Those who saved the Crew cherish MLS Cup
Until Saturday night, the last Ohio team to win a major-league championship on home soil was the Cleveland Browns, when they beat the Baltimore Colts 27-0 to win the NFL title at Municipal Stadium on Dec. 27, 1964. That year, the Beatles arrived in America, Muhammad Ali beat Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title and Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Don Shula was the Colts’ coach and Johnny Unitas was the Colts’ quarterback. If you’re of a certain age, then you know Shula and Unitas, and you know Jim Brown and Paul Warfield. And the names of Blanton Collier, Frank Ryan and Gary Collins probably ring a bell.
In the 56 years since, the Cincinnati Reds clinched three World Series on the road, the 2008 Columbus Crew won an MLS Cup on a neutral field in 2008 and the Cleveland Cavaliers clinched an NBA championship (“the Warriors blew a 3-1 lead”) in Oakland in 2016.
Over this same span, 56 years, the Oakland Athletics beat the Reds in Cincinnati in seven games in the 1972 World Series, the Warriors clinched the NBA championships in Cleveland in 2015 and 2018, the Portland Timbers beat the Crew in the MLS Cup final in Columbus in 2015 and the Chicago Cubs beat the Indians in Game 7 of the World Series in Cleveland in 2016.
In sum, since 1964,
Ohio’s major-league teams were 0-5 when visitors had a chance to clinch a majorleague championship on Ohio soil. That is, until Saturday night, when the Crew smoked the Seattle Sounders, who hail from the city that invented soccer, by a score of 3-0. A COVID-19reduced crowd of a couple thousand paid witness at Mapfre Stadium, on the shoulder of I-71, on the northern perimeter of the Ohio Fairgrounds.
And so did the Crew, a huge underdog, win the 2020 MLS Cup championship. It wasn’t Miracle on Ice. But is was something that circled that rink.
There are those who will quibble that this is not a “major-league” championship. I would submit that MLS in 2020 is as much “major-league” as the NFL was in 1964. I would also make the suggestion that, 56 years from now, in 2076, the NFL will be happy to be on the level with MLS. The smart money on the long bet is with soccer.
The biggest sporting event in the world Saturday was probably the Manchester derby, Man City vs. Man United in the English Premier League. Or, it might have been Crew vs. Sounders in the MLS Cup championship game. By comparison, the Army-Navy game was just a blip on the world’s radar. Ohio State-Michigan, had it been played, would’ve looked like the Millrose Games, in the grand scheme of international sports.
The Crew’s stunning romp over Seattle rippled across 24 time zones, give or take. It certainly tremored in Ohio’s history. It was Massive.
That word “Massive,” with a capital “M,” was applied to the 2008 championship Crew team and it had an us-vs.-world connotation. That team was underfunded (to put it mildly) by an absentee ownership group (Lamar Hunt’s heirs) who did not care much for Columbus. They sold the team to Anthony Precourt, who tried to move the team to Austin -- with the full backing of the league – three years ago.
The Save the Crew people thwarted the effort and preserved a public trust.
Put another way: In three short years, this team was dragged to the curb, left for dead, reborn under new ownership, rebuilt and – amid a pandemic that savaged their roster, and emptied their stadium – beat Seattle, a team with designs on a dynasty, on a hallowed and historically important patch of grass right here in Columbus.
It won a championship on home soil in Ohio, a feat that has eluded other major-league franchises for more than a half century.
Of all the great sports stories that have emerged during this hellish year, the Crew’s championship must stand alone as the very best. No question, it squared with, or even surpassed, “Massive.”
For the championship game, the Crew was left, due to COVID-19, without the services of midfielder Darlington Nagbe and winger Pedro Santos. The one is a choreographer of everything the team does and the other is a critical piece of the offense. Heading
into the Saturday night, Crew fans also duly noted the referee assignments: Central referee Jair Marrufo, who has a shameful history in Crew/Mapfre Stadium, and assistant referee Corey Parker, who with Marrufo blew a critical call in the 2015 Cup final.
The fans figured that MLS commissioner Don Garber was once again trying to screw Columbus. He has tried it before, after all.
I spent the night in a parking lot at the corner of 4th Street and Detroit Avenue, watching the MLS Cup final as it was projected on a screen on the side of a house where Sikranth Meka and Sarah Pariser reside. Two dozen grizzled Crew fans, many of whom were central to the Save the Crew movement, gathered there – all of them masked and carefully spaced, as they have been for the duration of the pandemic.
“What idiot would write this story?” asked Meka. “This team was supposed to be dead. Eighteen to 24 months after the team is saved, they bring Seattle in, and they kick their (rears)? I mean, seriously.”
These people are the best of Columbus.
Meka had better job offers in more agreeable climes, but he stayed in Columbus because he couldn’t bear leaving his Crew-fan brothers and sisters. Saturday night, he was like his two dozen guests who were giving him grief about maintaining his internet signal and manning his fire pits. He was carried away, rapt. This Crew team, a victim of attempted murder not three years ago, was wiping the field with a team from Seattle, where the game was invented.
“What is impossible in Columbus?” asked Keith Naas, another Save the Crew veteran. “Buster Douglas beats Mike Tyson. Third-string-quarterback Cardale Jones beats Alabama. The Crew beats Seattle for the MLS Cup. What is impossible in Columbus?”
Is anything?
The new owners, the Haslam and Edwards families, didn’t see this Cup coming. Not so soon.
The new president/general manager, Tim Bezbatchenko, has been looking ahead to next year. The new coach, Caleb Porter, will claim he saw Saturday night in a dream last week. As for the players, good on all of them.