DURING THE LAST few weeks, this author felt like he was stalking the San Jose Earthquakes. On Nov. 5, while returning from Europe, I stopped over at Newark Liberty International Airport en route to SFO.
The Quakes had just upset New York in the playoffs at nearby Red Bull Arena the previous night and had just left for SFO from Newark a few hours before I got there.
It happened again last Saturday. I was in Toronto attempting to watch the Quakes play Colorado on television. It was the conference championship, which they ended up losing. Had they won, they would have traveled to Toronto this weekend for the final—the MLS Cup—and I would have just missed them again.
Now, some basics: Over the last few weeks, many of us have been comparing the 2010 Quakes to the 2010 San Francisco Giants. Even though the Quakes just lost the equivalent of a semifinal and were eliminated last Saturday, the teams this year were eerily similar.
Like their pals 50 miles north, the Quakes were a scrappy bunch of outcasts, cobbled together from several other places—and a team no one anywhere expected to reach the semifinal. Some of the players were young, some were old, while others were thought to be past their prime. Some were local, while others hailed from different countries. All of them were regular dudes you could imagine having a sandwich with at the pub and each player contributed to the family in his own funky idiosyncratic fashion.
Somehow they managed to get all the way to the semifinal, winning big games on the road, so one thought they had it in them to defeat Colorado in that team’s house last Saturday. But it didn’t happen.
Anyway, back to the stalking. You see, these situations happen to me all the time. After San Jose last won the championship in 2003, coach Frank Yallop immediately quit and bailed for his hometown of Vancouver to coach the Canadian National Team. The Jan. 29, 2004, issue of Metro had me writing a humor column, flying up there and storming the building on Beatty Street where his office would soon be located, claiming if San Jose couldn’t have Yallop, no one would. Facetiously speaking, I was ready to gun him down in the hallway, but he hadn’t moved in yet.
In any event, my plan last weekend in Toronto was to watch the Quakes at a huge sports bar called Real Sports—a place nothing short of mind-blowing. A 25,000-square-foot complex directly across from Air Canada Centre (home to the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team), Real Sports boasts a staggering 199 screens, including a beautifully ridiculous 39-foot HD screen, the largest indoor one of its kind in North America. The main space, called the Arena, features an 80-foot bar resembling a sheet of ice when lit. The upper floor overlooks the main space and includes a golf simulator, three private suites and the Pitch Bar, which looks like a soccer field.
A VIP space dubbed the Player’s Lounge is reserved for members of the Maple Leafs, the Raptors basketball team and the local Major League Soccer club, Toronto FC. Dark leather furnishings surround a stainless-steel fireplace and the booths come equipped with beer taps at each table. In a recent article, The Globe and Mail compared the entire facility to the NORAD Command Center. There are screens everywhere, even above the urinals in the men’s bathrooms. Everything is controlled from the equivalent of a DJ booth, where employees toil away at the controls.
I was looking forward all weekend to watching the game at Real Sports, but as hip and dialed-in as the place is, to my dismay it didn’t get Fox Soccer Channel, so I couldn’t watch the match. Instead, I took a taxi back to my hotel room and fired up a pirate feed on my laptop, which came in perfectly. The audio and video were clear as day. I didn’t need to futz with it for a second. The whole scenario probably says a lot more about Fox Sports than it does about anything else.
So there I sat, alone in my hotel room, watching the San Jose Earthquakes lose to Colorado. My stalking thus came to an end and so did the Quakes’ 2010 season.
