The Clumsy Interloper

Saturday, September 15th, 2007 – I departed my ground floor studio apartment on Dakin and Freemont minutes after the sun rose.  A red hoodie, baggie dark blue jeans and a kelly green iPod nano set to shuffle in my pocket. On Sheffield Avenue the metallic groan of a rapidly approaching elevated train grew behind me. In a flash, the buckling silver behemoth appeared between the trees above, backlit by the amber fluorescent lights of the Irving Park station, and banked sharply behind a line of redbrick row houses and out of sight. The streets around Wrigley Field were quiet at 7am. The Cubs were on a road trip in St. Louis that day, a double header with Kerry Wood and Sean Marshall pitching. They held a tenuous lead in the NL Central over the Brewers (+1) with two weeks to play and the Northside was hanging on every pitch. Although it’s two blocks out of my way, I decided to walk down Sheffield and make a loop around “The Friendly Confines”.

I spied a souvenir shop and hanging in the windows are a hero’s regalia: Lee (home white), Ramirez (alternate gray) and Soriano (away blue). They glint in the sun as beacons of hope. Turning west on Addison, I stopped to gaze upon the famous green and white Wrigley marque while the aroma of stale Budweiser, peanut shells and bus exhaust dance across the sidewalk. In three short weeks my brother TK will fly out from the Bay Area and flop on my couch. We will watch Game 3 of the NLDS against the Diamondbacks with lower concourse SRO tickets printed at home and folded into our wallets. We save the ink for Game 4, they will be refunded, the Cubs will have been promptly swept out of the playoffs. “It’s Gunna Happen” signs jammed lengthwise into dumpsters. Turn the page.

Moving toward Ashland now and the anticipation starts to grow. I feel like a schoolboy with an exotic new crush and each early morning rendezvous adds another layer of intrigue. We’ve been seeing each other since the spring but aren’t monogamous yet. I find things frequently get lost in translation between us. I want this spark to grow but I feel like a tourist in my affection’s world.

Kurt Dirty is standing outside Ginger’s pub on Ashland and Grace shortly before 7:45am. He is small but dense, like a neutron star. He wears a big mop of black hair pulled back into a manbun and his eyes bulge with recognition when he clocks me crossing the street toward him. He flings his customary pre-match dart, a Camel light, curbside and we hug. After some pleasantries we duck into our booth and get down to brass tacks – how do we break down Portsmouth’s back four? When will Gerrad and Carragher get back from injury? Does this new lad, Fernando Torres, have the look of a #9 the Kop can rally behind?

Eighteen years ago, I fell in love with Liverpool Football Club. At the time I was a soccer neophyte who never played the sport seriously – I missed the orange slices and juice box train. However, I was soccer curious because, like many searching American post-college layabouts, morning drinking and eating bangers & mash with a bunch of British ex-pats seemed like a quirky thing to do.

There was a confluence of events that led me to this point. I played an aggressive amount of FIFA on PlayStation2 in my 4^th year college apartment. I studied the 2006 World Cup and was absolutely transfixed when Zinedine Zidane’s meaty French forehead met Marco Materazzi’s chest in the Finals resulting in a straight red. Soccer may have charmed me, but it took a singular person to deliver me to Merseyside. Kurt G. Bauer. We ran in the same circles in high school, but it wasn’t until after college that we became close. He became a frequent fixture in my post college apartment on Diversey and Lincoln, an honorary 5^th roommate, and he’d turn up most Sundays for Bears games. One fateful Sunday afternoon after another humbling Bears defeat, he stayed behind and we played untold hours of FIFA while his encyclopedic knowledge of the beautiful game filled the room. When I told him I was interested but needed a team to follow, he stated with a wry smile, “Let me make the case for Liverpool. That’s my team.”

Today my Liverpool fandom is old enough to vote and buy Camel Lights. My affections for LFC have even surpassed that of the Chicago Cubs, my first love and childhood bedspread. The Cubs, Bears and Bulls arrived into my life as preloaded geographically based installments into my personality. They remain intact – box scores are read, shirts are worn, highlights are consumed – however, inconceivably, watching a team five time zones away from a city I’ve never been to is required viewing each week. I cried when I watched the 30-for-30 on the Hillsborough disaster. When my daughters were newborns, I sang them to sleep with “The Fields of Anfield Road”, “Poor Scouser Tommy” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. Through the course of the last 18 years, Liverpool and the greater game of soccer have become a source code for me.

A handful of years ago I worked with a British woman named Helen, a feisty and irreverent Newcastle supporter. The Monday after a Liverpool triumph against the Magpies I wore my Steven Gerrard kit into work to take the piss out of her. When she saw me, she rolled her eyes and said mockingly in a thick British accent, “What the fuck Alan?! You aren’t even a proper Scouser!”

She was right, I held no claim to Liverpool or it’s inhabitants. In that moment I realized why it meant so much to me. This club reached over the Atlantic and found me. Or I found it. Either way, this journey was an organic, spiritual process that felt preordained.

Last weekend Liverpool secured it’s twentieth Premier League title, the first in front of fans since I started following them. The nineteenth was during the summer of 2020 and it was devoid of that passion, that collective effervesce (to borrow a phrase) that was the hallmark of this team. I watched the raucous scenes from my phone in a field in Earlysville, Va at my daughter’s Family Fitness Fair. In between sprints and the mile runs, the goals piled up turning the game into a coronation. When the final whistle blew I found myself alone, in the tall grass beside the cross county track, with a dumb smile and misty eyes.

In that moment I was delivered back in time to so many Chicago mornings, walking past my baseball mecca, toward a pub and my destiny.