah, that's how we roll here in the Rose City.

In memory of..?

...the Seattle dead of World War 2, apparently.

This past Saturday I finally did something I've wanted to do for a long time.

No! I didn't convince my wife to make love in a hammock. C'mon! That's nuts; you could hurt your back that way!

Nope. I rode the Portland Thorns fan bus up to Seattle for the women's professional soccer match between the Thorns and the home Seattle Reign.

The bus ride was...well, about what you'd expect from a bus ride between Portland and Seattle (though the delays in Tacoma were surprisingly few, and shorter than I would have expected...)...though the pickup soccer at the Scatter Creek rest stop was fun. First time I'd kicked a ball around since my new hip, and I was pleased with my agility.

But it was just a long, dull bus ride enlivened by the fact that we had a pony keg of Lompoc Brewing's fine Kick Axe ale broached in the left rear seat. I don't usually start drinking at nine a.m., but needs must. Mmmm. It is a damn fine breakfast drink.

We made excellent time - overcalculated those delays in Tacoma, no doubt - and arrived outside the Home of the Reign more than hour before gate time, so several of us wandered away to find another place to kickabout. Some admired the bizarre organic metal shell of the EMP music building, museum, whatever; it looks like an aluminum tumor. That and the ginormous steel stalks next to the parking lot. As art they're kind of shit. As toys, on the other hand, they're a lot of fun. It's pretty amazing how far you can get them to flex...

Finally we all regrouped outside the gate of Memorial Stadium, where upon entry we discovered that one of the local car dealers was sponsoring a scarf giveaway.

It's a sad comment on what a scarf whore I am that I instinctively scooped up one of these things before realizing that it was a Seattle scarf. Well, okay, a Seattle/Subaru scarf, but...still. A Portland fan wearing a Seattle scarf'd be like pinning a Nazi swastika on a yarmulke. Just. Wrong.

So I scarfed the first vendor I saw and trooped in to find our seats.

The Seattle organization had given us pretty good seats; down front, near midfield - way better than the far top corner we in Portland pen our visitors into on matchdays, sadly. The odd part was that there was no real attempt to segregate us from the Seattle fans. Most of the Portland supporters did stand together in a block, but the outside edges were pretty ragged, and there was a sort of admixture at the fringes where individuals and small groups of Portland fans mingled with supporters of the local club.

One oddity was an apparent drinking restriction to a "beer garden" at the outer wall; I didn't see any beer served anywhere else in the joint and, while I didn't test the boundaries I didn't see anyone with a brew outside the designated grownup space. Maybe this had something to do with the owner, Seattle Public Schools. Certainly the sign on the South Stand pier suggested that Adults and Students were not to mingle,let alone share the Temptations of Demon Drink

Perhaps the other reason was concern for the health of anyone who had drunk enough beer to need internal relief, because the Memorial Stadium bogs were truly appalling. I've used some pretty primitive facilities - I was a GI and posted overseas, remember - but this was perhaps the most noisome toilet I've ever seen in a major city. I'd be shocked if these things had been renovated since the old pile was built back in 1947.

The day was cool and cloudy, the crowd large and enthusiastic, and the match a solid grudge fight between two teams that seem to genuinely like to whip one another. Unfortunately for a Portland fan, we were on the wrong end of the whipping that day.

Thorns FC lost one of our best defensive midfielders to injury early in the first half, making it difficult to defend against Seattle's excellent midfield or fight forward through it. Just before the half hour the Reign scored a goal on some terrific buildup play. Much as we chanted and sang we didn't help; our team was frustrated and penned up in its own end most of the half.

Halftime we were down 1-nil, and by midway through the second half Seattle scored again, this time an an awful error by one of usually-most-reliable defenders and a member of the US women's team. The last half hour and stoppage time was desperate; Portland scored, finally, in added time but then fell apart trying for the equalizer and gave up a quietus to Seattle's Rapinoe to go down 3-1.

