How My Brother Became an Atlanta United Capo
We grew up sharing sports from Boxing to Basketball, now we share Futbol and all is right with the world.
When it came to sports, on Grape Street, we played them all. Football in the street, basketball in the alley, whatever the season was, we played it.
And we taught ourselves. We had no adult coaching and guiding us. By the time we played with other children (not from our area) we ran circles around them.
The sport called soccer (but known as futbol all over the world) was no exception. Despite the fact that we didn’t play it often on our block, we did athletics — sports was like second nature. I ended up in the midfield more often than not. I wasn’t a goal scorer, but my passes were pretty accurate and my tackling was mean.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s there were limited television channels. Whatever came on Wide World of Sports: skiing, cycling, ice skating, we watched it. As we got older though, most of us settled on being fans of a few sports and called it a day.
For thirty four years I held on to my love for futbol…with few people to share that love with. How I converted my older brother is a story that I’ve been wanting to tell since he bought his first kit (jersey).
Now that we’re halfway into the season, I figure this is as good a time as any. First, I have to talk about how I became a fan in the first place.
You ever fact check your own memory?
I certainly do. For years I believed that I was an Arsenal fan because they had a Black player and I adopted the team off that. I’ve been a loyal Gooner for 35 years but after researching for this article, I was worried. Maybe that story is wrong.
We were living in Newmarket, England the spring of 1981. Like I said, we were sports lovers, so it was no thing for us to turn on the tele, see a live futbol match, and watch it from whistle to whistle. (Cricket was more of a challenge, but we tried)
Unlike now when you watch Premier League Futbol and the pitch has Black folk from end to end, back in 1981 that wasn’t the case. As nature would have it, we always looked for ourselves. And there on the screen was one sole Black player. I thought he played for Arsenal — pulled up that 80–81 squad. All white folks.
Brendan Baston, Arsenal’s first Black player, made his appearance in the 1970 season and everyone’s favorite Viv Anderson wouldn’t wear the red and white for another three years.
Who was that Black man?
That’s the beauty of the internet. I was willing to concede that maybe it was just another case of my revisionist memory. That I imagined something that wasn’t so. So I typed “Arsenal vs Wolverhampton 1981” into the YouTube search engine and up popped a short, minute and a half clip of Arsenal v Aston Villa, May 2, 1981. And what do you know…there he is…the Brother…running up and down the pitch. I reviewed the Team Sheet for that day, typed in each name until…voila…Paul Davis. Paul Davis, midfielder, was the reason that I became an Arsenal fan.
Seeing this clip…
…verified a lot for me. Arsenal is up 2 nil after two pretty amazing goals. Despite that, the Aston Villa supporters are cheering. What kind of madness was this? As the announcer says, Middlesbrough had scored beating Ipswich which left Villa four points clear at the top. Aston Villa would claim their first title in 71 years.
And at nine years old, I became a fan of the sport.
Coming back to America was a reality check. There was no futbol on television here, certainly not no English futbol. And at school, very few Black kids played the sport.
I would play for three more years, not on any organized team, we couldn’t afford that. Just at school. The last year playing would be in Burlington, New Jersey for our intramural, Orange Dragons team. I was a midfielder as per normal and we lost…every…single…match. But it was fun. Our team was a hodgepodge of non-commissioned officers’ children, Black, white, Puerto Rican, Japanese-American..and that was the last time I would see that mix.
Hill Middle School. Denver, Colorado. 1985. I saw the flyer for “soccer” tryouts. I never even suited up. All those white faces made me decide that my futbol career was over before it began. What people either don’t say or don’t know is that in those days, racism was still quite OVERT. It was nothing for a white kid to call you nigger. Nor was it unusual for a coach to tell you that perhaps you should be trying out for the basketball team.
So futbol lie dormant for the next fourteen years.
If this were a chapter, it would be titled “Newsstands & TV Rights.”
Aside from the NBA finals of 1993, I watched ZERO sports in college.…and I sat out for two years, and stayed an extra year to work on the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta…seven years of college…no sports.
I didn’t come up for air until 1997 when I rekindled my love for baseball. The world had changed drastically from when I first started watching “America’s Past Time.” You could watch baseball 24/7 if you wanted to. Amazing.
A year later a new channel popped up in my listings — Fox Sports World. And they had a show dedicated to English Futbol titled The English Premier League Soccer Show, their version of Match of the Day, if you will. It was like discovering music videos all over again. I videotaped every episode. But they didn’t cover full matches yet.
August of 1999. Fox Sports World begins covering two to three matches every match day. I’m sure I have video tapes of these matches. I was so excited. But I had no one to share it with. None of my co-workers really cared. No one in my family was concerned about the multitude of games that Fox Sports World was showing…it was (American)Football season for goodness sakes.
