Soccer stories don’t usually begin at the 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act and end up with the 1980 Portland Timbers teaching soccer on the outfield grass of Ketchikan, Alaska’s Norman Walker Field.

But when Brian Gant showed me a picture of some of the team hard hatted outside the Ketchikan Pulp Company’s yard office, I knew this was one oak I had to follow into the acorn, and where I ended up is here: It’s possible that on the sideline of a Pacific Northwest soccer field this last fall, a 50- or 60-year-old Ketchikanian (Ketchikander?) who learned to head the ball from Clyde Best could have been watching his son or granddaughter play the same game that brings us to Providence Park, demonstrating once again how much we come together though soccer and the Timbers.

The obscure part goes like this: When Georgia-Pacific acquired land in the Southern US in 1972, the Federal Trade Commission classified the company a monopoly under the aforementioned 1914 Act. Enter settlement spinoff Louisiana-Pacific who named Harry A. Merlo CEO.

Jump to 1979 and the NASL season ended with our club in a pretty rough place. The team dropped 5 of the last 7 matches that season, ending with a 1-3 home loss to the LA Aztecs and landing out of the playoff picture in their NASL-worst-season-ending position of 19th overall. To add to the angst, ownership was in doubt, and many wondered if there would even be a 1980 Portland Timbers. Star player Clyde Best asked for a trade, and since Best shared the same agent with Clive Charles and Brian Gant (not to mention Ahmad Rashad of the NFL and the NBA’s George “Iceman” Gervin) the team makeup—and, as we know now, landscape of soccer development in Portland—could have been completely different, for the worse.

Enter Harry A. Merlo and Louisiana-Pacific’s purchase of the Portland Timbers from the NASL-original owners, Oregon Soccer, Inc. This, for the purposes of our story—and Our Story—is a completely underrated moment in Portland soccer history. Not only did it ensure the continuation of our club, but Louisiana-Pacific also promised all profit from this NASL venture would go to Portland-area arts and culture organizations: United Way, Portland Opera Association, Portland Junior Symphony, Oregon Museum of Science, Portland Art Museum, and Oregon Youth Soccer Association.

[I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention this moment as a massive catalyst in building the game in Portland specifically because of the relationships that started with Harry A. Merlo and Clive Charles, Brian Gant, Bernie Fagan, and others.]

In many ways, things were looking up for both the team and the league. For the first and only time in the NASL’s history (1968-1984) 1980 is the only year there was no movement—no relocation, no new teams, no folded teams. The 1980 season was exactly the same in its club makeup as its previous season.

That’s not to say it all went well, not from the start. The Timbers started the 1980 campaign going 4-6 over the first 10 matches, seeing home attendance drop from a season-opener 14,595 to only 8,448 for a May 28 1-3 home loss to California Surf. Before the team’s next match—May 31 on the road to Ft. Lauderdale—the players woke on game day to the news that manager Don Megson had been fired (on his 22nd wedding anniversary, no less) and GM Peter Warner—a Methodist minister/marriage counselor—would be taking over head coaching duties.

Warner went 0-5 at the helm, leaving the team 4-11 with 17 matches to go in the 1980 campaign.

Welcome (for the second time in franchise history) Vic Crowe.

If there’s a place for a montage, this is where it would occur. And it would begin and end with Brian Gant.

Throughout it all, new owner Merlo had been promising the team a postseason fishing trip to Ketchikan, Alaska—the Salmon Capital of the World and home to L-P’s Ketchikan Pulp Company mill. “He was so proud of ‘his boys’ as he would call us,” Brian Gant said of Merlo. “Whenever executives would be in town, [Merlo] would bring them by the stadium or in the locker room.” The promised fishing was a way to show his appreciation for the players.

The Timbers soccer destiny, however, was no longer in their hands. A day after the home shootout victory over Los Angeles, in Tulsa the Roughnecks beat the visiting Whitecaps 2-0, wrapping up the final National Conference playoff spot. Portland’s last match of the season, away to Vancouver, mattered not in the standings.

Regardless, the 3-2 road win on August 23 was a victory of sorts. Best, who wanted to be traded before the season started, told The Oregonian’s Paul Buker, “I’m disappointed to see [the season] end, but I won’t mind so much if we come back next year with the same attitude that we finished with.”

The 1980 season was over just in time to still go fishing. “Harry’s plane was only available at a certain time,” Gant told me. “If we made the playoffs, the plane wouldn’t be available, and we wouldn’t have been able to go on the trip.” But they were, and days after their last match, twelve Timbers boarded Merlo’s private plane and headed north to fish, to see where their paychecks came from, and, most importantly, to plant more seeds of the game.

“It was an unbelievable trip,” Brian Gant said of the time in Alaska. Anything they could want was available. While on the trip, Gant and the other Timbers got together and planned a tip for their liaison, but the guide was having none of it. Merlo had taken care of everything, including the tip the guide ensured them was more than the players would have come up with. “He loves you guys,” Gant remembers the liaison saying of Merlo. “He’s positive about you and what you’re doing for [Portland].”

“Most teams are run by business people who are all about the checks,” Gant told me. “That wasn’t Harry. When we’d play on Saturdays, he’d have us and our families over to his house on Sundays for tennis, swimming, and croquet.”

While in Alaska, the twelve Timbers toured the pulp plant, fished, and put on two soccer camps.

And when they returned in the private plane to the Hillsboro, Oregon airport, Gant said, “there were boxes of fish from the trip, 30-40 pounds of salmon and other fish waiting for us.”

As we prepare to celebrate our 50th Anniversary season this year, I can’t help but think about the clinic put on by the Timbers in Alaska in 1980 and how, 44 years later, on the sideline of a soccer field near us, one of the seeds planted by Clyde Best, Clive Charles, Bernie Fagan, Glenn Myernick, Jim Gorsek, or Brian Gant could be growing through a second or third generation of Alaskan soccer player.

#RCTID