I just knew.
I didn’t pick the club from a list, or put names on a dartboard and fire away.
In reality, my club picked me. Almost like the way your parents decide to have you. Now, just like my parents, my club is in my blood. Forever.
In the summer of 2014, the US Men’s National Team made it out of the group stage of death into the knock out round, largely on the back of Goalie Tim Howard. The entire country was being swept up in soccer mania. There were watching parties. It was talked about amongst friends. There was buzz…..and I wasn’t ready to come down when the tournament ended.
Of course, I knew about world soccer and the English Premier League and a few other major leagues. I also knew that Major League Soccer in the US was anything but. So I went about doing research about how to ‘start getting into soccer’.
At first, I thought I might follow Bundesliga. From a distance, it seemed like that there wasn’t as much hype around it as EPL so it could be my “own thing”. But as an American, once you realize you can’t see every game on TV it’s a non-starter. Every EPL game at that time was shown live and for free on the NBC family of networks.
So once I gave in and realized that to really get into soccer it had to be the EPL, then it was all about deciding which club to adopt. I read a few articles, talked to some friends who were already bitten by the bug and set out to choose my team.
First of all, I knew for sure I wasn’t going to pick a side that “won everything” like Man U or Chelsea. Where is the fun in that? That’s as bad as rooting for the Yankees or Red Sox; Lakers or Patriots. Next off my list, I wasn’t going to pick a club that bought their success on the backs of pure cash as Johnny-come-lately’s. So long, Man City.
The first team I really started to consider and research, based on that World Cup and Tim Howard, was Everton.
And then I decided I wanted to have a club in London. See ya later Liverpool. And Everton. So Arsenal was in the mix. I had never heard of “Totten-HAM”….spoken in the vernacular of this Texan.
And that of course, brings me to West Ham United. As a teenager, I spent hours in my room listening to the loudest, heaviest records I could find. I had to have a guitar to teach myself the riffs and the licks I heard blasting from my speakers. I was engrossed with album art and the best of all of it, then and now, is Iron Maiden.
“Ah hah”, I said to myself. “I remember West Ham!” They were the club on the electronic scoreboard on the Somewhere in Time album from 1986, having beaten Arsenal 7-3. “Nice”
And so I remembered, they were the Irons, and the phrase Come on You Irons was the club slogan co-opted by my favorite band in the world.
I fell down that rabbit hole looking at the history of the club. And it all seemed like I knew it before and was just getting reacquainted with the backstory of this team or that I already had claret and blue blood flowing through my veins and it was just at this moment in time that the passion that once was dormant, was awakened.
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It didn’t take long for me to understand that I was West Ham till I die. They found me. My club chose me. The working man’s club, the hooliganism, the dreams that fade and die, the West Ham Way…it all was there for me, and in me, and part of me. It spoke to me, speaks to me, and I speak that same language.
I went home and announced West Ham United as the team I was going to follow. And so my family followed along with me, having also been caught up in US World Cup fever too.
The first match, that first side 2014-15; Big Sam in his suit, chomping his gum. Andy Carroll, Adrian, Mark Noble, and Kevin Nolan, Diafra Sakho, Mario Zarate, Ried, Tompkins, Downing, Koyate, Morgan Amalfitano, Alex Song, and the legendary Carlton Cole…..I knew. This club was in me.
It didn’t take long to understand how, and how fun it was, to hate Sam Allardyce. It didn’t take long to see why Carroll was (and is) the most polarizing figure at the club. It was just a few matches before I understood the West Ham Way, and what it meant and why Big Fat Sam had to go after ‘parking the bus’ one too many times.
From there, West Ham United has been a weekly way of life for me. I have always been a sports fan. And I have loved some offbeat sports before. But this was something fresh, something I was seeing with new eyes, and feeling for the first time. It was magical. Electric. Iron.
In 2016 I made my first trip to London to see a match at the Boleyn Ground before the club moved. That is a story for another column. But again, being an American, the idea that you could buy tickets for a match and the match could be moved or postponed was beyond me.
So our first trip to see the Hammers turned out to be a road trip on a train from London to Manchester to watch the club take on Man U at Old Trafford in an FA Cup tie with all of the other Hammers away supporters. Dimitri Payet’s goal off a direct free kick happened right in front of me and the place erupted.
When the Hammers took a summer tour of the US with a stop in Raleigh, NC. I bought tickets to the match, flights and a hotel room for my wife and daughter and surprised them with a trip to see WHU in person for all of us.
That trip was magical for many reasons. But the one we still talk about is how we joked on the day we left about seeing the club at the airport. Turns out, it wasn’t a joke. As we were killing time waiting for our flight, I looked up and streaming down the escalators in full team gear was the entire West Ham Squad!
Nobody else seemed to understand what was happening. These people weren’t recognizable to the other travelers that day and went by unnoticed, but we saw them immediately!
My daughter met her favorite Aaron Cresswell. We met and talked with Andy Carroll, Mark Noble, Winston Reid, Adrian, Pedro Obiang, and Slaven Bilic. My wife hid sheepishly behind the paperback books because she couldn’t believe all these players she’d watched for over two years, and took her life into her own hands on a train to Manchester to see, were there in front of her.
But there was nothing to be nervous about. Because these guys weren’t footballers or larger than life figures. They are West Ham, just like me. Just like us. They are family. My football family. They are in my blood. And when a Hammer scores, and pounds the badge on his chest, over his heart with his fist, I am in their blood too.
West Ham till I die.