This was also the era of whole shops dedicated to magazines. My favorite one was on Broadway between Broome and Spring. It also doubled as an internet cafe (remember those). Sadly, I don’t remember the name of the place…probably never knew it…just where it was. But they had magazines from all over the world. Fashion magazines, Photography magazines, Music magazines (see:How Multi-National Corporations Stifled the Voices of Rap Magazines), and most importantly for this article, Futbol magazines.
And I bought them all. I bought WSC (When Saturday Comes). I bought World Soccer (the oldest of the bunch, starting out in 1960). But my favorite of them all was Four Four Two Magazine. It was sizable, had a variety of topics ranging from fan interviews with retired players, features on up and coming stars, and investigations into world derbies.
We offered a whole new viewpoint and we wanted to show that quite literally. We wanted to use photography to it’s maximum and so we had a lot of photo essays, which newspapers weren’t really doing. Karen Buchanan, Founding Editor, FourFourTwo
Between those three magazines and Fox Sports World, I was well fed. In August of 2001, I took a two week vacation to London and procured my first two Arsenal kits — a keepers and a home team. That was the beginnings of a never-ending pursuit for kits. I copped a few for the 2002 World Cup. Bought some from Ecuador’s Serie A…yeah, I think you get the picture.
You have to understand, there was no market for this stuff up until the end of the 90s. You couldn’t just go into a store and find anything dealing with the sport. I bought those kits in England…and you couldn’t find them in the US. I bought those magazines in these magazine shops but outside of New York, no one carried them. When Barnes & Nobles started carrying “soccer” books, of which I bought a few (Fever Pitch & Soccer in Sun & Shadow being my favorites), no store carried these books outside of New York.
I’ve been preaching the gospel for years. Seeking out new converts at every turn. On a trip to Mexico City, I showed my brother Elpadaro Allah the ways of Futbol, how it is a universal language and the love and excitement that fans have for their teams. He accepted the religion but like Anakin, decided to forsake me by becoming a Chelsea fan. So I continued looking for a true follower.
I had almost given up my search when my older brother Ade asked me last year, “how do you get into it?” That was a great question and the first thing we had to do was find a team for him. I told him that there is no real joy in picking a top tier team. That picking one of those teams leaves little excitement but lots of disappointment. Arsenal have been the bridesmaids for almost thirteen years now since the days of the Invincibles and 2nd or 3rd or 4th place means nothing.
It had to be a mid-table team or a team fighting against relegation. Leicester City was flying high at the top of the table, the Cinderella team, #1. They had enough people on their bandwagon. We decided on Bournemouth. For his friends who followed the sport, they thought that I was doing him a disservice. Why not Manchester City? Why not Tottenham at least? Ade saw my reasoning and began researching the team.
He learned that the fact that Bournemouth was in the Premier League alone was a miracle. Back in 2008, the team was playing in League Two, the fourth tier of leagues, the lowest of the low. Bournemouth’s finances were shot and the club was kept afloat by the chairman, Jeff Mostyn, investing his own money into the club. And here they were, in the Premier League, just being there, according to Mostyn meant that his team had “achieved the impossible.” It was their first time in the top tier in their 126 year history.
For the 2015/2016 season, Bournemouth finished in 16th place which means they would stay in the Premier League. Before the 2016/2017 campaign, my older brother bought his first Bournemouth kit. He even took it a step further than me by getting his last name on the back. He’s gone on to buy other kits and he now follows Futbol more than he follows American football.
The only thing that rivals Futbol’s crowd excitement and fan loyalty in America is college football. Families pass down team love like heirlooms. Chants like “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” are sung with the pride of a National Anthem. My older brother took all this in. He now knows the isolation of being an all out Futbol fanatic in a country that could care less.
But he has me.
It’s like being a child again where he and I watched every sport together and talked about the games. Luckily, we’re grown or we might play keepy uppy in his basement the way we used to play tackle football in our thin, duplex hallway.
He’s gung ho — like me back in 1999. Devouring every bit of Futbol that he can find. Which inspires me to look for more. When he found out that Atlanta would be getting an MSL team, Ade went all in. Bought him a kit and a scarf. Which made me decide that I too would follow my first MSL team. We’re planning on an opening day trip to either Arsenal or Bournemouth for the 2017/2018 season.
He’s the best possible convert. For the past few months he’s been a Capo for the Footie Mob Supporter group of Atlanta United, gaining the love and respect of all AU fans, popping up in all the Supporter flics. It’s dope and all is right with the world.
