And upon inspection, it was not.
Molly drove down the long ramp behind what Danny reckoned was the south goal of the stadium. When she reached the ground level, she turned right, passed the corner flag, and, to Danny’s shock and mystification, proceeded onto the playing surface before bringing the car to a stop sudden enough to leave a massive divot in any patch of grass. And yet none of the handful of players knocking balls around, nor any of the photographers watching them, flinched. Danny gasped. Molly said, “Are you OK?”
He said, “Well, erm, I, uh—everyone else is, so I guess I am.”
Danny stepped out of the car and onto the alien surface of Portland, Oregon’s Multnomah Stadium. He’d heard about these plastic pitches, but... He hopped up and down upon it two or three times and felt its strange little spring. It was like a rubber mat stretched taut on all four sides. He ogled a few players in their Revolution T-shirts launching star-spangled soccer balls at each other from thirty or forty yards and struggling with mighty bounces and slick spins on the slightly moistened turf. The balls pinged and ponged in entirely un-football-ish fashion, forcing the players to control them with un-football-ish maneuvers: a cushion with the back of a thigh, or a squeeze between the knee and the ground; a rounder man trapped a ball with his ass, then turned and had it at his feet.
Danny could hardly imagine a match taking place on the slippery substance at his feet. He was about to ask Molly if this synthetic trampoline had really truly hosted a football match when a stray red, white, and blue regulation AASSA soccer ball descended toward Molly’s head.
Danny stepped in front of her, tensed his upper body, and headed the ball up into the concrete grandstand. It felt good—Danny hadn’t touched a ball since heading that towering Dire Vale punt at the Auld Moors. His momentum carried him into his unsuspecting driver, and she held him up—just barely—with her version of a bear hug. As the two of them stabilized, she said, “Wow—thanks, man. That would’ve hurt like I don’t know what.”
He had no chance of responding before being set upon by a graying local photographer. The bearded, round man had raced over from the top of the penalty box, where he’d been casually snapping shots of players knocking the ball back and forth. He arrived a few steps in front of Danny, just ahead of an eager pair of reporters, and gasped an exhausted, “Are you OK?”
Danny said, “Excuse me?”
“Can you do that again?” he said. “Head-butt the ball like that? I mean, if it’s safe to do that two or three times in a row—can you? For a picture?”
Danny looked at Molly, who gave him a shrug and a smile and nodded back to the photographer. Danny said, “I can do that, well, over and over again, really.”
“I gotta get a shot of this,” the photographer said, shaking his head in disbelief.
Danny made a face, leaned over to Molly, and murmured that he thought this was the second season of the Revolution. “How haven’t these wankers seen a man head a ball yet?”
Molly stood on her tiptoes and whispered, “They all tried their very best to ignore us last summer. We’re working a little harder at helping the locals understand the game this year.”
He nodded. “All right then,” he said to the photographer and the reporters, “throw something at my head. Anything. Give me your worst, lads.”
What followed had the look of a dodgeball game, as the reporters and the photographer hurled starred balls at Danny and he steered them to safety with his giant forehead. They kept asking Danny if he was sure he was all right, and Danny kept saying, “Time of my life, gents.” The reporters were in hysterics, and the photographer dropped his camera once.
Finally a voice interjected: “Leave my big man alone, you nuggets!”
A squat, bowlegged sixtyish man with wild, wiry gray hair, a peculiar wispy beard, and a black tracksuit was hurrying toward them.
“Danny Hooper!” he shouted toward Danny with an outstretched arm. “I’m Graham Broome. Put it there if it weighs a ton, my boy!” Danny reached toward the possible Communist’s hand, thinking he had probably never shaken a Communist’s hand before, and shook it. Broome looked at the photographer and reporters and said, “We had a solid club here last year, but this”—he used two arms to gesture to Danny’s entire body, as if he were a model showing off a new Cadillac at a car expo—“is what we were missing. Men, this is Danny Hooper, a real number five, a big, strong center back in the truest and grandest tradition of English football. You may score on the Rose City Revolution in 1976, but you’ll have to get by this great mountain of a man in order to do it.”
He still held Danny’s right hand in his and had eased in closer. He was now pressed up against Danny, facing the photographer and the two or three others who had scrambled over to meet and photograph Portland’s newest professional athlete. Danny smiled his big bearded smile until Broome let go of his hand and pronounced, as if to the entire stadium, “Right! That’s it. That’s enough with the giant today. He’s just got off the plane, he hardly knows where he is, and you’ll get plenty of him this season. Off you go then,” and he waved the motley Rose City media contingent away as if they were annoying schoolboys. “I’ve got to talk to the lads.”
Graham Broome, now rid of Portland’s slim soccer-focused press corps, gathered the team in the corner of the rubber pitch.
Danny had not been looking forward to this moment, but he knew it as a rite that had to play itself out. He’d been on the other side of it many times in his years at East Southwich Albion, as Aldershot Taylor and the chairman tinkered with the creaky machinery of the old club. As the new man stared at the ground, the manager/coach would say something to confirm the necessity of new blood by belittling the men whose toil had gotten the team into whatever straits they found themselves. “Boys, as you know, this club would like to be more competitive than it is at the moment. We need to put on a much better show for these people who inexplicably part with their money to see us week in and week out. And that is why I’d like you to make Colin/Ancil/Abdul/Jens/Mick feel at home today.” At which moment Colin/Ancil/Abdul/Jens/Mick would offer a bland and abashed wave to his teammates’ you’re not home yet nods, and look back down at the ground. Then the manager/coach would utter a half-truth along the lines of “Anything that makes the team better makes us all better,” or something like that.
So it played out this day in the cool late-spring Oregon drizzle. As Danny stood next to Graham Broome on Multnomah Stadium’s prickly green rug, Broomsie said the usual things, ending with “he’s a damn fine footballer and we’re over the moon to have him.”
At this, Danny offered his obligatory look up from the ground and saw, in full for the first time, the Rose City Revolution. Broomsie moved his arm around the semicircle. “This is Petie, Pete, John, Peter, and John. Pete’s useless but don’t tell him that, and Peter will nick the odd goal against bad teams. They all came with me from Cloppingshire. So did Trevor, Jimmy, Jimmy, and that Peter over there. That second Jimmy didn’t play in England, but he’s got an English accent and he’s handy for banter so we brought him across for shits and giggles. Americans don’t know the bloody difference, do they? By the way, Peter, how’s the hammy? Good? Good. That’s Peter Surley, Danny. Peter Surley, who has a dodgy hammy and can’t push himself away from a table.” All the players appeared to be in their early twenties, except for Surley, who looked a good forty-five and at least that many pounds over his playing weight. He was balding and unshaven, wore loose, old socks floppy about his ankles and his shirt untucked, and he could hardly have looked less like a professional footballer. He could hardly have looked less like a Sunday pub team footballer, for that matter.
“Yes, Danny, this is the Peter Surley, in the flesh, the very same Peter Surley who scored a hat trick for Nottingham Athletic in their famous ’63 League Vase win over Southampton Orient. To this day, couldn’t buy