PORTLAND, Ore. — One of Emily Menges’ favorite memories is a taste. It’s a smell, too. Combined, the memory something more immediate than the snapshot you expect when you ask for someone’s favorite moment. For Menges, one of Portland Thorns FC’s longest tenured players, one of her favorite snapshots from Providence Park is less memory, more feel.
“One of my favorite things is right after we score and they blast off the smoke bombs,” Menges says. The "they" here is the Rose City Riveters, the team’s supporters’ group. “[The smoke] kind of drifts onto the field, so you smell the little bit of the fire. And the other team is, like,” coughing, she mimes. She’s laughing, too. “You're like, ‘yeah. we just scored. That's what that smell is. That's what you're choking on.’
“I love that. I love how hyped [Providence Park] gets.”
It’s been 15 months since the Timbers and Thorns have had anything close to a full crowd at Providence Park. Oregon’s precautions against the spread of Covid-19 limited the teams to much smaller crowds. Sometimes the capacity was 20 percent. Sometimes it was a little more. Games have been nowhere close to capacity since March 2020, before the coronavirus forced the world to shut down.
After playing most of 2020 without fans in Goose Hollow, this year’s limited number of fans have been welcome. They brought the chants. They brought the smoke. They brought the support back into Providence Park. This weekend, though, capacity limits have been raised to 80 percent. The near-20,000-person maximum guaranteeing both the Timbers’ (June 19, versus Sporting Kansas City) and Thorns’ games (June 20, versus Kansas City NWSL) will can closer to their normal feel.
“To have that be missing? We're professionals,” Thorns goalkeeper Bella Bixby says, “so we have to recapture being in the zone and being in the game. But just that extra three percent we get from the fans at Providence Park is really special. We can feel it even when we're not with them.”
“Having 35 percent [capacity], you think ‘this is [a little closer to] what it was like,’” Timbers midfielder Eryk Williamson explained. Like Menges and Bixby, he noticed the chants, smoke and support. “But you begin realizing, ‘it's not even more than half full.
“Now getting 80 percent, it's going to be different feel, a different vibe. It's one [the Timbers players] are antsy for.”
Games without fans throughout 2020 were a big change for every sports team, but for Portland’s soccer teams, the change was more important than most. As much as the team’s crest, history, players and results, the crowds that fill the team’s home define the team’s identity. Those fans are part of the Thorns’ and Timbers’ renown. The atmosphere at Providence Park has become the teams’ biggest calling card.
“For us, it’s something incredible: to be able to share the experience our fans give us …,” says Timbers midfielder Diego Chara, the longest-tenured player in the Portland organization. “I’ve had that for most of my career - the 10 years I’ve been playing with the Portland Timbers – and truthfully, it’s been fantastic.”
The visuals of each match describe that “fantastic.” The Timbers have sold out every home match of their MLS existence, with the 2019 enclose of the stadium’s east side leaving the 90-minute chorus of chants and songs to ricochet around the cavern enclosed by the Multnomah Athletic Club. The Thorns, too, have experienced that, with 2019’s sellout crowd in the then-recently expanded venue providing an electricity that’s rarely been seen in the women’s game.
“It's an energy that you can't get anywhere else,” Menges explains, “where our energy builds off their energy, which then builds back off their energy, until it's kind of this like symbiotic relationship with us and the fans, which is awesome. It’s the best place ever … and I’m really excited to have it back.”
“You've just been scored on, and the stadium is having a GD party?” Bixby asks, when describing “other level experience” of being on the field after a Portland goal. She thinks about what it must be like for opponents. “It's like, ‘get out of here.’ As an athlete, you want to have a short-term memory and forget it and move on, but Providence Park does not let you forget it.”
Those are the impositions Providence Park made on guests every time Portland excelled. In their absence, home games weren’t themselves.
“It’s been difficult to be without that during the pandemic,” he says. “To get back to even 80 percent capacity, it’s a beautiful thing. I hope everybody realizes that getting [the atmosphere] back is really going to be something.”
For players like Chara, the atmosphere also serves as a draw. Chara and his brother, fellow Timber Yimmi, are Colombians in a team that’s developed a large South American presence. From the view of places like Argentina, home of Timbers stars Sebastián Blanco and Diego Valeri, an atmosphere that evokes Buenos Aires’ best becomes a point of distinction. It’s another reason to feel good about a leap away from home.
Bixby has a different view. Born and raised in the Portland suburb of Milwaukie, Bixby grew up amid the iconography of Providence Park. The Thorns and Timbers were not only her hometown teams, but games at Goose Hollow were part of her culture. The atmosphere at Thorns games was less of a drawing card than part of her identity as she grew up.
“In some ways, it feels like it's been a part of me all along …,” Bixby says. “I have been a part of it for a long time. As a fan, I have been in the stands and felt that energy of just, we're minutes away from kickoff, and it’s just buzzing. I'm so ready to get the chance one day to experience that as an athlete.”
Bixby points out she’s yet to play at Providence Park as a professional. She was the Thorns starter at the beginning of the 2020 Challenge Cup, but that event took place in Utah. The rest of the times she’s dressed for Portland, she’s done so as a backup, though that still gave her a new view of Providence Park’s prowess.
“The best way to describe it is that when we're in the locker room, and it's time to go out, and the stadium is just waiting to first us to come out the tunnel, they are just chanting “P-T, F-C,” she describes. “[The chant] just resonates in your heart. You know when you go to a concert, you can feel the bass in your bones? It feels like that, where it's just reverberating and vibrating. It just fills you.”
The story is similar for Williamson, even though he is now in his fourth year with the team. The Maryland native started one game at home near the end of the 2019 season, but his rise to prominence in 2020 came with Portland’s fans at a distance. Though Williamson is now a regular part of the Timbers’ starting lineup, he has yet to enjoy the full electricity of Providence Park in his current role.
“From the moment I got here, it was like, ‘OK, I want to play in front of these fans,’ he remembers. “I want to be week-in, week-out, hearing the fans cheering when my name's called.
“Seeing players like the Charas, like the Jebos (Jeremy Ebobisse), everyone getting a round of applause like that, it’s that childhood dream that I've always had … I think it's one that's going to be a big step in my career: continuing my form consistently in front of the Timbers Army.”
That step speaks to identity. It’s engrained into the future Williamson wants for himself, as well as the version of himself he saw when left the University of Maryland to turn professional in 2018. For Bixby, the importance of her home is also instilled in her identity, but that identity is a part of both her part and future. And for Menges, there’s an immediacy to Providence Park’s lure that comes through in the taste of smoke, and a haze from the North End that envelopes the rest of the park.
When asked for something like the smoke, Chara didn’t single out a specific feeling. For him, it was impossible to isolate one thought. Instead, it was “the energy that [the players] get” from the atmosphere, and how that carries them through games. He talked about “the happiness you feel to say you play in front of [the Portland] fanbase,” and how he’s reminded of that pride with each walkout. He talked about how, “honestly, [the feeling] becomes the difference for us in some games,” helping the team push through its lowest moments.
“I don’t have a single memory,” he said, “because every game is a profound memory. Because when you’re playing here, you’re playing in a stadium full of people who, you feel we’re all teammates. That’s not something you can say about many teams in the world.”
More on this weekend at Providence Park:
