(by Daniel Girard thestar.com 3-19-11)
Terry Dunfield wasn’t born when the Vancouver Whitecaps won the 1979 Soccer Bowl and 100,000 people filled downtown streets for a victory parade.
He was just a toddler when the North American Soccer League folded after the 1984 season, taking the Whitecaps, the Toronto Blizzard and seven U.S. teams with it.
But the 29-year-old Vancouver native is well aware of the importance of soccer in this city’s sports history. He remembers, as a 10-year-old, climbing a tree outside Swangard Stadium in suburban Burnaby to watch a sold-out playoff game of the Vancouver 86ers, the minor league professional powerhouse that eventually became the Whitecaps II.
“Saturday’s going to be a special day,” says the midfielder of the Whitecaps first game in Major League Soccer, a Canadian derby against visiting Toronto FC.
“It’s easy to say it’s just another soccer game, but it’s not,” says Dunfield, who spent more than a decade playing in England before joining the Whitecaps in the United States Soccer Federation Division 2 last season. “It’s going to be a whole occasion.”
The 2011 Whitecaps share more than just a nickname with their forefathers.
Saturday’s match will be played at Empire Field, a new, smaller and temporary facility built on the same east end Pacific National Exhibition site that once housed Empire Stadium. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, sellout crowds of 32,000 were commonplace.
The Whitecaps, who are to move into the newly-renovated B.C. Place Stadium downtown later in the season, also feature two of the biggest stars from the past — Bob Lenarduzzi is team president and Carl Valentine is a club ambassador and does work for the team’s website.
But the links to glory end there. This is an expansion franchise. Some of the players have experience in MLS, others in Europe, and the majority of them are making the step up from second division. As a result, prognosticators see a low finish in the year ahead.
“Obviously, it’s a big step for us to take,” says Teitur Thordarson, a former Icelandic international who has been head coach since 2008. “Hopefully we will be ready from Day One.”
The fans certainly will be. The first 5,000 into the stadium Saturday will be given drums and everyone will get a white poncho in an attempt to make a “Whitecaps Whiteout” in the stands. The club has also opened 1,500 more seats to bring the capacity to about 23,000.
“I don’t think any of us know how big it’s going to be but I believe it’s going to be huge,” says Valentine, who as a 21-year-old rookie helped lead the Whitecaps to the Soccer Bowl title. “I believe this team is going to be embraced and it’s going to match what we had in 1979 and the early ’80s.”
The club’s owners, who shelled out $35 million to join fellow expansion side Portland Timbers in MLS for 2011, are equally enthusiastic. Majority stakeholder Greg Kerfoot, a former software executive, is said to be a soccer fanatic as are minority partners Steve Nash of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, former Yahoo executive Jeff Mallett, also part owner of baseball’s San Francisco Giants, and Steve Luczo, a technology company executive whose holdings include a stake in the NBA’s Boston Celtics.
“We want to blow the socks off people in our home opener,” says Lenarduzzi, who grew up near the stadium and has been an integral part of the city’s professional soccer scene for nearly 40 years. “Your first impression is a very, very important one.”
Lenarduzzi says TFC’s slow start as a franchise — four losing seasons, no playoffs — gives the Whitecaps “extended goodwill” with fans if they don’t win out of the gate. But archrival Seattle’s smash success — league-leading attendance, post-season both years — has set a new standard for expansion clubs and raises the pressure to win early, he says.
“We don’t want to waste that goodwill,” Lenarduzzi says. “We have to demonstrate, whether we’re an expansion team or not, that we’re going to give 100 per cent every game and, ideally, we’re going to get better with each game, each month, each season.”
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