Category Archives: Early Days

Features regarding the formation of Puget Sound’s soccer community, dating to 19th Century

Early Days, National Soccer Hall of Fame, Seattle Sounders FC

Keller, Schmid Just the Latest Washington Legends

In a perfect world, America’s soccer history would have a permanent home, with an engaging strategy of telling the story of our long and often difficult path to reach this point in time. Hopefully Frisco can become that place, but in the meantime the thousands of National Soccer Hall of Fame artifacts are locked away in a rural North Carolina warehouse.

In a near-perfect world, U.S. Soccer would choose to take the Hall of Fame party on the road, particularly when two of the three inductees currently hail from the same city, and that’s exactly what’s in store for Kasey Keller and Sigi Schmid.

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Sigi and Schmid and Kasey Keller are to be inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame on Saturday evening. (Courtesy Sounders FC)

Saturday promises idyllic weather in Seattle, where by the shores of Lake Union, inside the Museum of History and Industry, the Sounders’ iconic keeper and coach will be honored that evening. The late Glenn Myernick (incidentally, teammate to Alan Hinton and coach to both Marcus Hahnemann and Chris Henderson) will be inducted posthumously.

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Early Days

You Don’t Always Get What You Want

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We all know the story of Ralphie and his craving of a Red Ryder air rifle for Christmas in 1930s Cleveland. It’s fun and fiction and ends, albeit after some plot twists and turns, with the 10-year-old boy blissful, laying in bed beside his new BB gun.

Now picture this: Same era in Seattle. Preteen boy in Mount Baker awakes on Boxing Day, hoping his Christmas present was just a bad dream. But no, there it is, on the floor. A misshapen skin of leather wrapped around a rubber bladder. A new ball, all right. Yet Robert’s parents had got it all wrong.

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As a child, my Uncle Bob wanted a football such as this.

Alexander MacDonald, Robert’s father, must have meant well. The then-fiftysomething Scot had grown up in the outskirts of Glasgow, learned the shipbuilding trade on the River Clyde and later built ships for the Australian navy on the Duwamish. He was described as a stern, humorless man, but not mean-spirited.

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As it turned out, Uncle Bob unwrapped this type of football. He was not happy.

No, Alexander MacDonald was raised on association football and even in his adopted city, many of the industrial workers played in state league matches on the Woodland Park pitch each weekend.

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