The Thorns had not played well and their body language showed it; after the traditional salute-song to the team the fans remained staring uncomfortably at the team's cool-down stretches before slowly trickling away up the steps and back to the bus.

The drive back to Portland was, not surprisingly, quiet, disturbed only by the brake problems on the bus I'd chosen (the "cider bus", named for the hard cider it was stocked with in place of beer, drove on without incident). Perhaps coincidentally it was just as we finished the last of the brew suddenly a chorus of shouts and shrieks broke out from the left rear;

"Ohmigod, the tire's smoking!" "We're on fire!" "Stop the bus! There's something wrong!"

The driver did, indeed, pull to the side of the anonymous stretch of I-5 bordered by empty fields several miles from the next exit. He opened the door and stumped out to see what was the matter. Inside considerable hilarity tinged with nervous laughter considered the possibilities of a tire-fire while the tire was still on the bus.

I texted my Bride: "FYI - brake problems with bus. May be late. On the other hand, may burst into flames. Will advise."

I love my Desdemona. She replied quickly: "In case of fiery death, assure send pictures."

But today the bus was not half in love with easeful Death. After a moment of backing and starting forward the brakes broke loose at least long enough to get us back on the road. We arrived in Portland as the sun was setting, and I walked through the windy cool of the evening back across the Broadway Bridge to my office lot and home.

Playing off

Did I mention that my beloved Timbers won the Major League Soccer title this season?

Oh, yeah. Sorry.

So I've walked around just slightly pleased this entire December because of this, and I just realized why because I watched Rog and Davo talking with the lovely and intelligent Rebecca Lowe on Men in Blazers last night.

Turns out that the Lovely Rebecca is a Crystal Palace supporter (see the little stuffed eagle on Davies' shoulder? That's "Kayla", Palace's eagle mascot). She was talking about the distress that Manchester United fans are feeling this season even though the Scum are within the top half of the Premiership table and in a position that fans of other, more mundane, (read: Palace) clubs would normally consider supremely enviable.

But that for ManU fans this is anything but. The Red Devils have been losing and drawing, not scoring, and generally looking moderately crap for much of the 2015 campaign, and this gives the over-accustomed-to-success-ManU-fans huge, huge sadz.

Lovely Rebecca's observation was that this was because these overprivileged mamzers were, in her words, "forced to face Life", that is, Life as the Rest of Us have to live it; full of disappointments, failures, heartbreak, people we love who like us "as friends", movies starring anyone ever appearing on American Idol, nonalcoholic beer.

And that hit be right between the eyes because the story of a Portland Timbers fan has been failure for nearly 40 years.

The original Timbers came oh-so-close, going to the old NASL "Soccer Bowl" championship match in 1975 but losing to Tampa Bay.

Between that year and last month the closest the Timbers ever came was...close.

We won the old USL in league play - winning the "Commissioner's Cup", the regular season record - in 2009 but proceeded to shit the bed against the damn Vancouver Whitecaps. We won the Western Conference in league play in 2013 but failed to beat Real Salt Lake for the conference playoff.

That's kind of been the "Portland Story"; win regular season games, go to the playoffs, lose.

Until, two years ago...

The Portland Thorns had a fraught season in 2013. Starting the season ripping out five wins and a draw the Thorns were top of the table in the middle of May. But by mid-June the team had slipped down to third of eight. In August the team lost two, drew one, and won one, nearly dropping out of championship contention.

Portland went to Kansas City to play the Blues - who had split the season series 1-1-1 with them including a home defeat in August - and shipped two goals in the first thirty minutes. The team looked beaten and out of ideas.

But some of the players refused to lay down and die. Tobin Heath scored just after the half hour. Christine Sinclair finished a brilliant run dishing to Tiff Weimer who scored just past the hour mark. And Allie Long drove the nail in 18 minutes into overtime.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, impossibly, for the final 210 minutes of the 2,190 minutes the Thorns played in 2013 the team played like...well, champions. They crushed Western New York in the championship match to win the first NWSL title.

The storyline of this Timbers season is freakishly similar.

