Soccer City USA?
It’s funny in hindsight. Consider the teaching clinics the original Timbers put on in Portland back in that first summer of 1975.
“You’d throw the ball to the kids,” said Peter Withe, “and they’d catch it.”
With their hands.
During a training session that first year of the Timbers existence, Withe remembers a couple of television cameramen showing up for a practice and grumbling that they didn’t understand what they were looking at or why they were there.
So Withe, nicknamed the Mad Header for his aerial theatrics, instructed teammate Jimmy Kelly to give him a cross.
“Jimmy crosses the ball in,” Withe remembered Friday, “I jump up, head the ball in. The cameraman nearly drops the camera.”
It was how he scored most of his team-leading 18 goals that season. The cameraman was entranced, even if, as Withe tells it, he wasn’t quite sure what he’d just witnessed.
“And the guy says, can you do that again?” Withe said, chuckling as he looked across to the east grandstand of Providence Park, where the letters “SCUSA” are emblazoned on the seats.
As the Timbers celebrate their 50th anniversary this summer, a five-decade history that spans a shifting American soccer landscape and a patchwork of leagues that came and went, the first team in club history gave the city a remarkable foundation.
They didn’t just play the game in Portland. They brought the game to Portland.
“We were the first base,” said Withe, now 75. “Things have progressed over the years.”
Imagine, if you can, a time in Portland before the Trail Blazers were NBA champions. Before the city really had developed its identity as a sports town. In 1975, Bill Walton had just completed his rookie year with the Blazers and missed more than half of the games.
Here came the Timbers, a collection of players from all over the world who had never played together and captured the imagination of the city, making a surprise run to Soccer Bowl ’75 – the championship game in the now-defunct North American Soccer League.
“It was a miracle we had a good team because we just came together,” said Mick Hoban, who is one of five former players in the Timbers’ Ring of Honor.
And consider all that happened because of that miracle. The Timbers went from having fewer than 7,000 fans in the stadium for their franchise opener to 33,503 for the win over St. Louis that propelled them to Soccer Bowl.
“Which remains a record for a soccer game in Portland, Oregon,” Hoban said, with more than a hint of pride.
The Timbers welcomed back the original Timbers for Friday’s 1-1 draw against San Jose. And it was hard not to feel nostalgic about seeing those bedrock players who brought unfamiliar sport to a curious city and helped transform it into a mecca.
You had to wonder if soccer would have caught on here in the way it did if that first team hadn’t found unexpected success. If they hadn’t immediately delivered incredible results.
“If you’re successful,” Withe said. “It grows.”
This week marked the first time most members of the ’75 team had been together in a decade, since the Timbers celebrated their 40th anniversary in 2015 and welcomed back all of the club’s former players.
Withe traveled 38 hours on four airplanes to get from his home in Perth, Australia to Portland. It had been 50 years since he first arrived here and enjoyed a single season of something akin to being a rock star before returning to the top division of English football with Birmingham City.
It could easily have been a forgotten chapter in Withe’s 21-year playing career, which included stints with top-flight clubs including Newcastle United and Aston Villa. But helping birth a movement sticks with a person.
And when the bus carrying the 11 members of the team who made the trip this week pulled up to Providence Park on Friday, memories flooded over them.
“I said to the lads, ‘Do you remember this?’” Withe said. “When we’d pull up for training and the stadium was just ringed with people waiting to buy tickets?’”
It’s easy to imagine now, given the recent years where the Timbers reliably sold out Providence Park and the club has served, and serves, as a symbol of the city on par with the Blazers and the bridges over the Willamette.
But then?
It was impossible to imagine.
“Then,” Withe said, “all of a sudden we create Soccer City USA.”
Indeed they did.
_\--_ [_Bill Oram_](mailto:boram@oregonian.com) _is the sports columnist at The Oregonian/OregonLive._