Greetings, friends. (LXXVI)

Greetings, friends. Today I got to see the Portland Thorns FC play their second home game of the season, against Racing Louisville FC. After giving up two goals in the first six minutes, they came back to tie it in extra time, 2-2. Not bad after having lost their previous two games, but not great for a club that sat at the top of the NWSL for much of last season, and who were league champions the year before that.

You could be forgiven for not knowing who the Thorns are; I had never heard of them before I moved to Portland, either.

You probably already knew this, but I’m vaguely embarrassed to admit that my favorite spectator sport is professional American football. Sadly for me, Portland isn’t much of a football town. (Before you bring up U of O, I will point out that Eugene is almost two hours from here.) Most NFL fans around here follow Seattle, but I lived in San Francisco too long to root for the Seahawks.

So when I moved up here, I eventually start craving a local sports team to adopt. This city does have a basketball team, one that was apparently quite good up until recently, but basketball has never made any sense to me and I have no interest in learning.

That leaves football football, i.e. soccer. Portland actually has two professional soccer clubs. I probably could’ve gotten into watching the Portland Timbers, but they have been a solidly middle-of-the-pack team for many seasons, and, anyway, Besha had no interest in becoming a men’s soccer fan.

That left the Thorns, Portland’s local National Women’s Soccer League franchise. Now this was something Besha, as an anarcho-feminist and never much of a sports fan, was at least intrigued by, in no small part, because the fan base is legendary for attracting anarchists and queer people and other folks who might not, at first blush, be well-known as avid supporters of professional spectator sports.

I also knew nothing about the NWSL until I got here. Such is the sad, short shrift that women athletes get in our country (our world?) that, last August, I came across a news article headlined something like “Spain Wins World Cup”, thought to myself, “Huh, I didn’t know they were playing the World Cup”, and then started racking my brains to recall what year it was, before I realized they were talking about the women’s tournament. Bravo to whatever newspaper editor deemed it unworthy of their august publication to deign to make a distinction.

Most clubs in the NWSL are named in the modern style, with bland, abstract singular nouns that are at least meant to sound inspiring. Dash, Sprit, Courage, Pride, Current, Wave. But we’ll have none of that lifestyle magazine, Instagram-influencer “inspiration” here, thank you very much: No, Portland is known affectionately as “the City of Roses” and our soccer team are the Thorns.

The simultaneously best and worst thing about women’s professional soccer is that the talent on the field is every bit as good as your top echelons in the men’s leagues. As near as I can tell, the only difference is that the tickets are cheaper. And the Portland Thorns have got some of the best talent in the NWSL, with players on the national teams of multiple countries. They’re a team worth rooting for.

And then there’s the fan base. Every time a Thorn does a presser, and talks about playing in Portland, or about having won or lost a home game, they inevitably reference the fans. The reverence is mutual.

The Thorns fan base is intense. We went to see our first game at Providence Park back in the fall. Up in the supporters’ stands, the Rose City Riveters hoisted great big queer and trans pride and anarchist flags, clapping and chanting, their drums reverberating across the stadium. The supporters’ club kicked off the game singing Bella Ciao, an old Italian anti-fascist partisan anthem. Besha and I both got the song stuck in our heads and sang it the entire way home. We were hooked.

Spectator sports are a funny thing. For someone who spent most of my youth turning my nose up at athletics (mostly because I was bad at them) and actively looking down on spectator sports as conformist and stupid, I get an awful lot of satisfaction out of following a team, watching the games with all of their ups and downs, getting to recognize the individual players and their abilities and even their play styles.

There’s Coffey, the veteran midfielder, the linchpin of the squad. Here’s Moultrie, charging up the middle with the ball, looking hardly old enough to be on the pitch. Here comes Weaver, crashing down at top speed from the left wing. Here’s Sugita, the acrobat. And, of course, there’s Smith and her dazzling virtuosity at center. She shoots, she scores, goooooooal! There’s a poetry to it, when they really get going.

I feel I should add that Sophia Smith, who was the league MVP in 2022, and played forward on the USWNT last year, just landed an NWSL record-setting, multi-million dollar contract extension with the Thorns. Apparently, this was not a no-brainer, because women’s soccer is bigger in Europe, and there’s some pull for our best players to go play over there. One of Smith’s stated reasons for staying in Portland? The fans.

There is something peculiar about the identification of a fan or a fan base with a sports team. I startle when I hear NFL fans refer to their favorite team in the first person plural, but I also kind of get it. Do we have some kind of primal instinct for tribal self-identification that sports fandom scratches? And clearly human beings derive some obvious emotional satisfaction from identifying themselves with greatness, even if that identification is entirely parasocial.

I do wish the Thorns would get it together, play to their potential, and actually win a game this season. They are far more talented than their performance so far would suggest. When they do play like a team, the result can be electric. Some things are the same in every sport, I guess.

What the hell, it’s fun, and I don’t care. Soccer is a second-class professional sport in American, and all women’s sports are de facto second-class by reason of hegemony. Being a Thorns fan brings with it a kind of indie thrill. I’m proud to be a women’s sports fan. I’m embarrassed for our society that a statement like that has any meaning to speak of.

It is also fun being a part of the most inclusive fan base I have seen anywhere in worldwide professional sports, full stop. I feel okay identifying with this tribe.

If you’re reading this, I hope you went to bed earlier than I will tonight. Ceterum censeo imperdiet vigilum cessandam. Go Thorns!