South 12th

Neighborhoods, places of employment, weird inside jokes from the 19th Century.

I will happily admit to being sort of a soccer poseur. After being relegated out of my pops’s youth soccer league at age 10, I didn’t pay much attention to the beautiful game for a solid twenty years. It didn’t help matters that during what ought to have been my formative soccer years, I was attending a suburban crudhole filled with jerk-ass soccer players. (Although, in hindsight, the mid-’90s peroxide blonde “alternative” jerk-ass soccer player is a beautiful archetype that I feel oddly nostalgic for, as it is rapidly fading into history.) On the whole, I actually didn’t much care for soccer at all.

During this past World Cup, however, I inexplicably caught a low-grade case of football fever — something about the sounds of the vuvzelas and living in a predominately Mexican neighborhood did it. I got very excited about the whole thing. When it was all over, I actually thought, well, maybe I won’t go as far as selecting a Premiere League English football club to get behind (I don’t even know what metrics could be applied to making such a decision). But maybe, I thought, Major League Soccer could be something interesting to think about.

Until I looked at the team names. They all suck. They really suck.

They all sound like third-rate expansion WNBA teams. “San Jose Earthquakes”? “Colorado Rapids”? What the shit is “Colorado Rapids” supposed to mean? That doesn’t even sound like a sports team. It sounds like a town off the interstate where your car breaks down and you buy a Slim Jim in the gas station while the tow truck comes from three towns over and some redneck makes fun of your shirt and you buy one of those newspapers that’s all personals ads for truck-drivers and prison inmates. Not very inspiring.

There is, in my limited experience, a poetry to football club names. They’re not named for vaguely threatening singular nouns or natural disasters. They are named for neighborhoods, and places of employment, and defunct athletic clubs, and weird inside jokes from the 19th Century. They are at least a dozen teams in London, and not one of them has the word “London” in their name. It’s Crystal Palace F.C., Chelsea, Arsenal, Fulham, Tottenham Hotspur, Leyton Orient.

So to that end, I’ve taken the liberty of renaming each of the MLS teams to more closely conform with my own expectations for what a soccer team’s name should sound like. Please enjoy.

Chicago Fire » Bridgeview Town FC

The stadium’s not even in Chicago proper. Which is fine, but the fact that’s a dumb pun on top of that makes it inexcusable. Show some pride for little Bridgeview. An alternative would be naming for the long-gone White City, from the 1893 Columbian Exposition, but White City FC sounds a little racist.

Columbus Crew » Linden South End FC

The “Columbus Crew” sounds like a gang of jocks that come down from OSU and crash your little sister’s graduation party. Again, naming the club for the city neighborhood it’s located in makes a much stronger statement.  

D.C. United » Columbia FC

Nice try, guys, but “United” should only apply to a team that is formed when two hated rivals finally put aside their differences and join forces. Until the D.C. club merges with the Arlington Avvalanchez or whatever, “Columbia FC” should do it.

Kansas City Wizards » Village West Rangers FC

There is no reason to drag wizards into this whole thing. Apparently they’re building these guys a new stadium in a mixed-use development near the Speedway called “Village West.” Sounds good to me. Plus, maybe “rangers” kind of sounds like something with cows. You know, like stockyards, or that kind of thing. I don’t know. 

New England Revolution » Lexington & Concord FC

Why fart around with vague historical references? Just go for it, dudes.

New York Red Bulls » Brooklyn Celtic

“But Andy, the team’s not in Brooklyn.” No, you’re right: it’s in New Jersey. But come on, teams that play in New Jersey get to call themselves “New York” all the damned time. It’s absurd, but it’s life. “Brooklyn Celtic” was a respected American soccer team from back in the bad old days, when American soccer teams had better names. So Brooklyn can have a team that plays in New Jersey. That’s fine.

Philadelphia Union » Chester FC

Again: not in Philadelphia. It’s in Chester. We’ll just use that. 

Toronto FC » Dufferin Gate FC

Actually, I guess “Toronto FC” is hard to argue with. Or maybe “Toronto City FC.” But it looks like the team plays at a stadium at Exhibition Place, which was once the site of a 19th Century structure called “Dufferin Gate.” I like the sound of that. Let’s go with it.

C.D. Chivas USA » C.D. Chivas USA

This one generally seems reasonable. 

Colorado Rapids » Commerce City FC

Another one where the name of the suburb the club’s actually located in has a better name than the major city it supposedly represents. Though I’ve heard Commerce City is pretty crappy.

FC Dallas » Tree City FC

This club is based not in Dallas proper, but in Frisco, Texas. Listen to this gem from Wikipedia about the city of Frisco: “Since 2003, Frisco has received the designation ‘Tree City USA’ by the National Arbor Day Foundation.” That’s outstanding!

Houston Dynamo » Dynamo Houston FC

Apparently “Dynamo” is also the name that all the KGB- and Stasi-backed football clubs in the old Soviet bloc had, but why not, let’s just keep it anyway. Maybe switch the two words around.  

Los Angeles Galaxy » Carson South Bay FC

Teams in huge cities shouldn’t be named for the whole city. It’s too expansive. Just a small part of it. Since the club doesn’t play in LA proper but in nearby Carson, I think this geographic designation is more specific and more appropriate. 

