Many wondered if soccer would make it in Atlanta when the city was awarded a MLS franchise in 2014.
Now the question is better asked: can MLS make it without cities like Atlanta?
ATLANTA-
Move over Tom Glavine and Dave Justice.
You’ve finally got company.
Atlanta United FC won the city of Atlanta’s second major sports championship Saturday night, capturing the club’s first MLS Cup with a dominant 2-0 victory over Portland Timbers.*
Whether you view Saturday night’s MLS Cup championship by Atlanta United FC as a coronation of America’s newest soccer city or the culmination of a momentous two-year fairy tale, this title and this team is definitively Atlanta’s.
Atlanta, the sprawling, soulful city rich in song and sadness, a place whose story is defined by how it rises from the depths of despair, again and again.
The late, great Georgian Lewis Grizzard once wrote:
“Whenever I get down about the state of things in Georgia, I simply make the point that if there weren’t a God and he or she didn’t love us, there wouldn’t be such a thing as a sweet, beloved Vidalia onion.
Think about it: Vidalia onions, which are sweet and mild, grow only in a small part of southeast Georgia.
Some have tried to duplicate the Vidalia in other parts of the country, but to no avail.
God, I am convinced, was traveling through what was to become southeast Georgia during the six days of creation and said, “Let there be a sweet, mild onion, and let it grow here and here only.”
Perhaps Grizzard fixated on the sweet Vidalia onion because, as he also wrote, “Georgian sports fans are a sad, somber lot,” doomed to fail in the most spectacular, inventive ways. When Sports Illustrated dubbed Atlanta “Losersville” in the early 90s, Grizzard chortled: “That seems too kind.” He wasn’t wrong.
The Braves, who outside of Hank Aaron and Dale Murphy were lethargic, unlovable losers since they moved from Milwaukee captured the city’s imagination- and this young Atlanta boy’s heart with it- in 1991, going worst to first only to have the World Series ripped from their hearts in Games 6 and 7 by the late great Kirby Puckett and the mean-spirited cheater (at least to this small boy) Kent Hrbek.
We thought there would be other chances, and there were, and the city will always have 1995, but heartbreak was ever-present.
Take Mark Wohlers bizarre decision in 1996 to throw the Yankees Jim Leyritz a slider instead of strike him out with a fastball. The Braves should have won a second World Series that year. Instead, they would lose to the burgeoning Yankees juggernaut and come no closer to a second World Series title after that pitch.
Georgia Tech managed a national championship in 1990, a big deal in the city that houses the College Football Hall of Fame; but down the road, in Athens, where I’m told it just means more, there hasn’t been a champion since a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter was President. A year ago, the ‘Dawgs, as they are calmly called on shows from Chuck Oliver’s to Buck Belue’s to Finebaum, were within three plays from changing that. They lost, because of course they did.
In the NBA, the Hawks had Dominique, the Human Highlight Factory, but for the most part, they’ve manufactured mediocrity and sadness.
Don’t even get started with the NHL, where two teams have come, tried, and gone, leaving without much of a whimper.
Cleveland—yes, even CLEVELAND- had experienced sporting nirvana more recently than Atlanta, until Saturday night.
But no Atlanta moment compares in tragic scale to what happened to Atlanta in the winter of 2017, when the Falcons, losers forever, finally appeared ready to shed the label and win the Super Bowl, leading the Patriots 28-3 in the second half.
They wouldn’t win, of course, losing 34-28 in overtime in the greatest, saddest Super Bowl ever played. It was, in short, an unmitigated catastrophe, an object lesson in despondent and abject sadness.
But a city burned and razed to the ground for its sins wouldn’t be what it was without rising from the ashes.
Once defined as the Confederacy’s last bastion, a city that spent a century battling post-war racialized resentment became ground zero of the Civil Rights Movement, the city too busy to hate, the capital of the south, the home of the best hip-hop, an imperfect place to be sure but one constantly reimagining and reinventing itself.
Targeting young, brilliant talent like Miguel Almiron and paring it with steely veterans like Michael Parkhurst proved a quick, exciting winning formula for Atlanta.
And so it was in the winter of Atlanta’s latest sporting discontent that Atlanta United FC emerged from the ashes to save the city’s sporting soul.
Atlanta, the home of the College Football Hall of Fame and the capital of a state defined by football, now a shining beacon of futbol of the other, less parochial variety.
The building of this champion, in two short years, no less, defied majority expectation.
Written off as the latest in a series of non-football or baseball failures in a sports city deemed “terrible,” “apathetic” and “listless” in multiple columns upon MLS’s announcement of expansion, little was expected of Atlanta United FC.
Yes, the monied, actively involved and Atlanta-based ownership of Arthur Blank gave the franchise a jolt of credibility, but how would they compete with football on autumn Saturdays and Sundays—and would people care enough in the other seasons, when the weather was sticky and hot and the entertainment options many?
