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End of an ERA
Salt Lake City, UT - The clean air. The mountains. The Great Salt Lake. The Delta Center. The pro-US crowd. The US victory. All of these are memories I have of our trip to Utah. Unfortunately I will remember none of these first and foremost when I look back years from now. I will always be thinking of how we lost the NJB Banner. Well, I shouldn't say "we," how Real Salt Lake lost our banner. Our trip didn't start out under the ideal conditions either. 'Hijacking alarm sends fighters after JFK-bound airliner.' That is never a breaking news headline you want to see hours before you flight leaves from the same airport. Luckily though, it was just a false alarm and our flight was on schedule and had no problems getting us there. For the first time since France 98, I was fying with friends from NJ to see a US game. We actually had a pretty good crew heading out there. Rob, Dimitri, Nik and myself all were heading out to Salt Lake City. We even had two Tico friends travelling with us from the ESC. This was my first time flying JetBlue and I was not impressed. JetBlue's thing is personalized DirecTV for each passenger. That's great, too bad they don't follow up on their claims. Rob got stuck with a black & white screen and we both were the only two jackasses on the plane who couldn't get 3/4ths of the channels. If you are going to advertise something, make sure it works for every passenger.
After that we headed downtown to check out some of the scenes. We hit up the Olympic Plaza Gateway mall and checked out the historic 1908 Union Square Depot Station. From there we headed to the Delta Center, home of the Utah Jazz. As luck would have it, the Jazz were having an Open House of sorts, inviting fans to come and purchase or upgrade their season ticket From there, we headed to the Brigham Young Statue and the Temple Square where he originally founded Salt Lake City. The Mormon temple was pretty impressive and apparently this is the place to have your wedding if you live in Utah. There seemed to be more brides and grooms then tourists. While leaving the Square, we had an unwitting Mormon Sister try to convert us which led to a funny scene when Nik put his arm around her for a picture and she lept back saying "no touching."
We got into the stadium a few minutes before kickoff, put up our flags and banners and headed toward the US Supporters section. This game marked the debut of the 50 states flag, consisting of all 50 state flags sewn together into one huge one. It looked damn good and made me wish I would have followed up on my idea to do the same thing back after the 2002 World Cup. The crowd was very pro-American. There didn't seem to be too many Costa Ricans there at all. Just like in Birmingham, the US scored early and took control. Landon Donovan cleaned up an errand pass and slammed it nicely into the upper left corner. The US started the 2nd half sleeping and let Costa Rica try to come back into the match. Time and Time again though they were thwarted by Kasey Keller, easily the man of the match in the NJB's opinion. Shortly after the Keller heroics, the US scored another thanks to Landon Donovan, who again was in the right place, right time to poke in a rebound off a saved Brian McBride header. The US cruised from there adding one more late in the game from Brian McBride to make it a 3-0 win. Onto Panama where a win down there would all but guarantee a trip to Deutschland.
After the game ended, our plan was to stick around and catch some of the Real Salt Lake game. Once the majority of fans leaving had left, we grabbed the Big Ass Flag and brought it down to the concourse where we folded it up. When we returned to the stands, I headed over to get our NJB banner, NJ state flag, 13 star US flag & 50 star US flag. Nothing was still hanging up... only the 13 star flag was still there on the floor. I looked over the railing down to the field level and checked with someone at field level to see if anything had fallen down. I asked the Guest Services employee standing there. Finally I saw a staffer in a Real Salt Lake shirt taking down another banner that was covering a corporate sign. I asked him where he put all the banners that he had taken down? To my
I eventually made my way down to the field level and was speaking with the RSL Director of Operations and Manager of Corporate Partnerships. He explained to me how he told someone in the section from Dallas that the banners needed to come down at end of game to make way for the RSL corporate signs. I pointed out that the person he told is not in charge of Sam's Army nor in charge of the supporter's section. No one said anything to us when we put our banner/flags in that spot. I did get an apology, a promise that they would look around for our banner and an offer of getting some Clint Mathis stuff to make up for the mistake - but that's still not going to get us our banner back. Bottom line is that if there were still banners blocking where their corporate signs needed to go, they should have collected all of them and brought them to some sort of a lost and found for safekeeping. If the banner is important enough to someone, they will search and look for it, LIKE ME. Just leaving the banner/flags on the ground by an exit with over 1,000 people leaving a section is just a After that fiasco, we grabbed a bite to eat with Thom, Colin, Limey, Rishi & his friend Hunter at some Chinese restaurant in the downtown section. And who do we run into at this restaurant...Steve Cherundulo and a few soccer big wigs - Don Garber, Dr. Bob Contiguglia & the one and only Nelson Rodriguez. Salt Lake City just ain't that big. Feeling pretty tired afterwards, Rob, D and Nik all headed for bed, but I went out one last time to hang out with Rishi and Thom. It was a crazy night. Rishi almost got into a fight asking for directions and we almost got run over by a few drunken joyriders. Walking back to our car after the bars let out and who do we just happen to see standing on the street: Eddie Johnson and Cory Gibbs heading back towards their hotel. DejaVu anyone? Jokingly, I asked them if we were all heading to the Waffle House like in Birmingham. Of course we had to snap off a picture with them. Salt Lake City just ain't that big.
After breakfast the next morning with our Tico friends, we took a drive on Rt 80 West to Rt 15 North which took us to the biggest lake in the state. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. We drove to the Antelope Island State Park to take in the scenes. Overall the trip to Salt Lake was a blast. More World Cup Qualifiers need to be played in places like this. The 'big event' mentality comes into play and draws more home fans. Not many CONCACAF-Americans live in the area and it is very difficult for anyone not flying to really get to... and finally, the sports landscape isn't as crowded as other major cities. The newspapers here actually had frontpage coverage the day of and after the game. They had pregame match up reports for each player, possible formats and then grades of each perfomance after the match. In total I must have read about 16 articles from the Salt Lake Tribne about the game. But I'll always find myself thinking back about our banner.
Brian McBride, Steve Ralston, Claudio Reyna, Brad Friedel, Tab Ramos, John Harkes, Alexi Lalas, Cobi Jones, Paul Caligiuri, Marcelo Balboa, Tony Meola & Thomas Dooley. These are just a few of the National Team players to sign the NJB banner. There will be no more. Baltimore, East Rutherford, Washington DC, Foxboro, Paris, Lyon, Nantes, Wolfsburg, Frankfurt, Columbus, Suwon, Daegu, Daejon, Jeonju, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Birmingham & Salt Lake City. These are all places the NJB banner has been. There will be no more. There will be no more....
Ed Kirwan
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We arrived pretty late in Salt Lake City, got our rental car and headed to our hotel since everything was closed already. In the morning, we headed out to see some of the scenes before the game. Everywhere you looked, there were mountains. The city was clean as could be and all the lawns were emmaculate. We headed towards some higher ground so we could get a better view of the city and we just happened to pick the street that Karl Malone used to live on. Rob and Nik got out to take some pictures and like we always seem to do, we managed to get on the property and check out the house.
packages. We were able to tour the arena and also get onto the floor. Finding a basketball, we got to play a little, taking and missing a few shots. Just ask Dimitri! Known in our basketball circles as the "white" John Stockton, I had to call out a few plays of my own. I also had to have my picture taken with his retired jerseys and the statue erected outside for him. Karl Malone's statue is coming soon, so we got Rob to take his place.
We got to the tailgate alot later than we all anticipated and didn't really have too much time to drink & converse with fellow US fans. I guess thats why Rishi brought the beer bong then. It was great watching the reactions of the locals to this spectacle. One mom kept yelling at her son and telling him to turn away everytime it was someone's turn to take a 'hit.'
surprise, he tells me that he just left them there on the ground. I shot back: "You just left them on the ground with half the stands exiting so someone could just pick them up and leave with them?" He started to then give me attitude like I was the asshole for bringing the banner/flags in the first place and went on about had he only had 15 minutes to get all the corp banners up and didn't have time to search out the owners.
poor decision and inviting someone to pick them up and walk out with them. I strongly suggested that they do this next time to avoid something like this from happening again - but that's still not going to get us our banner back.
Eventually half the team ended up walking past us including some players from FC Dallas and RSL. Rishi was pretty hammered so he was going on and on rambling to all the players. He told Conor Casey that the problem with the US team was that they couldn't land hot chicks. He told Steve Ralston he was going to get the West Side Stadium built. He bored the hell out of Bobby Rhine and Scott Garlick talking about pushing yourself during the fifth set. "Tennis," Scott Garlick asks. A logical response .... well Rishi was talking about weightlifting and five minutes later he was still talking about it. Bobby Rhine had quietly slipped away, leaving Scott Garlick helpless, and joined some other players who began pointing over towards Scott and laughing at him. He talked to "Eddie Pope" about having yellow, green, black & white friends. I told him it wasn't Eddie Pope but he didn't want to believe me....and kept calling him Eddie the rest of the night (it actually was Nelson Akwari of RSL.) It took me at least 40 minutes to drag him out of there and we headed back to our hotel.
The Great Salt Lake was amazing. The size of the lake, the different colors, and the scenary of the mountains in the background. It sucked our flight left so early because we could have spent the rest of the day there easily. We didn't make it to the Bison Pen and we barely made it to the beach. Rob made sure that he got his feet wet and also tasted the water. How did it taste you ask? "Pretty Salty." Flying home the lake looked even cooler from the air. All these different shades of orange - you wouldn't be able to tell it was a lake if you didn't know it.