Real Salt Lake » Salt Lake County FC

Using the Spanish term “real” — which means “royal” — is just ridiculously pretentious. This is the equivalent of a naming the shittiest cookie-cutter suburban apartment development “Le Royale Oakes Apartments at Wyndmere.” Again, “City” is already in the god-damned name, so we could just do “Salt Lake City FC.” That said, I like the “county” designation, and we need at least one team with “county” in the name. You’re it, Salt Lake.

Seattle Sounders FC » Seattle Occidental FC

Again, let’s go with a neighborhood. Seattle is a city of neighborhoods. This should be easy. Actually, now that I look at it, the team plays in kind of a downtown-nowhere arena, and “Central Business District FC” isn’t so inspiring. However, it’s located at 800 Occidental Avenue. Great name! “West,” get it? Totally mythical.

San Jose Earthquakes » ???

I give up. You think of something.

Herbach, writing on Fambled:

Andy, Steph and I watched the Vikings simply beat themselves.  It was an eerie, horrible time.  This photo essay, dumbly, documents our pain as it happened.

This was the scene downstairs at S. 12th over the weekend. I was out of frame for much of the game, watching from the chair on the right. :37 in is my personal favorite. Herbach slunk off to the kitchen and Steph whispered “I don’t think he’s coming back.”

Contrast to the jubiliant scene on the other end of the Mississippi at Ills Manor.

Residences, Below Tenth Street Bridge, Minneapolis, 1939, by Syd Fossum (1909-1978). Image courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

My pal Mills, a native son of Louisiana, has written an eloquent and touching summary of what is at stake in today’s big Vikings-Saints show in New Orleans, using our own excitable pre-game conversations as a starting point. If you’ve not read it, please do so immediately.

He is, as is often the case, correct in most respects (though I strongly disagree with his diagnosis that only 20% of the metro population is invested in this game — I mean, come on, it’s the Midwest; people go totally bat-shit over football here). But on a personal level, he is experiencing a far different game than I am. I am not a lifelong Vikings supporter, or a lifelong football fan, and I am in fact an exceedingly casual football fan in the best of times. Actually, let’s not mince words: I am a classic bandwagon fan. I like the Vikings when they’re winning, and I don’t really care when they’re not. The terrible truth is I feel much more of an affinity for the Green Bay Packers, who are publicly owned, much older, have sillier (and therefore, better) fan traditions, and have actually appear to have won a few Super Bowls here and there.

So there is little doubt that the people of New Orleans have much more at stake emotionally in this match-up than we do in Minneapolis and St. Paul. As a lifelong supporter of hapless underdogs, from Eugene V. Debs to the 1999 roster of Sympathy for the Record Industry, I am sympathetic to the Saints’ cause.

However, to decry our boys in purple as a “mercenary and geriatric team” devoid of genuine symbolism is patently untrue, and is shot through with the sort of emotionally over-saturated rococo Crescent City hooey usually associated with figures like Huey Long and Master P. I know this much from my personal experiences this season, and I believe there is a weight and a heft to the counter-narrative at work here in the Vikings story.

Favre, right? It all comes back to him. Favre, Favre, Favre. Here I turn the floor over to Herbach, a furiously passionate admirer of the man, writing on mpr.org last year:

I love the guy. I love his openness. I love that he says he’s scared when he’s scared, that he cries at the drop of a hat, that he tackles his teammates after a touchdown.

He’s so different from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady or the Colts’ Peyton Manning, who both travel in this cool, mechanical air. Favre is emotionally engaged. He lets it all hang out.

Yes, Favre is wishy-washy. Yes, he brings the circus to town. Yes, he’s made off-seasons painful due to his shenanigans. But that’s who he is — the best player of a kids’ game around.

Although it hurts, I’m glad I have the opportunity to watch him play again, especially if Vikings fans accept the certain disasters along with the potential successes.

Right? I have enjoyed watching the Favre saga unfold, for these reasons, and for a few more. Basically, Minneapolis is different than St. Paul, or Duluth, or the Dakotas or Wisconsin or anywhere else in the Upper Midwest in one critical way: it is a city of mercenaries. It is a place people come to from elsewhere with the intention of making a better life for themselves. I came from Louisville; Herbach and Steph came from Wisconsin and Iowa.

In your day-to-day experiences in Minneapolis, you don’t meet a lot of native Minneapolitans. You meet a lot of what are called transplants. St. Paul is full of people that grew up in St. Paul and know the neighborhoods, but not so much with Minneapolis proper. Sure, you do meet a few Minneapolis “city kids,” as I like calling them, but mostly, you meet people like Brett Favre, who loved Wisconsin but couldn’t find a way to make it work, lit off for New York, crashed and burned, and then found a home for themselves here in the City of Lakes. Minneapolis is where the drama queens and burnouts and weirdos and misfits of the Upper Midwest wind up. It’s a city full of people that secretly suspect they don’t belong here, that they’re not Minneapolis enough, because didn’t go to South High, or because they didn’t go to Oarjokefolkopus or First Avenue when they were teenagers, or because they came from the suburbs, or from outstate. They came from the Iron Range or Fargo-Moorhead or Bloomington or White Bear Lake or Collegeville. Or, farther afield, they came in from Chicago or California or the Pacific Northwest or Mexico or Somalia. But god dammit, we accept each other. We accept each other and Johnny-come-latelies like Favre because that’s who most of us are.

If Brett Favre is not one of us, than none of us are. That’s got to count for something.