Alert: PreGame - TFC Match Postponed to 8/22

OK, I've been stewing on this all day, so I'm going to rant on on a few points and then move on.

Jim Bach: I respect a lot of what you said in your follow-up post. If you had just said that to begin with, I never would have had a problem. I hope you've emotionally backed down from your initial thought of giving up your season ticket, because if you haven't, I stand by my initial comment. If you want to take your ball and go home permanently because this tragedy is such a major inconvenience to you, you probably need the extra time and money to get your head straight anyway.
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To the point of whether or not allowing the other Crew to go to the funeral at the expense of not having the match was the right decision: Absolutely, it was. And while I'm willing to see both sides of most arguments, I'm not on this one. If you disagree, you're wrong.

For all of us, Kirk Urso was a face with a yellow shirt on saturdays. And not even a long-time one at that. Frankly, for as much as I appreciate all ourpouring of support and respect I've seen, the simple truth is that most of us wouldn't have recognized Kirk Urso if he walked past us on the street. If you take the jersey off of him, I wouldn't have been able to pick him out of a police lineup. But we somehow feel as though we're an intimate part of the grieving process because we feel a connection to our club. We love it. We love them. We love the guys who represent that bond. So we feel like we sort of knew him. That, and the simple idea of a 22-year-old dying who seemingly had the world at his grasp -- who can't feel that?

So it's easy for us to articulate what the "right" way to pay tribute is. Singing songs, or tifos, or kicking the hell out of Toronto -- but it's not really our place. Sure, we're connecting our tribute to sport, because that's our connection. It's easy for someone to say that destroying TFC would be the best way to remember him, and honor him, because that's our whole reason for cheering for the team anyway. If it wasn't for that connection, we wouldn't even feel this. (And by the way -- I don't see a 3-0 jackhammering of the next opponent as any kind of "tribute." If we lost 3-0, I wouldn't see that as somehow dishonoring his memory because of the result of a sports contest, so I'm not going to say that a great win will somehow honor him more.)

But his teammates had a much, MUCH deeper bond, and as such, are going to feel the sting of this to a level we can't empathize with. THEY were the ones who trained with him every day. THEY were the ones who sacrificed, on the field and off for each other. THEY are the ones who got to know him, and travelled with him, and even roomed with him. All the best sports teams develop that bond with each other; it's something we talk about all the time. That must cut so much deeper for them when it's broken. We get to drop our "grief" for most of the day, while we're at work, cooking dinner, or watching TV. They're stuck with it.

So you know how I can be so certain that postponing the match and going to the funeral is the right thing to do? Easy: Because the rest of the Crew say it is. Period. It would take an awful lot of balls for anyone to try to tell the guys that actually know him how they should handle their grief. If going to the funeral will help them with the grieving process, I want them to do it, if for no other reason than it will help clear their heads.
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To the point of whether or not Kirk himself would want the club to "get on with life", who the hell really knows? I certainly don't blame the players for saying that -- they played on saturday, the kid died that night, the next game is (you think) saturday, and you've got a microphone in your face on Tuesday -- what the hell would you say?

I think most people, in their hour of death, would want the people they care about to move on and not let their passing slow them down in life. But the funeral process is just as much about the friends and family as it is the deceased. It's about giving all the people affected a chance to come together and offer shoulders to cry on, to support one another, and to get some closure.

I hated, loathed and despised being at the memorial services for my father, and then, a year later, my mother. I couldn't stand being in a place for hours at a time where the only topic in the room was the death of my parent. The outpouring of sympathy didn't make them any less dead. But I had the presence of mind to understand -- the gathering was just as much for THEM as it was my immediate family. THEY all needed an avenue to grieve as well.

So it's not an either/or. It is possible to both (A)get on with life, and (B)take one day, a week later, to pay respects.

I've got more on the Crew front office part of this, but right now, it's intermission time.

 

To the point of the Crew waiting too long to make the announcement:

I'm just shocked that Bill would be trying to paint the club as trying to exploit this tragedy by cashing in on as many ticket sales as possible.

If you want to live in a world where everything is a conspiracy, be my guest. The truth is that this is an unprecedented tragedy in not only club history, but league history. No one really knows what the hell to do. Everyone's head is spinning, and they have a thousand different things to take care of/think about. The most likely scenario, as has already been mentioned, was that the arrangements weren't made quickly enough for the Crew to be able to come up with the decision any sooner than they did. For all they know, they may have expected the services to be on Friday, and to be able to get back in time to play the match as scheduled. I don't know. But again -- I think it takes a lot of stones to suggest that they held off on making the announcement because they wanted to sell more tickets. Especially since I've read in about four different places that one of the classiest organizations in sports (other people's description, not just mine) is the one at the helm.
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As for the exchanges of game tickets: Yes. It seems to me that we, as fans, should recognize that this is an extraordinary situation, and we should have patience and understanding. But it also should follow that the club should recognize the same, and be a little more reasonable in terms of what fans with tickets should be able to do about this.

I honestly don't know why tickets are being limited to only the Montreal match. I really don't. My guess would be that if (allow me to pull a number out of my ass here) 16,000 people had tickets to the TFC game, and only (ass pull) 12,000 are able to come, and (ass pull) 4,000 tickets go unused, it'll be hard to exchange those tickets at comparable value for games that have already sold pretty well in advance. Why they can't just give refunds in recognition of the inconvenience, I don't know either. But instead of flaming, I'd suggest giving Mark McCullers a call or shooting him an e-mail. You might not have your problem resolved, but you might get a compromise solution, or you might at least get an explanation. Who knows -- they've all got so many things on their minds right now, it's possible that a simple solution has eluded them because they're not thinking clearly. But I can't just get on board with calling the front office incompetent or calling them jerks because they don't have an A to Z plan for dealing with a tragedy.

 

Point taken.

 

Are you talking about the August 6 issue? I don't see anything about Urso. Page number?

 

Yes. And this one is now closed.