It’s hard to be a football fan in Oklahoma — a proper football fan that is. The uninitiated will know the game by its American name: “soccer.”
Soccer. That word. Sounds like something you’d find in Urban Dictionary. But there it is. And there Jeremie Poplin was. Growing up, this was his game.
“Soccer was really my first sport,” said the Tulsa Roughnecks play-by-play announcer. “Really, it was my only love as sport.”
Proper football has been growing in Oklahoma for decades. Even back to the late ’70s, soccer established a foothold in the Sooner State. The original North American Soccer League and the original Tulsa Roughnecks (including Charlie Mitchell, Victor Moreland, Bill Caskey, Alan Woodward, and on it goes) laid the foundation for its emergence. The heroics and anecdotes they left behind sparked a generation’s imagination — Poplin’s generation.
As a kid growing up in Coweta, finding a professional soccer game on television was about as easy as finding a liberal Oklahoman. They were few and far between, and even when you thought you’d found one, you still couldn’t be sure.
Every now and again, though, he’d find one. And maybe, if he was lucky, it’d be at a Liverpool game with Ian Rush marauding toward a goal. Maybe it would even be the Everton goal if it was Poplin’s birthday.
Back then, no one in Coweta knew enough to ask Poplin at school if that was really a beer brand on the front of his Liverpool jersey. It was. For perspective, think how livid Ms. Viola Swamp would be to see you rocking a Natty Light shirt to 10th grade English.
While that was cool, though, it would have been cooler if someone had thought to ask him about Carlsberg or Fowler, Gerrard. It would have made his day if someone just started chatting him up about last weekend’s match and who he thought the Reds might pick up in the transfer market. It wouldn’t happen then, but it’s happening now.
Now, Poplin’s friend and colleague at 1430 AM The Buzz, Chris Plank, will regularly ask him about the happenings around professional soccer here and abroad. There was a time when that never would’ve occurred, and it wasn’t that long ago. As a matter of fact, it was just three years ago when there was no professional soccer team to speak of in Oklahoma, just a bunch of Okies pining for a club of their own.
Now we’ve got two teams. There’s Oklahoma City Energy FC and Tulsa Roughnecks FC. It’s the latter that allowed a proper football-crazed kid from Coweta to live his dream when the Roughnecks front office asked him to call its games.
“I was blown away,” Poplin said. “I was so excited. That is always what I have wanted to do. If you could ask me to do anything, that would be the first thing I would pick.”
In addition to his responsibilities at the radio station and being the sideline reporter for the Golden Hurricane football team, Poplin travels with the Roughnecks squad and acts as a medium for fans at the games too far for travel. Over airwaves, he’s engaging, colorful, and bright. Increasingly, though, he’s matched by fans who are just as knowledgeable and keen on the game as he is.
He’s watched fans pick out players in street clothes from my hometown side. He’s watched the Turner Turnpike rivalry between the Energy and the Roughnecks brew into a contentious battle between the two clubs’ fan bases.
The Grid (the Energy’s supporters’ group) and the Roustabouts (the Roughnecks’ supporters’ group) are unmerciful in their attacks from the stands. He’s watched the pranks and insults escalate to the kind of attacks that would make even the most rabid Sooners or Pokes fans feel sheepish.
There’s no better proof of a love and interest in a team than to see how many mudslingers one boasts, and the two Oklahoma clubs have their share of passionate supporters. That’s the proof enough. But there’s more proof in Poplin.
The kid from Coweta who could never find anyone to talk proper football with is now inundated with questions, comments, and concerns about not just his club, but the state of the sport locally and abroad.
If you’re not one of them, if you’re still not sold on the guys and gals who are some of the most athletic people in the world, playing the most beautiful sport in the world, consider this: 3.2 billion people (about 46 percent of the world’s population) watched the 2010 World Cup. Even more watched the 2014 one. Proper football — soccer — is the most popular game in the world. Isn’t it time you gave it a shot?
