M E T R O S I L I C O N VA L L E Y JULY 29-AUGUST 4, 2009 COVER STORY
EARTHQUAKES 21 “The tailgating was unbelievable,” said Mark Demling, the Quakes’ vocal defenseman. “I never had to buy a drink, and I never had to worry about eating anything after a game. We would go, and there would be a Mexican group, and you’d get a Dos Equis or a Tecate and you’d get tacos. And you’d go over a little bit more, and there’d be a German guy there, and he’d give you a Beck’s, and you’d get a bratwurst or something.”
‘My job from the first day was to take it to the streets, take it to the schools, just try to expose as many people in the community to the club. And we started signing players, and every guy who was brought in—that was the way we were going to build it. All the guys agreed to it, and I think that was the reason for our success.’ —Johnny Moore According to Demling, the Quakes players always hung out with each other in public, much more than teams do today. For example, in 1977, when the hockey film Slap Shot premiered, 15 Earthquakes players went out and saw the film together, primarily because the team in the film reminded the Quakes of themselves. “You just don’t see that in Major League Soccer today,” Demling said.
No-Fault Zone The timing of all of the above was perfect for a relatively unknown city with nothing but a vapid Dionne Warwick song to put it
on the map. In fact, some folks didn’t want San Jose to be on the map. The Earthquakes changed all of that rather quickly. “San Jose had an inferiority complex to San Francisco,” Moore explained. “And suddenly San Jose was playing New York and Chicago on national TV. Suddenly, it was, ‘Whoa, this is San Jose.’ I think the fans in San Jose were ready for a professional sports franchise, and it just so happened that we were suddenly in their face every single day, and at schools every day, and suddenly kids wanted to see us, and then it just took off.” Guzman agreed: “At that time, San Jose was a community in search of an identity. The Silicon Valley mystique was only beginning to evolve. There were still some orchards along Blossom Hill Road. The lyrics to the song ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose’—they alluded to a small-town feel, comparing itself to L.A. I remember downtown; a lot of it was boarded up at the time.” For players coming from other parts of the world, to see fans in some town called San Jose suddenly taking to a team and a new sport was thrilling. Krazy George, everyone’s favorite snare-drum-bashing cheerleader, pretty much began his proteam rooting career with the San Jose Earthquakes. For each match, the crowd would wait in anticipation to see how George would enter Spartan Stadium—whether it was on the back of a camel, landing in a helicopter, arriving in a police car or flying in a hang glider—antics completely unheard of in pro sports at that time. “Some of the things in the show that they put on at the stadium was really rather unique for the time,” recalled Guzman. “That was considered a bush league—having all this loud garish music and Krazy George leading people in mass cheers. [Now] that’s all become part of the custom in professional sports, but, truly, it was rather unique then.” The players had never seen anything like it. Paul Child had just spent two years playing for a dismal Atlanta club in the Fulton County Stadium in front of crowds of just a few thousand in a place that held 60,000, so he relished in the jam-packed, close-knit environs of Spartan Stadium. “The atmosphere, Krazy George and a gorgeous city weatherwise, you couldn’t want any more,” Child recalled. “It’s kind of like a picture book thing. . . . It was a great feeling for that group of guys to come into a place and know that you’re the only professional team, and you knew when we went out there, the place was 19,000 [fans], packed solid every game we played. I can’t put it into words, I don’t know what it was.” Even though the field at Spartan was ridiculously narrow for soccer, the close confines enabled the crowd to be almost 24
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