Most of you know me as a rabid hockey fan now but once upon a time I was a huge fan of the worlds most popular sport, soccer. I played it, I refereed it, every member of my family...including my sister and BOTH parents...played it. Total and complete immersion in the sport and the best part about it is that we had a major league team as a role model: The Tulsa Roughnecks.
The inaugural season was in 1978 and while I missed opening night...ironic considering I've seen all 21 opening nights of the Tulsa Oilers since they returned in 1992...but from the next game on I was a huge fan. The guys above are the foundation upon which I came to understand about what it meant to be a true die-hard fan of something. Sure, I have professed to be a Steelers fan since I was a baby but this was the first team I was a tangible entity that I could embrace as my town's team. As in the place where I grew up.
We had players in the community doing clinics and camps, and the teams they played featured some of the greats of the game. Tulsa was the smallest market in the North American Soccer League (NASL) but I can say that I saw major market teams from New York, Chicago and Boston before any Oklahoma City Thunder fan did. I don't say that with malice however, because if anything the Roughnecks proved way back in the late 70s and early 80s was that major league sports could exist in Oklahoma, it just took 30 years to make it happen again.
If you were a soccer fan in Tulsa, Victor Moreland, Billy Caskey, Alan Woodward, and Iraj Danifard were as familiar as Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, Derek Fisher and Serge Ibaka. The Roughnecks players were out on the dusty soccer fields of Tulsa holding clinics and camps with the players and they were, for a major league team very accessible to players who held them up as role models.
In terms of popularity among my age group at the time soccer still held a distant fourth place to football, baseball and basketball, but it held it's own. It was decidedly a nerd's sport but when the benefits of playing soccer were found to aid the big three sports it wasn't without great satisfaction that I saw some of my naysayers sheepishly tuck their shin pads into their socks with me on the sidelines.
Now we have soccer reborn in Tulsa with two teams set to take the field this year. The Tulsa Athletics...a "premier league" club that will play their home games at the old Drillers Stadium and the Tulsa Revolution, an indoor soccer team that will play in the Tulsa Convention Center. Both of these venues once housed the Roughnecks and hopefully, the success of the team that put professional sports on the map in the state of Oklahoma will translate 3o years forward to those teams.
It sure will be nice to watch them after all this time.
Now we have soccer reborn in Tulsa with two teams set to take the field this year. The Tulsa Athletics...a "premier league" club that will play their home games at the old Drillers Stadium and the Tulsa Revolution, an indoor soccer team that will play in the Tulsa Convention Center. Both of these venues once housed the Roughnecks and hopefully, the success of the team that put professional sports on the map in the state of Oklahoma will translate 3o years forward to those teams.
It sure will be nice to watch them after all this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment