So:
What turns a soccer team into a football club? When does a bunch of guys kicking a ball for some suits who sell tickets turn into … so why don’t I just let the story tell itself?
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There’s this cool thing they do during the national anthem at BMO Field these days. They fire up a typical brass-band-with-strings recording of O Canada, and the fans all hold aloft their scarves and sing. But right about “true patriot love,” they cut the music, and let the fans’ voices ring out unaccompanied.
It’s thrilling. I am not, in general, an anthem guy. But this is thrilling! Hokey, sentimental and jingoistic? Sure, yup and hi there. But it also gives me goosebumps, and a lovely little adrenalin hit just before kickoff.
But this time, this past Saturday against Seagull City SC, something utterly extraordinary happened.
As the last line of the anthem rang out, Toronto FC fans in the south end supporters’ section began to raise – the banner.
In honour of Danny Dichio, the recently retired first true hero of this small, unlikely soccer team, a gigantic white banner rose to cover virtually all of the south grandstand.
Some stats: 250 feet wide by 50 feet high. The darn thing weighed 500 pounds – before they even started painting it!
Imagined, paid for, designed and created entirely by hundreds of members of Red Patch Boys and U-Sector – and anyone else who wandered in and felt like helping. For the past three weeks or so, large groups of fans have been gathering near the stadium to create their masterpiece.
One dark rainy day, they actually hauled it under the nearby Gardiner Expressway, and used Toronto’s ugliest and least-loved public works project – as an umbrella!
I hadn’t seen it until the thing went up. Being me, my mind had already been considering all that could go right – and wrong. BMO Field in October – sitting, as it does, on the shore of a Great Lake – is a cruelly windy place. How was a monster this big going to hold together?
“It’s one piece” a Red Patcher told me.
“One?” I gasped, struggling to take the magnitude of that statement in.
“We know a guy”
Dichio, of course, became legend back in early May, 2007, when he slid on BMO’s artificial turf to side-leg home a wonky pass from Edson Buddle – the very first goal in Toronto FC history. His fire, grit – and goals! – were cherished by the support from that day forward. When age, injuries and internal club infighting forced his retirement last month, something … had to be done.
So, how to you generate 12,500 square feet of custom-painted plastic out of nowhere?
- Someone in a pub decides it should be done.
- Someone else – maybe in a different pub – “knows a guy.”
- By word of mouth and internet message boards, money is raised.
- Permission is gained to use the Exhibition grounds for the work sessions.
- A design is painstakingly pen-and-pencilled onto the plastic.
- Lots of people and lots of paint later, the giant waits folded at the base of the south stands, as the national anthem begins to play.
The design was so perfectly simple.
White with a thick, black border. To the left, a painting of Dichio, head and shoulders, with a trademark battle-cry scream across his face. The rest? Simple block letters – “THANK YOU!!” – with the logos of the Red Patch Boys and U-Sector forming the dots of the exclamation points.
It fluttered back there for two, maybe three full minutes. Dichio – clearly gobsmacked – walked from the sidelines to the south goalmouth, waving and acknowledging the single greatest spontaneous tribute in the entire history of Canadian soccer.
And it wasn’t the only one! Way up at the other end of BMO Field, the North End Elite – a smaller but hugely vocal support group, separated from the others by both distance and disposition – covered their entire section with Dichio’s face, and the numbers 23:13, the exact time Dichio scored that famous first goal.
And the capper? The banner fundraising effort actually brought in about $1500 more than was needed. The balance is being donated – by unanimous agreement – to whatever charity Danny Dichio wishes to select.
And up on the roof, watching all of this – as the guy who’s supposed to write this stuff down and flag the moment when it means something – I saw a deeper truth that thrilled me almost as much as the banners and the songs and the greatness of the event.
In the moment this gigantic tribute was raised, in the ten or fifteen seconds it took to engulf the entire south grandstand in Dichio’s bellowing face and the fans’ deep and heart-felt emotion …
Toronto FC became a real football club.
The days of novelty, MLS experiment and idle curiosity are gone. From here on in, We play for real.
Onward!