Views on Tottenham From the Tar Heel State: Part 1

Spurs with a side of Barbecue

e-Spurs would like to thank James for taking the time to write this first article and look forward to many more to come!!

Hello! My name is James, and I hail from the city of Winston-Salem, in the lovely state of North Carolina, in the gorgeous (albeit politically flawed) country that is the United States. It is a pleasure and an honour to debut my weekly column for e-Spurs.com. I want to thank Andy and the team for giving me this chance; I will do as best as I can (and as best as coverage of Spurs in America lets me) to entertain, inform, and provide insight into our beloved club from “across the pond”.

I thought that since the e-Spurs audience hails primarily from outside of the United States, I would use my first article to introduce myself, and explain what it’s like to follow Spurs in the grand ole’ United States.

Not to say that I am Spurs in North Carolina, per sé, but I am a major player for Spurs within this state. I am one of three men heading up the drive for an official THFC Supporters Club in the Triangle (which contains the state capital, Raleigh, the place with that school-that-shall-not-be-named, Durham, and all of the neighbouring towns and vicinities). Hopefully, you’ll start seeing Raleigh/Durham Spurs on the club’s Fanzone page very soon! In addition, I’m helping lay the groundwork for another official Supporters Club in Charlotte, the state’s largest city. We have room for at least two official Supporters Clubs in the state of North Carolina; I’m making sure that the Tar Heel State (as it is often called) “meets capacity”, so to speak. I’m also a “figurehead” of sorts for Spurs fans in North Carolina; I got the chance to travel to Baltimore last July to see our match against Liverpool, and in the process met the leadership from most of the Supporters Clubs on the East Coast. To them, I am the symbol for the Tottenham fan base that will eventually develop in North Carolina. In fact, I’m already a representative of Tottenham fans in this state to a degree. I also have a place in the general council of Tottenham Hotspur Supporters of America, which is the unofficial national “umbrella” group that governs all of the Tottenham Supporters Clubs in the United States.

But enough with me. You have a good picture of my place as far as Tottenham fans in the United States goes. What I really want to talk about is what it’s like to be a Yankee Yid.

I think that one of the best things about Tottenham fans in the U.S.A. is that bandwagoners are few and far between. If you’re a Tottenham fan here, you follow the club regularly and you know a lot about the club in general. We don’t have the terrible “success whores” that Man U, C$KA London, and Citeh have.

Long and short, if you follow Tottenham Hotspur in the United States, you’re all but guaranteed to join a group of real football fans that are as far from fairweather as you can get. I love that our fans here are that way. I can’t stand the fairweather fans.

Now, the only problem is that Tottenham fans here are relatively few and far between. It should come as no surprise to anyone that Man U and C$KA London (I refuse to call them by their actual name) dominate the American picture of the Premier League; it’s very easy to find fans of either, and you don’t have to look far. You’ll find at least one fan of either club in your school, workplace, neighbourhood, country club, and just about any organisation in your community. Arsenal also have a fair number of followers and are easily the third most popular team Stateside, although their numbers have dropped considerably in the post-Henry era. Interestingly, Liverpool fans are not as populous here as you would think; they’re definitely fourth in the “fan table”, but they really aren’t that far ahead of us. They’re definitely underrepresented in the United States compared to England and places elsewhere. We slide into fifth, with a sizable advantage over sixth-place Citeh. I’d put Newcastle and Everton in a tie for seventh, and then from there it’s a free-for-all. Town club supporters are very few-and-far between.

When looking at the geographical dispersion of these fans, you’ll notice that there is a heavy bias towards the East Coast for the Premier League. Games usually start anywhere between 7:30 and 10 A.M. here; while some of them call for an early wake-up, it’s not too much of a stretch for us to rise out of bed and catch games on Saturday mornings. Likewise, there are fewer fans of Tottenham (and of the Prem in general) in the western part of the United States than there are in the East. It’s usually between 4:45 and 6:00 in the morning on the West Coast when games usually kick-off; that wake-up time alone has a good deal to do with the lack of EPL fans out that way. But that’s not to say that there are no football fans out that way; in fact, there are a great deal of fans out there that support Major League Soccer. They are fare more focused on our domestic league than the East Coast is; consequently, the West Coast teams (LA Galaxy, Portland Timbers, and Seattle Sounders) have the largest fan bases in the country, and the best support.

