^{_{Illustration using photo by Rick Dikeman [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], from Wikimedia Commons}}

'Like Church': Crew Fans and a Summer Under Threat

_{^{"Columbus is the greatest team the world has ever seen,
Columbus is the greatest team the world has ever seen,
We're gonna win today, and we're gonna cause a scene,
'Cause Columbus is the world's greatest team"
—Crew fan chant}}

1. Near Sunset

Some people build communities for profit. They offer the public a product or service that functions as a scaffolding or skeleton into the gaps of which consumers can fill as much of their individual lives as they see fit. Hobbies, discretionary spending, friendships, relationships, business partnerships, careers, aspirations, even a sense of purpose can be woven into the provided framework.

When nurtured, individual and community attachment to the product produces a steady income for whoever owns or controls it. At the same time, the individuals who make up the community affect the skeleton’s shape, and their satisfaction with the product and their connections to it, and to each other become important in attracting new customers. In other words, loyal members of a for-profit community don’t just give their money to whoever owns the product or service—they become a part of what new customers buy. Without their involvement, the product or service as it has come to be no longer exists.

Just as crucially, if the product’s shape or essence changes, the people who’ve allowed it to shape their individual and corporate identity are indelibly changed, as well.

These are stories about people who have given pieces of their lives and themselves to the Columbus Crew, and how they have changed.

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It’s near dusk on a Saturday in June. The Crew are off, so I’m mowing my lawn and listening to ACES radio, a Crew fan podcast the style of which will be familiar to listeners of the Howard Stern show. Come for the analysis, stay for the animal impersonations and bestiality jokes.

This week, the ACES panel is evaluating the first half of the 2018 season, assigning it an average grade of B. They also take time to mock fellow Crew podcast The Massive Report (there is approximately one Crew fan podcast for every four Crew fans. The four fans are the hosts), and singing the praises of Andrew Erickson, the indefatigable and versatile Crew beat writer for the Columbus Dispatch. Erickson is preserving—or restoring, depending on your politics—American’s faith in media, fueled by little more than roast beef sandwiches. They joke—as they do every week—that this is the final episode of ACES.

It occurs to me that if we’re halfway through the 2018 season, the last episode of ACES might not be far away. The Crew will be saved, but until it’s all said and done, the other possibility looms. I’m obliged by circumstance to consider the chance that if the sun sets on the Crew, it’ll set soon.

I finish my mowing as twilight cleans the hazy, burnished copper sky and replaces it with purple.

A little less than a week later, on a sodden Thursday evening, the ACES panel is in the beautiful front room at Endeavor Brewing Company, recording another episode. They’re talking about the early days of the Save The Crew movement, remembering the emotional waves cresting at the first sun-drenched rally where 4,000 angry fans roared to a sleepy world that we’re not done yet, we’re not done yet.

Less is said about the other side of the Save the Crew experience, but it’s acknowledged; the waves crashing back down into months of strain and uncertainty. The constant, sucking undertow of exhaustion and grief. Lives frayed along the edges by perpetual distraction. The backlog of quotidian tasks left undone. The conversation is vulnerable, open, and at times almost profound.

ACES cohost John Zidar voices one of the doubts Crew fans fighting to keep their team feel: when so much is so wrong in the rest of the world, why spend so much energy and effort on this cause?

The world is on fire. What’s so important about a soccer team?

2. "With Zero Return"

Nicole has been a Crew fan since the inaugural season, and after twenty-three years of supporting the Crew, the relocation threat feels like waking up to a daily sucker-punch. The threat of relocation is an attack—not only against her, but also against her family. She worries about the impact it will have on her two children if the team leaves.

Her six-year-old daughter wept when Justin Meram, the Crew’s longest-tenured player was traded away—in part due to the relocation threat. When Meram returned (again via trade), Nicole sent me a video, in which her daughter roars with joy, arms flung straight up in excitement when she’s informed that Meram was back where he belongs: Columbus.

Nicole’s other child, a three-year-old son has a more general attachment to the team. Sometimes when he’s in bed and supposed to be sleeping, she hears him softly chanting “Columbus!” and clapping to himself.

She worries that her kids will grow up without a team; will have the team ripped from them. Anthony Precourt and MLS are moving to ensure they will.

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In the absence of a football team, soccer was king at J’s high school. More than a thousand spectators routinely turned up to cheer the team on, forming an oasis of soccer fervor in the early 1990s. His team’s contact with the rest of the footballing world was limited to magazines where they read about European stars, and from whom they ordered jerseys with those stars’ names. Soccer as a vocation was an alien concept.

