Two weeks ago I wrote a column explaining the arbitrary way in which I became a fan of the Duke men’s basketball team. In that column I promised I would share the story about how I became a fan of the Arsenal soccer team, which is even more convoluted than how I became a fan of Duke. There wasn’t enough room Sunday’s reader feedback column, so here’s the Arsenal story:
When I was 11 years old my family spent a year living in a suburb of London. My dad’s company was exploring whether to partner with a similar company in Great Britain, and my dad was chosen for a year-long employee exchange.
Now, spending a year in England did not turn me into a soccer fan. I wasn’t a soccer fan then. I never attended a match during our year there, and I think I watched exactly one game on television. I was much more interested in the weekly NFL show (they condensed a game into a single hour, what a great way to watch a football game).
But one thing I couldn’t get away from was the rundown of all the soccer scores on the news each weekend. This was before the age of highlights (at least in England), so all it consisted of was a news anchor reading off the list of scores while the list was shown on the screen. This was interminable, because they would go through all four divisions, meaning it was a long list. It was Liverpool and Everton and Oxford United and Bradford City and Chesterfield, an unending list of increasingly obscure English towns.
But one name that naturally stood out to an 11-year-old was Arsenal. To a kid that’s a far more memorable name than the likes of Luton Town or Leicester City.
And the idea of Arsenal was reinforced. Our family’s favorite board game that we found while living in England was called The London Game. The game board was a map of the London Underground (which is fantastic in its own right). The object of the game was to use the Tube to travel as quickly as you could to your six tourist sights, while simultaneously trying to prevent your opponents from getting to theirs. Each sight had its own card that included a description, and one of the sights just happened to be Arsenal Football Club.
The seeds were sewn.
Then after I graduated from college, I came back to Seattle where my friend Pat and I needed to find a way to continue playing sports, even though we no longer had intramurals at our disposal. So we joined a recreational soccer team. At the same time we stumbled across a weekly cable program on Prime Sports Northwest (remember that?) that showed highlights from the English Premier League, which we quickly became addicted to. We were officially soccer people, and upon becoming fans of English soccer we naturally had to choose teams to support.
Which team to choose? There could be only one choice. I knew exactly two players on Arsenal’s team: I recognized Dennis Bergkamp from the 1994 World Cup played in the U.S., and I remembered some guy named Wright (it turned out to be Ian) from a Nike commercial.
So the root of being an Arsenal fan essentially boils down to the combination of a decision made by my dad’s company, a board game and needing an athletic outlet once school was over.
No, being a fan doesn’t always make sense. But it’s a whole lot of fun, and it’s been a blast sharing my stories and hearing yours. Thanks to all of you for making this such an enjoyable project!
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