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Feeling Minnesota The Twin Cities bring out the best in soccer's diehards
Updated: Thursday March 29, 2001 4:22 PM
MINNEAPOLIS -- It was tough enough that being here for the Final Four meant I couldn't go to Central America to cover Wednesday night's U.S.-Honduras World Cup qualifier. Even worse, I came thisclose to not seeing the Americans' classic 2-1 victory at all. Thank god for bigsoccer.com. Which is how, in a perfect only-in-soccer moment, I came to see the game in East St. Paul, in the basement of a random house, with seven guys who didn't know each other but shared one thing in common: a burning desire to watch the U.S. national team. Lord knows it's not easy. Earlier in the week, I had called all over the Twin Cities trying to find a place that would televise the game, which was being shown on pay-per-view. First I tried my hotel. No luck. Then I called four "soccer-friendly" bars in town that I had found on a helpful Web site, www.halcyon.com/mcoker/main.html. No luck there, either. Finally, desperately, I logged on to to bigsoccer.com (the nation's best footie message board), clicked to the U.S. Men -- Fans and Travel page, and found a thread titled "Yank Viewing in Twin Cities." In it, a guy with the screen name "gominnesotathunder" asked people to call his number if they wanted to see the game at his place. So I did. There were eight of us in all, known to each other before only by screen names. There was our gracious host Fred Turk (gominnesotathunder) and his son Brian; Sasha Jovanovic (Yellow Bismark); Jordan Becker (Jobeck); Steve King (Leperkhan); Bruce McGuire (Kingwho); Andy Wattenhofer (thunderpac); and me (Grant Wahl -- a lame screen name, I know, but what are you gonna do?). This, of course, is what makes soccer great. Could you imagine complete strangers getting together at a house to watch a baseball game? An NBA game? An XFL game? In any case, it was great fun. Everyone brought chips and beer, and we sat there, rapt, as the game unfolded. We gasped in silence, then roared when Earnie Stewart's 35-yard bomb somehow found the upper-90. We groaned when Honduras's Julio Cesar de Leon hit an even more remarkable cracker from long range to tie it up at 1-1. And we went fist-pumping bonkers when Clint Mathis curled a Zidane- esque free kick into the goal in the closing moments for the win. More than anything, our watch party showed me that there are indeed soccer fans out there -- hard-core soccer fans, and not just in MLS cities or ethnic enclaves. Fred, for example, gets the MLS Shootout package on DirecTV (he's a Kansas City Wizards fan), and he even traveled to Florida for MLS spring training. Andy is planning to trek to Mexico City for the U.S.-Mexico qualifier in July at the Azteca. Bruce witnessed the U.S. win over Brazil in Los Angeles in '97. And four of the guys are traveling to Kansas City next month for the U.S.-Costa Rica qualifier. Hope to see you there, gentlemen. For what I'll remember about Wednesday night, besides the hospitality and the game itself, was something Bruce said as we got ready to leave. It was a perfect description of our unlikely motley crew: "We're just a bunch of knuckleheads who don't know each other having a good time." Amen, bro. Long live soccer. P.S. A couple of additional soccer thoughts
All right, back to
hoops.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Grant Wahl covers soccer for the magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.
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