The birth of MLS was a shock; a curtain rising to reveal unfathomable possibilities. But the curtain rose a year or so too late for J to even attempt to make soccer a career, and it soon receded into the background of his mind. He moved away, got married, started a career and a family. He moved back, and made time for an occasional game, but was hardly passionate.

Five years, ago, though, in the course of his work J went through a jarring, traumatic situation related to soccer. As the emotional effects lingered, he bought two Crew season tickets and started rotating trips to games between his children, in hopes of resetting and redeeming his relationship with the beautiful game.

It worked. And in time, became a cherished tradition. As his family built friendships with other season ticket holders in their section, J noticed that a larger and larger portion of his life was shared by people with whom he had no original connection other than tickets to soccer games.

And now the community that helped J bring peace to troubling memories is under threat. And even though he knows that he’ll find some other way to have adventures and connect with his kids, J tells me “I can’t imagine my life and family without the Crew.”

This summer, he’s been obliged to imagine the possibility.

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Like Nicole’s children, Adele’s kids have grown up with the Crew. They’ve been the children swarming across that same moonscape parking lot playing pickup games. They’ve spent her money on hot dogs and pretzels and cotton candy. They’ve learned to swear from sitting a little too close to the Nordecke’s cheerful potty mouths.

Adele made sacrifices to bring her family to games, and connect them with the team. For a long time, it was worth it. She was repaid in camaraderie and shared experiences with her kids. Her daughter’s first complete sentence was “Let’s go Crew,” and sometimes the only easy way to cut through the tension with a teenage child was to talk about the Crew.

Now, she tells me she feels like she should have seen the betrayal coming. When her kids woke up at 6:00 on a Saturday to spend hours filming a commercial for the team in summer sunshine, and didn’t receive so much as a sticker for their efforts, she ought to have known. When the family ticket deals she depended on were discontinued and only generosity from her employer made it feasible for her family to go to games, she should have seen the writing on the wall. When buying a standard cable package was no longer enough to watch games, it should have been obvious.

She should have seen this coming; should have foreseen this year of settling sadness. A future where a vibrant centerpiece of family life becomes a heap of t-shirts, Lego and jerseys, fading into memory.

“It feels like we invested a lot,” she tells me, “with zero return.”

3. "A Ghost of What it Used to Be"

Trevor met his wife through their mutual love of the Crew and even proposed to her at a game. For them, summer weekends mean Saturday spent in the parking lot, basking in the atmosphere and tailgating with friends.

So far, this year, those Saturdays have been more or less the same. But there’s a shadow, now; a question no one will answer unless they have to.

“When we talk to our friends and family we refer to the Crew as a community, not a sports team,” Trevor tells me.

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Keith has thrown himself into the movement to Save the Crew. His contributions have been wide-ranging and energetic, but even as he’s invested so much in preserving the Crew, his feelings about the game have changed. Keith tells me that he’s lost the joy of soccer.

He grew up playing soccer in an era when few people did. He attended his first Crew matches in 1999 when he was given free tickets through a connection to former head coach Greg Andrulis.

The connection wasn’t instant. For a time, the Crew became one piece of a larger relationship with soccer that continued to mostly revolve around playing. If Keith watched soccer, it was more likely to be a European league than anything domestic.

And then in 2014, as the toll of soccer-related injuries mounted, Keith was finally forced to give up playing. Since Keith stopped playing in matches, his wife suggested that they spend more time at Crew games. They split season tickets with friends, and the Crew have become a regular part of their lives. Going to games, and participating in Crew supporter’s culture was a source of joy—a settled, internal sense of well-being and pleasure. Beyond individual game results and the accompanying excitement or sorrow, the joy was always there. The experience of soccer was itself a source of satisfaction.

And now, even as Keith fights to save the team, the joy of the game has dried away to nothing. Now, any given game can bring a temporary flicker of interest, but the river has run dry. The light has gone out.

“I still have a fun time at the game,” he tells me, “but it’s a ghost of what it used to be.”

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Jacob’s experience lies on a parallel path to Keith’s; a feeling of losing something when he watches the Crew. Almost like a loss of innocence. He’s unable to lose himself in the moment the way he used to.

“I feel like my fandom of anything is insignificant now because it doesn’t feel like it’s for the fans anyway, just the bottom line,” he tells me, “So that’s always going to be stuck in the back of my mind no matter how into pro sports I ever get. That will not allow me to ever be fully invested like I used to be.”

He still watches the Crew, but he doesn’t watch any other MLS teams, anymore. He’s still looking forward to seeing his adopted Cardiff City back in the Premier League, and he’s enjoyed filling the time he used to spend watching the rest of MLS watching his first sporting love, the St. Louis Cardinals instead.

But it isn’t the same.

Instead, Jacob has become more aware of civic issues and governance than ever. He reads the minutes of his local city council. He pays attention to which companies are getting tax breaks, and how those subsidies play out. He feels a new willingness to take a public stand and advocate for causes he cares about.

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Geoff’s story shares traits with many Crew fans; his relationship with the Crew is about his family. A majority of the fans who contacted me mentioned either their parents or their children.

He’s been going to games since 2007 when he was 11 years old. He’s come of age in the stands for the peaks and valleys of the Crew’s history since then. It’s given him, he tells me, some of the best memories he has with his father.

Geoff believes (author’s note: Geoff is right) that the Crew will be saved. But if it isn’t? If Columbus loses the Crew, Geoff tells me he’ll never watch MLS again.

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On June 9, Phil starts to understand how much a soccer team can mean to its supporters. It’s Pride Night at MAPFRE stadium, a sweltering, sun-drenched slog of a match against the New York Red Bulls. The bleachers are hot enough to burn bare skin, and the fans in the Nordecke are pressed into the shadow of the stage.

Phil’s been a Crew fan since about two weeks before the shit hit the fans, but it’s his first time ever making the two-hour trek south from Akron for a game. Before kickoff, as he and his wife make their way across the gullies and ravines and bubbling asphalt of the parking lot, they pass through swirling soundwaves from competing car stereos and waves of kids on scooters.

Crew fans are eager to introduce themselves. They offer the newcomers beer and hot-dogs. Everywhere he looks, Phil sees rainbow flags and costumes for Pride. As he soaks in the moment, there’s a lump in Phil’s throat. He’s been fighting for months to save the Crew, but suddenly, in the broiling parking lot, he gets it. He understands how much this means.

And in the end, maybe Phil understands what’s at stake better than most. He grew up near Cleveland, and he’s been a die-hard Cleveland fan his whole life. He was in high school when the Browns left.

Since October, he’s been unable to shake the feeling that this is all his fault. That somehow, when he latched onto the Crew, a curse came with him.

More than two decades later, he still feels cursed.

^{_{Illustration using photo by Jay eyem [CC BY-SA 4.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons}}

4. "Like Church"

For twenty-two years of Courtney’s life, the Crew have been a constant—a Saturday diversion, and a bridge across generational gaps.

Like many fans, he first attended games with his father. Courtney’s dad is now in his eighties, physically unable to attend games in person. Each game day, Courtney is obliged to choose between watching with his father, who is ill, or standing with his fellow Crew fans in a fight to keep our team.

Either way, he says “I feel like I’m visiting a dying friend in the hospital.”

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When I ask for stories about what the Crew mean to them, and what the crisis means to them, David Uhlendorff gets in touch to let me know I can use his twitter thread about his relationship to the Crew and to his father.

What you should do is leave this essay and read David’s thread. If you feel like stopping there, and just ruminating on that, I think you’ll have made a fine decision.

From buying groceries at Kroger to get free tickets, to bonding across a shared love of soccer, of the Crew, and of the community that supports the team, the Crew were the proving ground for David’s relationship with his father.

At some point along the way, David’s father stopped going, but for David, the clanging, hoarse embrace of Nordecke is a family of strangers. “Like church,” he tweeted.

David’s father is dying, and David’s church is under threat.

It’s important, thinking about these stories, to clarify that I don’t mean to suggest that losing a sports team is like losing a parent. Instead, I want to note that it’s clear from the stories I received that sports remain a tether between generations—a mainstay of shared enjoyment. The community we build is not only with strangers, but also between generations. Whatever healing, escape, and happy memories black and gold once offered the bereaved, those balms have been compromised and turned against themselves.

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In 1996, Steven’s father, a poor preacher transplanted from Hungary, scraped together money to take his son to see a game at the Horseshoe. It was a rare treat, an attempt to help his All-American kid understand something special to his immigrant father.

As his father’s body declined and the family’s financial situation worsened, they were forced to exchange going to games for visits to training at the Crew’s facility in Obetz. Even in those straitened times, the Crew provided generosity and memories. Steven remembers Crew and Polish national team legend Robert Warzycha telling him to cover his ears so he could tell his father a dirty joke he’d heard while playing in Hungary.