At the beginning of October the Timbers stood in seventh place in the MLS Western Conference, out of playoff contention having lost a gutting 1-nil home decision to Sporting Kansas City. The team had scored only 31 goals in 31 games.

They were out of the Open Cup. They had finished behind both Vancouver and Seattle in the Cascadia Cup.

It looked like lights out.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, impossibly, the Timbers began to win.

They won their last three regular season matches to finish third in the Western Conference.

They won an insane play-in round match against Kansas City that went to twelve rounds of penalty kicks after 120 minutes.

They comfortable disposed of the Vancouver and Dallas sides that had finished above them in the West.

Then they won the championship match.

Both Portland's professional soccer teams have now won their leagues. Within two years of each other. Both teams will now wear the star above the club crest that forever shines as the sign of a championship season.

I have to confess something here.

I'm not a big fan of "playoffs", in any sport. My feeling has always been you play a sports season to decide who's the best. You win the season, you win all the matches, you win. You're the champion. That's it. No frigging "wild cards", no "play-ins", no gimmicks. Play the games, win, that's it.

But boy friggin' howdy am I glad that the outfits that run American soccer don't think like I do.

Champions

My beloved Portland Timbers are the 2015 Champions of professional soccer in the U.S.

There really isn't more to be said, but, being who I am, I will say more after I've taken some time to simply sit and smile. In September this team seemed headed out of contention altogether. Today they are the champions. This season has been a ridiculous, improbable dream and, as such, perhaps all the more wonderful. I will have some thoughts later, but for now, the taste of victory is sweet.

We're going to the Final..!

You'll have to excuse me. But it's time to have what G.M. Fraser's pipey would have called a "wee gloat"...

We're going to the Final! Weeee're going to the Fiii-inal! We're best in the West, we stood the test, we're going to the Fiii-iii-nal!

Sorry. You may now return to your regularly scheduled bloggage.

Women and leggings and...well, Carlos Bocanegra NOT wearing leggings

My friends Lisa and Labrys reminded me that looking at attractive bodies is not a gender-specific thing. So here's some eye-candy for the female readers; U.S. Soccer's Carlos Bocanegra:

If you knew that this body was under baggy sweats and a ballcap, would it matter whether it was tight shorts or baggy sweats, or a bare chest or a hoodie?

I mean, certainly less clothing is more scenic...but what is unseen can still be seen, if you're thinking about it.

As Lisa said; the brain is the real sexual organ. What can be imagined will be imagine, whether it be by man or woman. We men may be a trifle more visual, but we were all designed to respond to each other's (or our own gender's, for those of us hardwired that way...) bodies. As Labrys said; we may be married, or in love, or committed, but we're neither blind nor dead. We respond to those bodies as our own minds and bodies tell us we should. And that's just fine; if we are truly civilized people we can surely find ways to dealing with our desires in civilized ways.

The fact that religious zealots - whether fundamentalist Christians, ultraorthodox Jews, Wahhabi Muslims, or every other flavor of God-bothering asshole - can't seem to do that is their problem, not ours, frankly.

Otherwise?

Enjoy.

Goals

The autumn is deep upon us and, with it, the Rains.

Once the return to Standard Time spells the end of evening light the clouds that lour upon our house seem all the lower and more lour-y, the rain more incessant, and the season chillier and more inhospitable. This isn't really as awful as it sounds; its just what happens in the Northwest in the waning of the year, and, by and large, we're both used to it and accepting of it.

But...that doesn't mean we enjoy it, and our delight in the rare sunny autumn day is the proof. This past Saturday was a lovely, sunny and mild autumn day and it seemed like all of Portland got out to bask in it.

Perhaps except for me; I had to work that morning, so I spent the first half the day in a muddy field outside the permanent traffic-tie-up that is "Tualatin" keeping an eye on people making the field less muddy.

