"You can have love affairs with other football clubs. With Everton, it's a marriage."
- Howard Kendall
Partly due to family but mostly due to me not being one to conform or follow trends, World Cup '94 and also to music (Steve Harris, bass player of Iron Maiden, who never failed to mention his beloved Irons at any opportunity, was the origin there.); in 1993 I decided I was going to delve in to the world of "soccer". At the time, the sport got absolutely zero coverage on maintstream US television and the only place to find scores was on the back pages of the Sport section of the newspaper...at least in the parched desert SouthWest of Arizona. Soccer was the realm of men in shorts, something not wholly embraced in a country chock full of faux machismo. Just out of the image-conscious world of High School, where wearing a Pantera or Slayer shirt had already limited the friend factor, I was a target market back then. It wasn't cool at all and neither was I, to the average teen sheep-like person. As an 18 year-old metalhead, though, it had something else...the spectre of crowd violence. Rightly or wrongly, this was right up my alley...it just looked like one big mosh pit to me. Passion, I was in!
With the World Cup coming to the US the sport had gotten slightly more attention but to say it, as a whole, could compete with the coverage/popularity of the juggernaut that is the NFL, a resurgent NBA, Major League Baseball or even the primarily East coast haunt of the National Hockey League, would be a blatant lie. Any American who tells you otherwise has lost a grip on reality through the cloud of time. The coverage that did exist was still only about the World Cup or the US national side and that was it. Enter the internet... With personal computers beginning to become commonplace in the homes of middle America the old, familiar tones of a dial-up modem sequence began to form the soundtrack of a generation of teens, including myself. Enter the information age and the ability to form connections, of all types.
Truth be told, I nearly became a Wimbledon supporter. The "crazy gang"(!?), hated by just about everyone, as far as I could tell...now we're talking! I got in contact with a Wimbledon supporter over the internet and he actually set a course straight for the heart of the sun, just not directly. "Support who you want...once you pick a team you gotta' stick with them, so choose carefully." Well, crap...ok. In hindsight, it was what was supposed to happen and thankfully I had obviously gotten in contact with a real football fan. I had no real connection to any club, despite some family history that I wasn't going to allow to influence me, for various reasons (stubborn, no!). What followed was a good month of searching out club badges and reading up on their history, as you do when you don't have much else to go off of. It kept coming up, though... "No!" Resistance ended up being futile and, somewhere around July/August, 1993...Everton, it was.
Following the World Cup was one thing, we were hosting it and it's a global pandemic when it's happening...easy enough! Club football was a different beast, though. I almost gave up as it wasn't very rewarding and you had to make the effort to stay connected, as it were. You couldn't watch a match and I didn't engage much with Blues online, mainly out of fear of acceptance..."who's this Yank? 'KOFF!" I defo thought I was somehow gonna' get my head caved in online...I mean, hell, they do that at a match! I didn't know much of the "casual" behaviour had stopped, it's all you'd hear about over here. Thankfully, we won the FA Cup in '95 and it kept me going long enough for things to develop. From subscribing to mailing lists, to going on mIRC to watch someone type out match comms while they were listening to it on the radio, the bug was planted and the rest is history.
Everton's still, for the most part, a solitary venture for me...a sneaky joint in the handball courts passed between you and a close friend after school, a good album on the headphones or a quiet midnight drive with the windows down in the spring or fall. And I wouldn't have it any other way...
Twenty-five years it's been now... Here's to my Silva anniversary.
Up the 'kin Blues!
- Howard Kendall
Partly due to family but mostly due to me not being one to conform or follow trends, World Cup '94 and also to music (Steve Harris, bass player of Iron Maiden, who never failed to mention his beloved Irons at any opportunity, was the origin there.); in 1993 I decided I was going to delve in to the world of "soccer". At the time, the sport got absolutely zero coverage on maintstream US television and the only place to find scores was on the back pages of the Sport section of the newspaper...at least in the parched desert SouthWest of Arizona. Soccer was the realm of men in shorts, something not wholly embraced in a country chock full of faux machismo. Just out of the image-conscious world of High School, where wearing a Pantera or Slayer shirt had already limited the friend factor, I was a target market back then. It wasn't cool at all and neither was I, to the average teen sheep-like person. As an 18 year-old metalhead, though, it had something else...the spectre of crowd violence. Rightly or wrongly, this was right up my alley...it just looked like one big mosh pit to me. Passion, I was in!
With the World Cup coming to the US the sport had gotten slightly more attention but to say it, as a whole, could compete with the coverage/popularity of the juggernaut that is the NFL, a resurgent NBA, Major League Baseball or even the primarily East coast haunt of the National Hockey League, would be a blatant lie. Any American who tells you otherwise has lost a grip on reality through the cloud of time. The coverage that did exist was still only about the World Cup or the US national side and that was it. Enter the internet... With personal computers beginning to become commonplace in the homes of middle America the old, familiar tones of a dial-up modem sequence began to form the soundtrack of a generation of teens, including myself. Enter the information age and the ability to form connections, of all types.
Truth be told, I nearly became a Wimbledon supporter. The "crazy gang"(!?), hated by just about everyone, as far as I could tell...now we're talking! I got in contact with a Wimbledon supporter over the internet and he actually set a course straight for the heart of the sun, just not directly. "Support who you want...once you pick a team you gotta' stick with them, so choose carefully." Well, crap...ok. In hindsight, it was what was supposed to happen and thankfully I had obviously gotten in contact with a real football fan. I had no real connection to any club, despite some family history that I wasn't going to allow to influence me, for various reasons (stubborn, no!). What followed was a good month of searching out club badges and reading up on their history, as you do when you don't have much else to go off of. It kept coming up, though... "No!" Resistance ended up being futile and, somewhere around July/August, 1993...Everton, it was.
Following the World Cup was one thing, we were hosting it and it's a global pandemic when it's happening...easy enough! Club football was a different beast, though. I almost gave up as it wasn't very rewarding and you had to make the effort to stay connected, as it were. You couldn't watch a match and I didn't engage much with Blues online, mainly out of fear of acceptance..."who's this Yank? 'KOFF!" I defo thought I was somehow gonna' get my head caved in online...I mean, hell, they do that at a match! I didn't know much of the "casual" behaviour had stopped, it's all you'd hear about over here. Thankfully, we won the FA Cup in '95 and it kept me going long enough for things to develop. From subscribing to mailing lists, to going on mIRC to watch someone type out match comms while they were listening to it on the radio, the bug was planted and the rest is history.
Everton's still, for the most part, a solitary venture for me...a sneaky joint in the handball courts passed between you and a close friend after school, a good album on the headphones or a quiet midnight drive with the windows down in the spring or fall. And I wouldn't have it any other way...
Twenty-five years it's been now... Here's to my Silva anniversary.
Up the 'kin Blues!
