This is the current opening blurb of the draft of the book on soccer fandom I am writing called "Oxymoron: An American Soccer Fan: 5 decades, 500 matches".
“I was 8 years old and in third grade. It was April 25, 1976. Seattle had just opened the brand new Kingdome and my family was heading to the first regular season Seattle Sounders match against the Portland Timbers in the NASL. The two years previous, the Sounders had played in Memorial Stadium and we had not been able to attend a match. Seeing Sounders stuff on local television and having a rival team be named the Sounders had me amped up. Pele had just played the preseason sell out of the stadium. We went downtown, a place my dad really doesn’t care for, and were walking up to the new building through the parking lot. I ran ahead to just touch with massive structure. It was cold and concrete and new and awesome and didn’t last a quarter century, but touching the outside pillar and wall was one of the coolest things 8 year old me had ever done to that point. My brother and I sat with a group of friends and my parents sat with their group of friends. The Sounders won that game on an extra time goal by Sir Geoff Hurst. I went home and immediately looked him up and saw he was the only hat trick goal scorer in a world cup final ever and that it had happened before I was born. That one game introduced me to so many things and led to me looking up what the world cup even was. Years later, I would interview Houston Dash midfielder Carli Lloyd post Reign FC match in 2015 in Seattle, the only other player ever with a world cup final hat trick. November 10, 2019 I sat in the press box on the same site in Seattle in a different building and watched the Seattle Sounders FC defeat Toronto FC 3-1 in MLS Cup. This book, Oxymoron, is about everything that happened in between.”
