Celebrations Are Their Goal : Digital’s Crawl, Salcedo’s El Fantasma, Welton’s Dance Can Only Help Major League Soccer Score With Its Fans
Paul Bravo was watching an NFL game at his Bay Area home last fall, months before he and the San Jose Clash would begin the Major League Soccer season.
After watching Green Bay Packer wide receiver Robert Brooks leap into the stands after scoring a touchdown, Bravo thought to himself: If I ever score a goal, that is what I would do.
And he did.
Against the Colorado Rapids on May 8, Bravo scored the go-ahead goal in a 3-1 victory. He quickly jumped over the sign boards surrounding the field, climbed into the stands and threw himself into the crowd. Bravo was joined by three teammates, and a mini-mosh pit formed at the north end of Spartan Stadium.
“I was loving it,” Bravo said, “but then I got down and the referee gave me a yellow card.”
Bravo tried it again on May 12 against the Galaxy in San Jose, but this time he simply slapped hands with fans.
Said Bravo: “The referee came up to me and said, ‘I’m not going to give you a yellow card, but hurry it up.’ I would have liked to jump into the crowd again; that would have been more fitting.”
What is fitting? That is the question MLS and its players have been asking early in the league’s inaugural season. Bravo is the second player to receive a yellow card for jumping into the stands, and one of a handful of players warned for excessive celebrating. The players and the league are still newlyweds, and one of their first spats has been what can be done once the ball is in the net.
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Galaxy fans missed an opportunity to see the league’s most famous celebration when Kansas City Wiz striker Vitalis “Digital” Takawira was shut out in a game at the Rose Bowl May 19.
But the fans in Kansas City have seen enough goals from the 23-year-old striker from Zimbabwe and are buzzing over his postgoal routine.
After scoring, Takawira drops to his hands and knees. Teammates either crawl with him or pick up his legs as if they were conducting a one-man wheelbarrow race.
It is called the “Digital Crawl,” and, although it sounds like a bad ‘80s dance move, it has caught on in Kansas City. There is a Digital home page on the Internet, and Takawira, who has only the name “Digital” on his jersey, is mobbed in local malls.
Didge, as he is called by teammates, got the idea from Nigeria’s Finidi George, who crawled like a dog during a 1994 World Cup game against Greece and raised one leg, as if he were . . . staking out his territory.
“I would never do that,” said Takawira. “That is his [trademark].”
Takawira has been working on his routine for nearly two years. Fans once threw cans at him during a crawl in Algeria, but U.S. crowds love it. The officials, on the other hand, are not so enamored.
They allowed it when he scored Kansas City’s inaugural goal April 13, and again on the first of two goals in a game against the Colorado Rapids on May 5. But they stopped Takawira after the second goal.
“I don’t know why,” Takawira said. “When you score you should be allowed to celebrate. You ask Cobi [Jones], Maradona, George, when you score you must have your own style of celebrating. You must have your own identity.”
But the league is also staking out its territory.
“We don’t mind if they do a certain amount of celebrating. It is good for the game,” said Jim Allen, MLS director of officiating. “But we have our instructions from the league to keep the game moving.”
FIFA, the sport’s governing body, allows a player to “share his joy” with teammates as long as it does not take up an inordinate amount of time, and is not taunting on the opposition’s side of the field.
But perhaps more influential is ESPN. It leaves a two-hour window for televised games, and celebrations such as Bravo’s and Takawira’s sometimes push the limit.
“Much of what we do is about TV,” Allen said.
A memo was sent to MLS officials recently, restating FIFA’s rules on postgoal antics. It reminded that celebrating was allowed, but that jumping into the stands was not, for fear of the player and the fans’ safety.
“It’s harmless,” said Bravo, among the league’s leading scorers. “It gets them jazzed up. People can say, ‘If Paul Bravo scores, he is going to celebrate with us,’ and what they want is to congratulate you. We owe that to them. They are out here supporting us and the league.”
The feeling among players and coaches, at least in this first season, is to let the players draw as much attention to themselves as they wish. It doesn’t matter if they want to crawl, flip as Tampa Bay’s Roy Lassiter does or slide on the field like human 747s landing as Kansas City’s Preki and New York/New Jersey’s Giovanni Savarese have done.
“In our last game, [the referee] was so busy trying to stop [the crawl], but why?” Kansas City Coach Ron Newman said. “The fans love it. And anything to get the fans excited--that gets them talking--is good.”
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They are talking, screaming, whispering and e-mailing in Boston, where the New England Revolution’s 21-year-old Brazilian, Welton, has been turned up to maximum volume.
The speedy striker went on cable TV and danced the “La Macarena,” a Spanish version of the electric slide and a popular song in clubs. Welton said he would perform the dance if he scored, but after netting a shot recently against the Columbus Crew in Ohio, he was a wallflower.
He announced to the media afterward that he was saving his dance for a home game.
The song, “La Macarena,” is about a flirtatious girl, not unlike Welton right now. But preparations have been made to play the song if Welton scores. The traditional song at Foxboro Stadium--KC and the Sunshine Band’s “That’s the Way (Uh Huh, Uh Huh, I Like It”--has been bumped.
“We’re cued and we’re ready,” Revolution spokesman Rafael Morffi said.
Fans are ready in Los Angeles, to see something . . . anything.
The celebrators on the Galaxy tend to be on the gentle side, with Mauricio Cienfuegos running over to slap hands with the coaching staff, or Eduardo Hurtado blowing a kiss to his wife and child. Only Jorge Salcedo’s semi-undressing after scoring against Washington at the Rose Bowl on May 5 could be considered showy.
“There was a guy who I played with in Mexico who was called El Fantasma . . . the ghost. He would pull his shirt over his head after he scored,” Salcedo said. “I knew they would show all the [MLS] goals on TV down there and I wanted to salute him.”
Salcedo said he and teammates have planned more elaborate celebrations, but they haven’t materialized.
He and Jose Vasquez planned a celebration for the D.C. United game in Washington. Salcedo was planning to sprint toward Vasquez, who would kneel down and let Salcedo climb on to his shoulders, and then carry him around the field.
“But Hurtado knocked him down before I could climb on his shoulders,” Salcedo said. “And now [Vasquez] is out with an injury, so I’ll have to think of something else.”
Gregg Vanney, who scored the game-winner against San Jose on May 12 but limited his celebration to a few hugs, is said to be planning a celebration befitting the league’s only unbeaten team. Rumor has it that Vanney will run to the closest flag, take his jersey off, and put it on the flag. He will then pull the flag out of the ground and wave it in the air.
“We will see,” Salcedo said. “The fans would love it.”
Oh, the league will too.
