Tag Archives: Memorial Stadium

Know Your History, NASL Sounders, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle Reign, USL Sounders

Thanks for the Memories, Memorial

It would be 90 miles each way and I was a year away from a driver’s license. Tickets were student-priced at $2.50 but the seats were view obstructed. Yet I was determined to finally see with my eyes what I had only imagined in my mind.

As it turns out, Sunday, June 29, marks 50 years since I first saw a Seattle Sounders game firsthand. Officially, it was sold-out, except for these seats whose vantage point continually had spectators straining to see around the substantial concrete pillars. I paid cash from my lawn mowing earnings and convinced my sister to make the long drive from Centralia to Seattle to see our first professional soccer contest at Memorial Stadium.

Memorial Stadium at its peak, during the Sounders’ first two NASL seasons. (Frank MacDonald Collection)

If there was any question whether I would be consumed by this game, it was answered in those first minutes after taking our seats. One by one, the Sounders starters were announced over the loudspeaker and the crowd stood and roared.

The atmosphere in Memorial on a summer evening was magical. Between the steep rake of the permanent stands, the twin concrete roofs of the two sideline stands and the extra 6,000 bleachers filling every bit of spare space, the feeling was intimate and the noise incredible. As it turned out, I was hooked. For life.

A Beautiful Backdrop

At its best, Memorial was a big city cracker box where the sport could shine. Fifty years ago from next Saturday came the first nationally televised Sounders game, against Pelé and the Cosmos. It had the look and feel of a Soccer Specific Stadium because, in those early days, it was compact and a scarcity of tickets; the final 17 home games were all filled to capacity.

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Cascadia, Early Days, Know Your History

Soccer in Puget Sound: It’s Rarely a Holiday

If your idea of a perfect winter holiday is to while away the hours watching live top-class soccer, you best not live near Seattle.

Among native Puget Sounders, perhaps only octogenarians can speak of such an experience in their lifetime. As we take a view to scores of frigid, rain-swept Premier League matches pressed into a cramped calendar, we can only surmise that long ago someone came to their senses and simply said, No more.

Most state league games through 1920 were played on playfields with little grass and no seating for spectators, who ringed the pitch.

Who knows, someday MLS may conform to the FIFA time table. But a look back at the last century or so illustrates why playing through the winter is problematic in Cascadia and downright impossible in the majority of MLS markets. New Year’s Day 2018 forecasts 12 of those cities mired in sub-freezing temperatures. Montreal’s high is predicted to reach minus-6 degrees F.

But enough about MLS. This is more a story of the hardened souls (masochists, some might say) in Seattle’s long-ago past who truly played for the love of the game and the sense of community it fosters, and did so in some of the most trying of circumstances. This is a tale of how and why our forefathers once tread the less-than-firma terra during the short, bleak and, yes, festive days of winter.

Holiday Bonus: Another Play Date

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