Wherein The Quest Begins (Preseason 2023)
Somewhere out there is a 6-foot-axe-wielding, bugle-playing tree who answered a 1975 ad at the Oregon State Employment Office and became the first Timbers mascot: Mr. Kick It.
I want to find him.
His name is Stan Olson, and I’ve been looking for him as I look for the stories that represent Soccer City, USA.
Let’s consider the mascots a moment. Timber Jim and Timber Joey? Absolutely. They are on the list. At a match last season, my son was fortunate enough to interact with both, and as I told him their stories as I knew them, I started to remember more.
I’ve since found Chris Hershey, the Red Robin turned Portland indoor soccer’s Louie the Lion (Portland Pride) / Stryker (Portland Pythons). And though I can reasonably guess why a python costume has legs and hands, I can tell you with certainty why most mascot costumes have four fingers—and that if the people playing as mascots in a halftime indoor soccer game have access to a cooler of locker-room beer before they take the field, it’s bad news for the costume head of a certain early-’90s purple dinosaur.
There’s more to our mascots. Professional soccer sidelines in Portland were once patrolled by a soccer-watching raccoon named, well, Soccer Watcher. And before that, it was Timbear—the most controversial of mascots in Portland soccer’s history, who once replaced Timber Jim only to find he shared his name with the protagonist of a pro-timber-industry children’s book about staying away from illegal drugs. The lawyers got involved. The spotted owls got involved. Cooler heads prevailed because both logger-author Odean Hall and then-Timbers owner Art Dixon met at a restaurant in Salem and talked, shared stories, found common ground and a truce, as they realized their intentions aligned around making things better for the next generation.
This is what happens when we come together, when we talk, when we share stories. And that’s where this all started—with a goal to find stories that unite us across nearly fifty years of professional soccer in Portland. As the Timbers begin their quest for MLS Cup 2023, I begin mine for the stories that make the last 50 years of Soccer City, USA.
Just months before Mr. Kick It’s origin story, for example, the Timbers’s own started, on January 23, 1975, when, from the league offices in New York City, North American Soccer League Commissioner Phil Woosnam announced the then un-named Portland team as the fifth addition to the league that season, bringing the total number of clubs to a very legitimate twenty.
Regionally, The Daily Olympian shared the news with the headline, “Portland Awarded Soccer.” And what did Portland do when awarded an entire sport? The Timbers, as the team would eventually be named on March 8 of the year, took that award and topped the Western Division with a league-wide-best 138 points, beat the Seattle Sounders in a first-round playoff game on a Tony Betts sudden-death goal in overtime, and made it all the way to the very first Soccer Bowl, where they would fall in a 2-0 loss to fellow first-year side Tampa Bay Rowdies.
Since then, it’s been nearly a half-century of leagues and seasons: NASL, indoors and out; Western Alliances of different names; Western Soccer League; A-League; USL; and, finally, Major League Soccer, where the Timbers played their first MLS match on March 19, 2011, when the MLS franchise’s first goal came from a Kenny Cooper 80th-minute free kick. And, of course, there’s the highest water mark: the Timbers’s first MLS Cup in 2015.
I started looking for the soccer stories behind our culture by writing about the Timbers for Howler last season. As a new place in the game for me, it’s given me what I think is the most essential nexus the game has to offer: access to the locus of our story.
“Heartbroken.” That’s what Timbers’s head coach Giovanni Savarese had to say in the post-match press conference following their last 2022 home match. “Heartbroken. How can I say anything else?”
The Timbers had just lost their penultimate match of the season, 2-1 to LAFC. With the Timbers down, 1-0, in the 71st minute of the match, Portland’s Claudio Bravo hit the crossbar. In the 81st, Portland found the momentary equalizer, when Dairon Asprilla headed home. The point would be huge—were it not for a 95th minute LAFC winner. Heartbreaking for the home side, indeed.
The win gave LAFC the 2022 MLS Supporters’ Shield. The next week, the Timbers lost at Salt Lake, missing the playoffs by one point in the standings. A month later, LAFC secured the double, becoming MLS Cup 2022 champions.
A crossbar apart on that day: one team misses out, the other goes on to win it all. (Then again, in Portland we know the power of a post—or two—to decide a fate, don’t we; it goes both ways.) Heartbreaking that day, however. And, as coach Savarese said, the Timbers deserved better, but “the soccer is not that way. You get not what you work for, but what you do.”
That’s where this quest started, with the universals of the game: the moments we share, from the stands or on the field, the ones that ring true because we’re in this together, because we come together for 90 minutes at a time to share a collective emotional experience that is immediate. And when we do this over 30 times a year, over what’s nearing 50 years, and we love this team, this city, this sport—because it’s who we are—we’re connected across generations, and that connection is the most beautiful part of the beautiful game. Trying to capture that is why I’m writing these stories, our Portland Soccer stories.
Over the next 10 months, at the end of each month, I will share my journey here in Green Is The Color, as I write stories that link us over the last 50 years, together through soccer, the Timbers, and each other.
And I’ll always add an update on my quest to find Mr. Kick It. He’s out there. I’ll find him. As sure as green is the color, and soccer is the game.