Unstuck in Time
Put a 50-year-old team in a 112-year-old tournament, and everything old is new again
When the Timbers went down a goal to Tacoma in the recent Round-of-32 Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup match at Starfire, I experienced a moment of pure joy.
Let me explain.
For the first 47 minutes of the match, a bushy-haired teenager wearing a pink Ball Boy shirt and his Seattle-area youth club’s team shorts was relatively docile. He watched the game and dutifully fetched the occasional errant ball and put it on its appointed pitch-side stand. Stationed on the east side of the stadium, in the roughly 8 feet between chanting Timbers fans and the guests’ bench, his was a rather solitary post compared to his fellow ball boys who were next to the home-team Tacoma Defiance or even on the opposite side of the stadium where the majority of the reported 1,792 in attendance provided the Defiance-friendly atmosphere. He was on an island watching a partially-senior-staffed MLS Timbers trudge through a mid-week match against a should-be inferior, lower-level MLS NEXT Pro side.
But, in the 48th minute, the ball boy became animated with belief when Tacoma equalized. And then, just 4 minutes later, he lost his mind completely as they took the lead. Unable to control himself, he squealed, he jumped, he got a hop in his step that was to that point missing in the humdrum of his solitary duties. The look on his face told me he probably couldn’t process what just happened on the field and how it made him feel in his body.
I could not have been happier for him.
I’ve felt that feeling with this sport. And I’m guessing you have, too. In fact, I think the reason we come to the game is because of our inner 48th-minute Tacoma-Defiance ball boy.
Of all the competitions where we follow this team, there’s nothing like the Open Cup to remind us it all started somewhere for each of us, somewhere between 1975 and now.
“Those kids on the pitches around, that was you.”
In a sliver of Phil Neville’s post-match press conference on Starfire’s stadium field, he made reference to his pre-match team speech and the location of that night’s round-of-32 U.S. Open Cup tie against host Tacoma Defiance: the main pitch of the 11-field complex, a field surrounded by hundreds of youth players trying out for their own club teams as the Timbers took on Tacoma. A match where the MLS head coach, in a bit of a youth-game throwback himself, forewent a spot on the high-school-stadiumesque aluminum team bench to manage from, at times, a red plastic water cooler placed on the ground.
Right in the middle of the roughly 3-minute post-match media scrum, the gaffer dropped a gem that could have easily been missed amidst the noise from the traveling Timbers faithful. It was the sort of thing that could have been for or about any of us. It was a reminder of what’s possible when our dreams are sparked by moments of magic:
The (Other) Ball Boy
For Bob Wilmot, that spark started 50 years ago.
The above photo shows Peter Withe, on July 8, 1975, during a game in which Withe scored a goal in a 4-1 win over the visiting LA Aztecs, a win that put the new-NASL-team Timbers at the top of the tables. Though I’m yet able to verify if this photo from that match is the one of the Timbers 19 shots that night where Withe placed a 37th-minute Willie Anderson corner past Aztecs ‘keeper John Taylor for the Timbers second goal of the contest, I am 100% able to verify that the ball boy behind the goal—horizontal-striped shirt, hand on hip—fell in love with the team and the sport that season.
Wilmot, that original 1975 Timbers ball boy who had front-row seats to the Timbers’ first campaign, would also go on to make a mark in sports, building women’s soccer with the WUSA San Jose CyberRays and helping tell the stories of Stanford Athletics.
At last week’s Open Cup match, same as against the Aztecs, Wilmot again supported his Timbers in a win, this time from the stands.
Welcome to Tukwila, Bob!
“Just go run about and score a goal.”
That was Vic Crowe’s message to 76th-minute sub Tony Betts in the 1975 NASL quarterfinals against the Seattle Sounders. The then-21-year-old Betts replaced just-turned-20 Chris Dangerfield near the end of regulation, as the match was 1-1. In this audio (from my conversation with Tony in Podcast Episode 6), Betts takes us to the moment he entered:
Fifty years later, Phil Neville (the only current two-time guest on the Green Is the Color podcast: Episode 18 and Episode 50) no doubt listened to Tony’s episode and found match-proven Croweinian advice he could relay to 79th-minute sub Gage Guerra—the Portland Timbers 2024 MLS Super Draft third-round pick—as he was about to enter the field and make his full-professional debut (audio begins at 9 seconds):
What Always Happens Next
Not even the most clairvoyant among us could know Guerra would enter and score on his first professional touch.
But the evidence, however, points to knowing he would score—and how he would score:
a cross from the left, to the center of the box, to the head of said late-match substitute, for the goal we need.
When Betts entered in 1975 with Crowe’s advice, we got the Kelly-Anderson-Betts control:
When Guerra entered in 2025 with Crowe’s Neville’s advice, we got replication via Paredes-Smith-Guerra:
Even in the smallest moment of a match, there are things the most observant of us could miss, and who would blame anyone caught up in the excitement of that Open Cup tilt? That night, Guerra’s fellow 2024 MLS Super Draft Timbers pick Kyle Linhares also made his first-team football debut when he entered in the 60th minute.
And earlier, when Daniel Núñez subbed on in the 46th for Claudio Bravo, his entry made him the youngest ever Timber to play, at 16—pretty much the same age as that Tacoma Defiance ball boy who experienced all the best soccer has to offer, if even for just for a moment.
The Timbers take on San Jose tonight at 7:30, in the U.S. Open Cup Round-of-16. In some ways, it’s another moment in our long history of Soccer City, USA. But, for someone out there, it’s going to be the moment their journey starts.
(Video: Portland Timbers)
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