Blank made the Falcons competitive, an astonishing accomplishment. He wouldn’t have put his name on this project if he didn’t think it would be successful. But there were still doubts. Yes, Atlanta was a suburban soccer hotbed, but no one had much cared when the city had a women’s professional franchise, and even fewer people cared about the fledgling NASL club, the Atlanta Silverbacks, who played on the edges of the perimeter at the time MLS awarded Atlanta a franchise.
When the club announced it would play in Blank’s new football (the other one) palace beginning in late 2017, even more cynics scoffed. “Atlanta can’t sell out a Braves playoffs game,” one fellow soccer journalist texted me. “How will they sell soccer seats? This could be a Hindenburg.”
Sitting in the press box tonight, maybe he got his answer, though the only explosion came from 70,000 plus people screaming and singing and chanting and shaking the building to the rafters on both of Atlanta’s goals, the first by MLS MVP Josef Martinez, the second by the plucky wingback, Franco Escobar.
When Atlanta was awarded a franchise, the common refrain was: Will soccer work in Atlanta? Sunday morning, as we begin to take inventory of the year that was in MLS, the better question is: Can MLS survive without flagship cities like Atlanta (and Portland, who were valiant runners-up?)
Josef Martinez, looking to add an #MLSCup MVP to his regular season honors (via @UnivisionSports)pic.twitter.com/vptnbWBI5I
— SI Soccer (@si_soccer) December 9, 2018
Why did this team with the clunky franchise name and utilitarian crest capture the imagination of a city of transplants, where even those who moved here and stayed never shed the strident loyalties and affections to the places they once called home?
Perhaps it was the uniqueness of it, the idea that lodging affection in the new soccer team was a way to put down sporting roots even when allegiances in other sports remained elsewhere.
Perhaps the naysayers just misread it all along. They ignored the decades of suburban soccer obsession and the expansive and diverse, soccer-crazed Spanish-speaking communities and the college-educated, millennial demographic who spent college weekends with the Premier League and instead, they relied on old tropes and anachronisms to guide their analysis.
Perhaps this was simply about front office excellence: the genius of targeting and handsomely compensating brilliant young South American players instead of aging old masters, a mostly new tact for MLS clubs that brought excitement and swagger. Mixing that youthful, swashbuckling talent with the steely poise and presence of Michael Parkhurst, Brad Guzan and Jeff Larentowicz was another master stroke. The audacity of combining that talent with one of the world’s most formidable tacticians, Tata Martino, whose possession-heavy, aggressive style of soccer is engaging and easy on the eyes and not at all the plodding, flag-drill stereotype of American soccer past.
Perhaps it was all of these, and when Atlanta sold out Bobby Dodd Stadium only four weeks after that fateful, miserable Super Bowl, and did it again and again in the weeks that followed, the whole experiment became a snowball rolling downhill.
From the moment Yung Joc took to the railroad spike, the soccer community knew what ATLiens had figured out: Atlanta was going to be different.
The whole city was in on the action, from Andre 3000 and Yung Joc to Flocka Flame’s daughter to the fields littered with wealthy kids in East Cobb to the ten soccer stations built by MARTA transit. From the moment Yung Joc took to the railroad spike, the soccer community knew what those of us from Atlanta had already figured out: this club was going to be different. This club was Atlanta’s.
I saw it when I went home for Christmas last winter, after Atlanta’s first season ended in classic Atlanta fashion, with a devastating home defeat to Columbus. Even in a southern suburban enclave of Atlanta, the only merchandise sold out was Atlanta United gear. The Falcons, a year removed from the Super Bowl, had found the discount rack.
At dinner MLS Cup week in the chic Virginia Highlands neighborhood, six consecutive local businesses proudly flew Atlanta United flags and a waiter, presumably with a restaurant owner embracing the occasion, wore a Josef shirt.
Driving through Druid Hills, a lovely community by Emory University, I mostly wanted to see pretty houses on hills with holiday lights. There was plenty of that, too, but the number of lawn Santas wearing Atlanta United scarves and porches flying Atlanta United flags was inescapable.
In the Little Five Points and at the crunchy, free-spirited East Atlanta bars, the act of eavesdropping and overhearing an MLS Playoffs conversation was as simple as some folks find sliding into my Twitter DMs.
Soccer cultures aren’t built at stadiums and in savvy front offices, though without question, that helps.
Soccer cultures are built in communities, on (and beneath) subways and at dinner tables and by water coolers and yes, in bar chatter.
Soccer in Atlanta is for everybody.
So was this Saturday, this rise from the ashes, this history-defying championship.
*The Atlanta Chiefs won the 1968 NASL title, and are an important part of soccer history in Atlanta, just as the original NASL played, for better and for worse, a vital role in shaping what American soccer looks like today. Nevertheless, it is generally claimed that the Braves won the City of Atlanta’s first “major” sports championship in 1995.
Neil W. Blackmon co-founded The Yanks Are Coming. Follow him on Twitter @nwblackmon.