If you take a look at where all the Spurs fans are concentrated, there are two distinct hotbeds of Spurs fans: the Interstate I-95 corridor, and the Los Angeles area. If you aren’t aware, I-95 runs from Miami all the way to Boston and beyond, and passes through just about every major city on the East Coast. It’s here that you will find the flagship THFC Supporters Club for the United States, D.C. Spurs. They serve the area surrounding the nation’s capital, and do an absolutely fantastic job of bringing together all the Tottenham fans in the area. They also work closely with another Supporters Club, Baltimore Spurs and drawing in some new Tottenham fans as well.

While D.C. Spurs are the strongest and largest Supporters Club in the USA, I don’t believe that they are the most passionate, nor are they the most vociferous. That honor goes to N.Y. Spurs. Representing Spurs in New York City, They’re a rambunctious, rowdy, and loud group of Yids that always brings a huge amount of energy every time they hit the pubs. And they’re the only Supporters Club on the East Coast to have a “larger-than-life” figure known to everyone in “Brooklyn Dave”. Long and short, they’re fantastic.

Near the Great Lakes, you’ll find Chicago Spurs. They hold down the Midwest for Tottenham, and are as strong as NY Spurs in numbers. If you have ever listened to the Podcast at The Fighting Cock, you’ll know that this is the home club for Chicago Dan. Truth be told, he would be able to tell you more about this group than I do; I don’t know much about their day-to-day operations.

On the West Coast, you’ll find the other major Supporters Club in the USA, L.A. Spurs. Like Chicago Spurs, I don’t know as much about them as I do some of the others (such is the case when you’re separated by 3,000 miles). But I know that they do as strong of a job of getting people together for games as D.C. Spurs, which is quite the impressive feat when you consider the fact that it’s usually between 4:45 and 6:00 in the morning in L.A. when Spurs games usually kick-off. For a West Coast Supporters Club, they have a huge number of people, and are the strongest Supporters Club of any Premier League team in the state of California (as they like to proudly proclaim).

In the next tier of Supporters Clubs, you’ll find the smaller Supporters’ Clubs in the USA. They aren’t nearly as big as the aforementioned Supporters Clubs (usually, they max out at about 25-30 people) and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club usually doesn’t officially recognise them, but they are sizable enough to be more than just a blip on the radar. This is also the category that I would put Raleigh/Durham Spurs in (for now). The best examples of this kind of Supporters Club would be Baltimore Spurs, Cleveland Spurs, Boston Spurs, Atlanta Spurs, Austin Spurs, Philadelphia Spurs, and Seattle Spurs. By and large, they function as a “group of buddies” that get together and support Tottenham. They’re like a group of friends that would go to someone’s house to watch games, but with official paperwork. They’re close-knit, and they know each other very well. But most importantly, they’re incredibly devoted to Tottenham Hotspur, and they’re just as passionate about Tottenham as anyone in the United States.

Together, all of these Supporters Clubs makeup a large chunk of the Tottenham fan base in the USA. I hope that you all have a better sense of what the American Tottenham fan’s life is like; if you’ve got more questions, you can always send them my way at PikeJ@RDUSpurs.com. I have included some links down at the bottom. Included are the websites for the four major Supporters Clubs here, a directory from D.C. Spurs that includes most of the official and unofficial Supporters Clubs in the U.S. (as opposed to the one on the Club’s Fanzone page, which is exclusively for official Supporters Clubs), and the page for Tottenham Hotspur Supporters of America. Next week, you should see a regular article (barring anything crazy).

I hope everybody has a wonderful week, and gets the chance to watch us beat Arsenal!

COYS,

James Pike
PikeJ@RDUSpurs.com

D.C. Spurs: http://www.dcspurs.com

N.Y. Spurs: http://www.nyspurs.com

Chicago Spurs: http://www.chicagospurs.org

L.A. Spurs: http://www.laspurs.com/LASpurs/default.aspx

The “unofficial” directory: http://dcspurs.com/links.html

Tottenham Hotspur Supporters of America: https://www.facebook.com/TottenhamAmerica

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