A Match in Bridgeview
The woman directly in front of me attempts to teach a song to a nearby child who would be woefully out of place in the cheering section of Spain or Mexico. Uninterested, the child returns to eating her popcorn, and the decibel level subsides as the half draws to a close.
Toyota Park, home of the Chicago Fire, is not in Chicago. This is fortunate for the stadium, because its home in Bridgeview allows the structure to cast a shadow over the surrounding gas stations and strip malls. A residence closer to the city would diminish the stadium’s cultural impact; and if Toyota Park were truly the home of the Chicago Fire, the arena would be reduced to the passing glance of a motorist on Lake Shore Drive. As a regional events calendar would indicate, the home of Chicagoland’s Major League Soccer team dominates its neighborhood. Still, just ten minutes before the start of the match between the Fire and the Houston Dynamo, the half-empty parking lot seems to betray this fact. Toyota Park does not appear the black hole it promises to be, and most of the traffic in Bridgeview is merely passing through.
The whistle signaling the commencement of the first MLS game sounded less than twenty-five years ago to a disappointing crowd; and at the World Cup two years later, the league’s lack of profitability was supplemented with disgrace when the US national team tripped and forgot its lines on the largest stage in international sport. Such failures triggered a coup in the league, and new leadership and financing led to the erection of soccer-specific venues like the arena in Bridgeview. Yet the foreign players who had held their noses and signed with American clubs started returning home. Home to England and Mexico and Spain and other places where striking a ball with one’s foot earns the game the sensible moniker “football.” As the new millennium rolled in, Major League Soccer was on its own. Like Toyota Park, where I’m sitting now.
My seat is in the standing section, but the less-than-capacity crowd allows me to move up five rows. I am fewer than ten yards from the back of the Chicago Fire’s net, and halfway between the action and me stands a raised platform upon which an official Crowd Rallier is beginning his shift. He wears a Fire jersey and scarf, and he leads the crowd in chanting the team’s canon of cheers, pausing every few minutes to take a sip of bottled water. His arms gesticulating, our official rallier is careful to exaggerate his oral motions so that the mostly English-speaking crowd can have a hope of pronouncing the mostly Spanish cheers. It is not enough for me, however, and I am forced to turn to a neighbor and ask for a translation, or at least a clear repetition. “Vamos Chicago, tenemos que ganar!” is supposed to be sonorously rising from the raucous cheering section, although to me, and probably to most of the crowd, it remains a jumbled cacophony . Behind us, two stadium employees, also swathed head-to-toe in Fire paraphernalia, abuse snare drums in an attempt to lend rhythm to the disorganized support.
My seat is in the standing section, but the less-than-capacity crowd allows me to move up five rows.
History now regards the initial flight of foreign players from US soccer as a blessing. The MLS was forced to develop and market itself upon home-grown talent. The seventeenth World Cup, staged in Korea and Japan in 2002, showed the football world that the US national team was no pushover. In the first round, the United States team stunned Portugal with three first-half goals and drew one-to-one with Korea five days later. The round of sixteen was also a surprise, as the United States buried Mexico with unanswered goals from Landon Donovan and Brian McBride (who is leading the attack in tonight’s match against the Dynamo). Yet America’s run for the World Cup was cut short in the quarter-finals, when a brilliant performance by Germany’s keeper kept the US in check while Michael Ballack scored the game’s only point in the thirty-ninth minute. The US national team was sent home, but they could finally hold their heads high.
Houston and Chicago handle the ball well, but the game is harsher than what one might see while watching Spain’s La Liga or England’s Premier League. The defense applies more pressure, contested balls elicit more elbows and shoulders, and the ball travels more slowly around the field, highlighting localized action instead of tracing out constellations of players and suggesting the next move. But the rough chaos births something beautiful in the forty-seventh minute, when the nimble Tim Ward avoids a tackle and rockets a left-footer shot from just over twenty-yards. Dynamo keeper Pat Onstad dives to deflect the ball, but Baggio Husidic materializes from between two orange shirts to head the ball and bury it into the back of the net. Red fireworks supplement the cheers of a meager eleven-thousand persons, and the rallier attempts to inspire a new song from atop his perch. Yet his flag-waving and exaggerated enunciation fail as the crowd is content to engage in more democratic yelling. The woman directly in front of me attempts to teach a song to a nearby child who would be woefully out of place in the cheering section of Spain or Mexico. Uninterested, the child returns to eating her popcorn, and the decibel level subsides as the half draws to a close. I leave my spot and head to the concession area after somehow rationalizing spending seven dollars on a Miller Lite.