The heavy fog lifted by mid-morning and the lowering sun strengthened from watery to warm. The dank earth steamed, the dark coffee in my hands steamed as well, and I stood in pleasant lassitude watching the work. The contractor knew perfectly well what his crew needed to do; my presence was purely decorative, a sort of large finial or an ambulatory bit of trimming designed to make the work prettier for the owner. So like any good eye-candy I promenaded about looking attractive, made an occasional note or three, and generally bided the time until I'd put in enough of an appearance to justify my paycheck.

The only upside to working a weekend is the relative emptiness of the freeways. Portland, sadly, is becoming more like our neighbors to the north and south; where once serious freeway traffic was restricted to circumscribed morning and evening "rush hours" random congestion is now both more common and vastly more random. I have encountered parking-lot-grade jams at midday and at midnight, on weekend mornings and weeknights in the early single-digit darkness.

Saturday the pavement was delightfully untenanted; I rattled north into the downtown enjoying the velocity while fretting slightly over the odd noise the old pickup truck was making. The drawback of an owned-free-and-clear-ten-year-old vehicle is that you have reached the age where anything may fail catastrophically and often will. What once was a small but annoying squeak now may be a wheel bearing announcing its imminent death or a leaf-spring suggesting that iron oxide has overcome the elastic properties of the metal.

(And I should notes that it is just this sort of fretful irruption from which wealth provides such insulation. Mister Micawber would have recognized it; the natural consequence of having to worry about whether you can manage to make ends meet on that twenty pounds. You listen to that squeak with the cold understanding that it may mean penury somewhere else, a new bearing rather than a new toaster, or a new leaf-spring rather than a coveted book. This is the reason that freedom is and always will be dependent on wealth; being forced into decision by straitened finances is not practically different than being forced into decision by a fist or a law. Being a wage-slave is, in many practical ways, less unpleasant but no different than being a chattal-slave.)

So it was with a small feeling of relief that I pulled into the sunny street outside the big bakery on 12th Avenue.

A soft white cloud of yeast followed me across the street and down the sidewalk paved with gold. The Boy's team was playing on the field beside the Edwardian pile of Portland's technical high school, and so I turned right and up the stone steps towards the noise.

The Boy's team had won that morning. The task at hand was to defeat some outfit with the terrific name of "Psychic Pineapples", which had already become my favorite kid-soccer-team name. But, honestly...the sun was warm and the turf was soft, and the crowd was happy and busy so the business of winning and losing seemed less than pressing. The Boy's team scored. The Pineapples scored. The play was, as it usually is in these upper-grade-school games, an ungainly collision of deft and clumsy.

The Boy himself is not a skilled player; certainly not the worst on his team at the fundamentals of what is, really, a very simple game but not really anywhere near as good as even the average player on his outfit. I try to retain the fond eye of a parent rather than the critical one of a long-time player and observer of the game, but there is little denying that my child will never be essential to the fortunes of his team. He plays with a lanky enthusiasm, however, and makes several good tackles and with that I am content.

The final is 3-all; the Boy's side went up 3-1 near the half but conceded twice - actually, three times but had a lucky break in that one of the Pineapples went over the touchline on the way to scoring - late in the match to settle for the draw. Scoreline forgotten almost instantly the group briefly convenes for a photo then disperses to homes and entertainments in the sunny afternoon.

In the line at Voodoo Donuts I am pleased to see that at least one Portlander has her sandals on, her bare toes defying the passing of the year. She reminds me that we here in the Rose City do not give in to the rains easily; we sieze upon the slightest hint of sunshine to shed the layers and glower of winter.

The sagging truck smells of fresh bread, and the Boy and I enjoy the sight of the honey-brown loaves emerging from the oven.

We agree that although neither of us particularly craves plain white bread that the leavened aroma has us hungering for that simple taste. The day slows to a stop as I tell my son about my fifth-grade field trip to the old Sunbeam Bread bakery in Philadelphia. He tells me about his fourth-grade field trip to the zoo. In the long light of late afternoon as golden as the loaves of bread we sit companionably together, unhurried, waiting for Missy and Mojo, listening for footfalls loud in the quiet street that announce the slow arrival of his sister and my wife.