We left the house Saturday at 4:30 a.m. and walked through the pitch-black quiet to Armature Works. It’s only a 15-minute walk, but I dreaded being late. Premier League Mornings Live, the NBC soccer fanfest, came to Tampa last weekend, and I knew from experience in Orlando that the crowds would be a zoo.
We walked down from Riverside Heights, crossing North Boulevard where the crab shack used to be and passing the new roundabout at the Hillsborough River bridge. My wife, Sue, makes this predawn trek every day, watching a fast-growing downtown rouse from its slumber. As we neared Armature, the streets suddenly came alive. SUVs, trucks, police cars and Ubers spilled onto Palm Avenue from every direction. Fans decked in team kits hustled across the parking lots toward the corrals. We got lucky and queued near the front. A woman alongside me in a Liverpool jersey played Wordle on her phone. Drones hummed overhead. Two teens behind me war-gamed what the final league standings might be.
With 90 minutes to kill before the gates opened, I had to wonder: Who are these people, and why are so many here to celebrate a soccer league that plays on another continent?
Growing up in Tampa in the 1960s and 70s, soccer wasn’t a thing. Tampa was a baseball town for boys; the bigger kids played football. I switched to soccer after breaking my thumb catching a fastball in Little League. It was a second-class sport then, foreign and weird, something for runts and misfits. Your coach was a dad who never played the game.
Our youth league in Temple Terrace was penny-wise and makeshift. We practiced in the evenings in open spaces at local parks, using pine trees as sidelines and traffic cones for goals. Substitutes borrowed a starter’s shin guards. Parents pitched in to pay the referees. On many game days, we chalked our own fields. They were “fields” only in the aspirational sense; most were sandlots and full of spurs, or soaked pasture in Brandon and Odessa. High school soccer was no more glamorous; at Tampa Catholic, we broke into the football lockers for gauze, scissors and tape. We were canaries in a backbench sport. And now thousands are swarming Tampa’s downtown waterfront for a telecast of English soccer?
Thank the Tampa Bay Rowdies for building a fan base for soccer here, for starting the youth camps and clinics in the mid-1970s and getting the sport ingrained in our schools. That was a long slog by a committed few that paid off, and now our region has two professional soccer teams.
Tampa, too, has changed enormously over the years, including — coincidentally — over the very ground I stood on Saturday. From the corrals at Armature, I looked north across the parking lots to Palm. As kids, my brother, Jim, and I would mow many of these fields, vacant properties, dead ends of a dead downtown. We had a routine: I manned the brush mower, and Jim walked in front, poking the ground with a spade to make sure no one was asleep in the grass. It was a solitary and creepy place even in the middle of the day.
As the decades passed, the downtown bustle pushed north, and the old trolley barn at Armature became Tampa’s next big thing. Those weeded lots choked with abandoned sofas, gin bottles and snakes transformed into places we know today as Rocca, Strandhill Public and Rejuv Aveda Salon.
It was almost 6:30 a.m., showtime, and we all inched forward in the corrals. Camera crews blanketed the crowd with floodlights, drawing shouts and screams, as fans jostled to give their teams face time with an American audience. From The Palm apartments, on Ola Avenue, a block away, a group of 20-something runners trotted by, slowing to check out the commotion. It was a meeting of two worlds that nobody back then might have imagined crossing paths. Now it’s more part of Tampa’s everyday living.
