It’s OK to make mistakes. In researching the 1976 NASL Timbers season, I nearly made one when I thought I’d found a connection to Pelé being forgotten at a SW Portland private school and Timber Jim’s origin story. But Jim himself sorted me out on that one. The Oregon Journal’s 1976 season preview wasn’t so lucky, inadvertently going to print with a misidentified World-Cup-winning captain. But the club (sort of) made right nearly three decades later.

Hopefully this weeks Season Preview*, the last as we prepare for the 2026 MLS season, will do justice to the fact that we have a pretty serious history, but that doesn’t always mean we have to take ourselves so seriously that we forget it’s the love of the game that brought us here, and it’s the love of each other that keeps us.

All we are is all we are, It doesn’t have to be perfect.

The Oregon Journal’s Season Guide made a pretty big misidentification, one ostensibly set right by the Timbers’ franchise in 2001.

Soccer itself was the guest of honor at 1844 SW Morrison Street in 1975. The new franchise brought a new league in a new professional sport to Portland that year, and Portlanders took notice, averaging an NASL-third-best 14,503 per match.

That 1975 season happened without much chance to plan, let alone pre-promote. The play on the field and players’ efforts on and off it to connect with the city and build and spread the game was special. It created Soccer City, USA.

In the following season, however, the club had a chance to plan, to participate in a player draft, to grow the game by highlighting, as one does, the stars in the league who would be coming to Civic Stadium. This is nothing out of the ordinary, even now (see: Messi).

And who can fault the Oregon Journal for putting George Best’s puss front and center in this section of their season preview? Best was as much a looker as he was baller. In Podcast Episode 5, Willie Anderson talks about his own Manchester United debut, Matt Busby, George Best, police escorts, and the birth of his niece:

All of this business in the pre-season preview is above board brand building, even in the mid-70s. But upon flipping further through the section of visiting 1976 players, I noticed one East-London-sized issue: That picture below of 1966-World-Cup-winning England captain Bobby Moore, who played his primary club soccer for The Hammers and was, in 1976, on loan from Fulham to the NASL’s San Antonio Thunder, was actually West Ham United’s Bobby Howe, who didn’t play in the league until the 1977 NASL campaign when he joined the Seattle Sounders as player/coach, where he made 11 appearances and remained managing until the cub’s NASL demise in 1983.

The real Bobby Moore did still take to the 1976 Civic Stadium Tartan Turf on May 19 in what ended up being a 1-0 Timbers win off the left foot of Tony Betts.

Though it’s hard to see with 2026 sensibilities how anyone in the industry could misname the great Sir Bobby Moore, Portland people could be forgiven for having Howe on the head. While with West Ham, Howe played (and scored) in the first ever professional match at Civic Stadium in 1969.

No harm in the error, however, as all was set right when the Timbers returned in 2001 and named the real Bobby Howe head coach, ushering out Civic Stadium and overseeing the A-League Timbers return in what became PGE Park. Howe led the club 2001-2005, winning the A-League’s Commissioner’s Cup in 2004.

There’s no shame in going to a match with a special interest in a player on the visiting side. This is, in part, how the game grows and how we can share special moments with each other. It adds variety, excitement, and opportunities for core memories around the sport.

I confess: It wasn’t always just the Green and Gold that drew me. I took my third-trimester-pregnant wife, who could not care less about sports, to a mid-2012 match because David Beckham was in town. We were seated right behind the south-end goal for that match—a special place to see a special player (see: Jim Serrill).

Plenty of people have personal preference as to who they want to see walk down the south-end ramp of Providence Park in 2026. It could be Thomas Müller and Whitecaps on March 7, or maybe it’s Son Heung-Min and LAFC on April 14, or just about anyone on the rosters of the 17 MLS teams currently scheduled to visit.

Here’s where I nearly made a massive mistake: I got so wrapped up in the story of Pelé in Portland in 1976 that I thought this might be the match O Rei gave us Timber Jim Serrill. Despite Jim’s 2016 Ted Talk and this 2025 Brook Jackson-Glidden essay in Portland Monthly, and just plain knowing the story of 1977’s Soccer Bowl and Jim and his family attending, I still thought there might be a chance it was actually the 1976 visit, as that one that featured the Portland Timbers and not two neutral teams. I wanted to do due diligence on the idea. If I was right (which I was not) here’s how the story would have gone:

In the 1976 season, visiting teams in town early often trained at Catlin Gabel, as seen above. But when the Cosmos were in town, the return transportation to the team hotel didn’t show. That left Timbers’ Director of Public Relations Dennis O’Meara in the parking lot with Pelé and The Oregonian’s John Polis, who piled Pelé and others in his van to get them back to downtown Portland.

Below, O’Meara recounts the moment to Michael Orr and Morgen Young for Orr’s The 1975 Portland Timbers: The Birth of Soccer City, USA:

I was into the idea of Pelé et al. crammed into a reporter’s Volkswagen, driving down Burnside, on their way to, the next day, plant the seed that ended up giving us Timber Jim Serrill, at the match where Pelé, Chinaglia, and the rest of the Cosmos posted a 3-0 road win in front of a then-Portland-franchise-high 32,247 in attendance. And primarily, I wasn’t interested in the 32,243 not named Rob, Jim, Mary, or George Serrill. I was ready to add to that quartet’s story here, as implausible as nearly all available evidence made it.

To make sure I was not right on this (which I wasn’t), that it wasn’t the van of journo John Polis that prevented the pre-Uber abandonment of the great New York Cosmos beyond the West Hills of Portland therefore preventing, in 1976, the serendipitous moment that gave us our eventual Director of Love and Celebration, I called Jim himself and posed the question that this might have some possibility. His response was as Serrillian as it gets.

Instead of telling me to go to Seattle, he listened and entertained the possibility as well. Then he verified. He asked his brother and sister, and he came back to me and shared that my idea was triple-Serrill-certified false. It was Pelé, and it was the Serrill Four, and it was Civic Stadium that gave us so much love.

But it was not 1976.

Here’s some of the Timber Jim Serrill’s origin story in 1977, from Podcast Episode 4:

It’s not hard to find Pelé’s last competitive match online, but it might be harder, if not impossible, to find the Serrill family seated four rows behind the south-side goal on August 28, 1977.

For those who want to see the 1976 Cosmos’ visit to Portland and watch the men who fit into John Polis’ Volkswagen, roughly an hour of that match exists here:

So there it is. I was a year off, and, as great and, at times, absolutely not-right, as the 1976 Timbers season was, it was not the year Jim Serrill walked into Civic Stadium with his dad and brother and sister to see Pelé. 1976 was not the year Jim Serrill took the first steps into our hearts as Timber Jim Serrill.

If I were able, I’d know no better time to have a good laugh about this could-have-been bed of salt, with Jim in person, at Providence Park this Sunday, when the Annual Log Blessing occurs.

From the Timbers’ press release:

As it is, this is one piece of our history I’ll miss this year. I’m sorry for that.

I do, however, hope you gather your friends and pile into a van of your own—or the van of a journalist of your choosing—and go to the Log Blessing. I hope you join the 107ist. Paint tifo. Give back. Give opportunity to others. I hope you make 2026 the year you participate in our community. You won’t be sorry.

You’ll find what I love about this club: Just like **1977** Jim Serrill, any of us can walk into 1844 SW Morrison Street and find our place, our inspiration, our sunshine. It’s perfect there.

Come as you are.

All are welcome.

#RCTID