Tag Archives: Chance Fry

FC Seattle, Know Your History, Seattle Sounders FC, USL Sounders

All Salaries Aside

Professional sports is generally depicted as glamorous, a high life where players mix with other celebrities, relax at exotic and exclusive destinations and, all and all, lead a jet-set existence.

Truth be told, the majority of those being paid to perform in the athletic arena are relatively simple folk who face many of the same struggles of the common human. And while the rock star may flash a Rolex and rumble off in a Lamborghini, the stories told by the rank and file are interesting in their own right and, without question, more relatable.

Take the fishing story of Roger Levesque. Our smiling, swashbuckling former Sounder forward is well-known for his pirate face and his scuba celebration. But how many know that Levesque made his pro soccer life possible by fishing the open sea?

For over 12 years, Levesque held a commercial fishing license, working out of ports such as Astoria, Westport and Bellingham. Out into the Pacific they’d sail in search of sablefish, a.k.a. black cod. When the USL Sounders season ended, he would go out to sea where the catch enabled him to make ends meet.

“I couldn’t buy a house or condo, and it was a huge investment at the time,” explains Levesque, who took out a line of credit to pay $90,000 for the license in 2006. “It helped bridge the gap.”

Thar he goes: Roger Levesque , commercial fisherman. During his USL and post-MLS days, he supplemented his income by catching black cod, a.k.a. sablefish, off the Washington and Oregon coasts. (Courtesy Roger Levesque)

Stormy Weather

In October, the weather can contribute to rough seas, and Levesque and the crew would usually stay out 2-3 days until they reached their limit. At times, it could take a week. They might sleep for a couple hours as the lines soaked, but it could be 36 straight hours of demanding and sometimes dangerous work.

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FC Seattle, Indoor Soccer, MLS, NASL Sounders, Seattle Pacific University, USL Sounders

Got Game, Will Travel

Sometimes following your dream means leaving town, again and again. For a couple of Seattle native sons, they started at home and finished here. But in between they moved around a lot.

Chance Fry and Peter Hattrup both came out of local high schools in 1982, when the sun was still high in the sky for American soccer. It would go dark all too quickly.

That summer there were 28 teams, both outdoor and indoor, that were paying livable wages across the continent. Within two years, that number was cut in half, and when Fry and Hattrup reached their prime, pro soccer in this corner of the earth, after years of bleeding red ink, all but went black.

Hattrup refers to his peer group as The Lost Generation. They may have made some bucks, even gotten a taste of MLS or made a World Cup squad. Yet there’s long been a lingering question of what might’ve been.

If there was a silver lining, says Hattrup, the game was overflowing with players and coaches with an unquenchable thirst to find a game. Any game. “The great thing was you only had guys that loved to play,” he claims. “No one did it just for themselves, just for the money. They loved being part of the game.”

The Sounders drafted Chance Fry as a Sammamish High School senior and U.S. Youth National Team player.

An Auspicious Start

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Champions League, Know Your History, USL Sounders

View to a Kill

[Part One] Guatemala City’s Estadio Mateo Flores is a classic, midsize, nondescript bowl, with the playing field surrounded by a running track. The participants enter through a tunnel at one end.

In October 1996, Estadio Flores had drawn world attention for all the wrong reasons. Counterfeit tickets and breached entrances resulted in an estimated 60,000 fans jamming into the facility for a World Cup qualifying match between Guatemala and Costa Rica. Mateo Flores capacity was listed at 45,800. The crowd surge began one hour before kickoff; eventually the stampede resulted in 83 dead and 180 seriously injured.

By the time the 1997 Champions’ Cup was held, further security and crowd control measures were in place, and pale blue plastic seats had replaced the concrete terraces, reducing capacity to 26,000.

Awaiting the Seattle Sounders at Estadio Flores on this hot, muggy, summer Sunday afternoon was Mexico’s star-studded Cruz Azul, seeking its fourth Concacaf Champions’ Cup title but the first in 25 years. La Maquina (The Machine) needed a victory versus Seattle to secure first place in the group and, thus, lift the trophy.

There may have only been an inch of copy in The Seattle Times, but in Mexico City there was no missing the score.

For anyone associated with the already eliminated Sounders, a sense of foreboding would be understandable. Yet as Preston Burpo and his teammates made their way through the tunnel entrance, their spirits were lifted.

“I’m a big believer that any game you walk into, you can get a result,” states Burpo. “When we’re walking out the tunnel, all the local fans were rooting for us because if we got a result against Cruz Azul, then (host Comunicaciones, playing Necaxa afterward) had a real chance to win.”

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Champions League, Know Your History, USL Sounders

Bury the Score

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Sitting in his living room, watching the catastrophic match unfold on the TV, Neil Megson had a growing feeling this would be his last day as head coach of the Seattle Sounders.

This was his team being shredded, gutted and embarrassed before its biggest audience and on the greatest stage to date.

Megson’s father, a former coach himself, sat with him, staring at the screen in shock. Neil broke the silence.

“Holy s***. Holy s***,” he repeated. “I think I’m going to get fired in the morning.”

His father, Don Megson, went further, stating, “You deserve to get fired.”

Neil Megson, Seattle’s player/coach, was obligated to coach the A-League West All-Stars rather than take his team to Guatemala.

If Sounders lore could bury a single score line from the past 44 years, certainly this selection would be weighted heavily. There are many reasons, the 11-nil beating being first and foremost. However, there’s more to it.

In some ways it was Exhibit A of where American professional soccer existed in the mid-Nineties; the scarce resources, skewed values and naiveté. It’s also a story of the Concacaf Champions League’s past and Seattle’s first encounters with Mexican powers and playing abroad. Stir it all together and it’s one hot mess, even if some failed to recognize it at the time.

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