For years, Steven’s family fought to keep their heads above water and the wolves from their door, and through those years of famine, Steven’s constant was his love of the Columbus Crew. The team popped up in class projects and took the first cut of his tax refund. When Steven’s father passed away, and Steven gave up his season tickets to help his mother find her feet in a harsh new world, the Crew became a lifeline. The team brought him memories and a connection to his departed father, and a source of aspiration for the life he resolved to rebuild for himself. Someday, he’d have season tickets again. Season tickets and a house with a Crew flag in the lawn.

After Anthony Precourt announced that he was considering relocation, something inside Steven gave way. Through all those years of tragedy and struggle, he’d kept a step ahead of a hereditary predisposition to severe anxiety. Following the October announcement, it caught up to him. The one steady point of light was now draining him dry, leaving him exposed.

Steven reacted as we can only hope we would: he understood his situation and sought help. Thanks to his proactive response and that help, he’s been able to manage his anxiety. He has season tickets again, and he owns a home.

But Steven is still afraid that he’ll never achieve the dream he’s been chasing for years—that he’ll never be able to replace his #SavetheCrew yard sign with the flag he promised to his younger self.

And if the end comes, what then? Does he throw away his scarves and jerseys and mementos, because they’re too painful to see? Does he keep them because they anchor him to his father, and to himself?

Steven’s body carries the heaviness of the uncertainty, and some days the pressure is so intense that he’s not sure he doesn’t just want it to end, so he can cauterize the wound, put himself back together, and move on.

5. "You Gotta Shoot Your Shot"

It’s July 21st. The ninety-second minute. The score is tied. It’s late, but it’s still muggy and damp in Columbus’ sagging soccer temple. The ‘Fre’s metal skin and bones are damp with rainwater and condensation.

On the field, the season is teetering. The team is losing momentum, having won one of their previous eight. The shots haven’t been going in. They’re only in this game on the strength of a questionable penalty call.

And the ball rolls to Wil Trapp, forty yards from goal, facing the north end of the stadium.

Wil Trapp, native son of Columbus. A star for whom the goalposts of expectation have always been receding. Heartbeat of the team. Avatar of a city. A smile for selling apple pies, and a ruthlessly tactical mind.

Wil Trapp controls the ball, considers his options, and pushes the ball to his right. He looks up and pauses.

And then he shoots.

It’s a symphony, it’s a masterpiece, it’s the tedium of physics alchemized to poetry by the outside of his right foot. It’s almost a miracle. It’s a line drive from thirty-five yards. It’s still the ninety-second minute, but everything has changed. Stupefied defenders double over as the ball screams by, or stand in mute astonishment. Joe Bendik rises from the turf with the pained expression of a man trampled by unexpected elephants. The soggy, leftover crowd is leaping and jostling in the stands, stretching their bodies and voices to do justice to what they have seen. Crew players sprint from every corner of the field to dogpile their captain just behind the midfield stripe.

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I’m not there to see it. I’m several hundred miles away, working late at a conference. But when I watch it on my phone, lying in a hotel bed, I can feel the lifting in my stomach. To me, at that moment in the dark, Wil Trapp is not only the captain of the team; he’s Columbus.

It’s an overwrought, melodramatic reaction. But I think maybe it’s the right one, too.

As children lie awake chanting and parents wonder what they’ll tell them if the team leaves, Major League Soccer is pouring money into lobbyists and litigators’ pockets to see that it does. Heineken, Home Depot and Coca-Cola among others pay millions to be associated with MLS and don’t object to anything. Who picks that fight?

Keith no longer feels the joy of soccer, and Jacob can’t connect to any sports team. A church that sang comfort to the fatherless and children of all faiths and no faith sings on against a lowering storm. Major League Soccer hopes to leverage their millions to replace those hymns with an echoing stillness until neglect and rust swallow the stadium whole and all that’s left is blurring memories drifting across the fairgrounds. Who takes on the league and thinks they’ll win?

Columbus.

A perpetually underestimated city too far from the coasts to really matter, always followed by comma-Ohio. Apple-pie smiles and iron wills. A million-and-a-half people from all over the world, who share a home. A community. The greatest team the world has ever seen.

After the match, in comments quoted by Ben Ferree on prosoccerusa.com, Trapp says it’s irresponsible to take a shot so far from goal, but then he adds,

“It’s just one of those things. Shoot your shot. Sometimes they go in.”