Armenian Football Finds Home in Fresno, by Evan Ream
Armenian Football Finds Home in Fresno, by Evan Ream
Armenian Football Finds Home in Fresno, by Evan Ream
Editor’s Note: This article is being published on Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, in memory of those killed at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
Twelve hours after the game, Fresno Fuego marketing director Jordan Wiebe texted me from his office deep in the coffers in Chuckchansi Park, the baseball stadium that lights up the otherwise boarded-up three blocks that pass for a downtown in Fresno.
“Does the Sac area really hate Fresno that much?” he asked.
In most of California, Sacramento serves as the punch line for jokes; in Sacramento, Fresno plays that role.
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I arrived in Fresno for my first-ever extended visit at roughly 4:00 p.m. on a Thursday and was immediately struck by the lack of people out and about.
The fact that there were no cars in the main blocks of downtown helped me thrice illegally U-turn after missing the parking lot that I had been searching for; one with a placard that read: “No Parking.”
Eager to explore, and with just under three hours before kickoff, I headed over to Fulton Mall, a run-down outdoor mall with aimless wanderers, dried out fountains, and cowboy boot stores that runs adjacent to Chuckchansi Park.
Once a bustling shopping hub, northern expansion of the city in the 1980s led to the flight of local and chain businesses to the more lucrative suburbs.
If a store wasn’t boarded up, it was likely suffering from a lack of customers. To call downtown Fresno “sleepy” would be incorrect, as sleeping implies an eventual wake-up call.
Downtown Fresno is in a coma.
One block over, Tioga-Sequoia Brewing Co. begins filling up with red-clad patrons toting Día de los Muertos cardboard cutouts and masks.
For the Fresno Fire Squad, General Sherman IPA’s are $3, ensuring that the tattooed squad wearing skinny jeans and flat-billed hats will be adequately lubricated upon arrival across the street.
As a fan walks by wearing a “Fulton Mall Firm” shirt – a joke Wiebe tells me - the marketing and creative director for the Fresno Fuego, who also founded the Fire Squad, remarks that he only sees people downtown between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m.
But Fresno truly wakes up when the Fuego play.
A PDL squad, the Fuego don’t begin their short regular season for months, but tonight is a big game, you can feel it with the buzz of the Fire Squad, or at least smell it by virtue of the amount of beers they consume.
Tonight, Fresno take on Ararat Yerevan, the most popular team in Armenia. Named for the towering Mount Ararat that overlooks the city of Yerevan and serves as a natural border between Armenia, Turkey, and Iran, Ararat Yerevan were the only Armenian team to represent the country in the once-powerful Soviet Top League.
In 1973, Ararat proved that Republics other than the powerful and wealthy regions of Russia and Ukraine could compete in the USSR, as the club won the league and cup double, perhaps best described in Jonathan Wilson’s Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern European Football.
“Fans would chant ‘Haya-stan, hoop-tor’ (‘Come on, Armenia’) or simply ‘Hayar’ (‘Armenians’) followed by three short claps, both refrains that were taken up by the independence movement,” Wilson writes.
The passion boiled over in the cup final that year at the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow, in which a reported 15,000 Armenian fans made the trip to witness a 2-1 extra time comeback win over Dynamo Kyiv, in which the famous No. 8, Levon Ishtoyan, tallied a late brace.
“Back in Yerevan, car horns were sounded through the night, nationalist songs were sung and, in tribute to Ishtoyan, the number eight was painted on the back of the Lenin monument in Republic square,” Wilson continued.
He goes on to write: “The paint was soon removed, and Lenin too has now disappeared, the place where his statue stood marked only by a patch of dead grass. Ararat, similarly, are not what they once were. Now that independence has been won, there is no need to use their games as a stage to protest for it, and their crowds have slumped to only a few hundred; perversely, Armenian football is now suffering because they have stopped being persecuted.”
Images of persecution of a different kind remain in Fresno, whose thousands-strong Armenian community erected an Armenian Genocide memorial in honor of roughly 1.5 million victims of an Ottoman Empire regime that sought a national scapegoat for their failures in World War I.
To this day, Turkey fails to acknowledge the genocide, and only 44 states recognize it, as the White House worries that certain military advantages in the Middle East would be forfeited if an official declaration were to anger Turkish leaders.
Memories are alive and well in Fresno, a city that sported an amateur team by the name of Fresno Ararat Soccer Club, who won three San Joaquin Valley Soccer League titles in the late 70s and early 80s according to the Fresno Bee.
Tonight, though, the two communities come full circle. Ararat Yerevan visits the memorial the day before taking on Fresno’s finest soccer players.
It’s Ararat’s first visit to Fresno since a victory tour in 1974, after the famous double.
The club is no longer almost exclusively Armenian, as the opening of borders in the early 1990s allowed for the import of non-Soviet players.
Ararat features a hulking Ivorian centerback, a diminutive Cameroonian attacking midfielder, and, oddly, former Chivas USA midfielder Bryan de la Fuente.
As the Fire Squad brings the ruckus to the announced crowd of 3,137, they are met with opposing chants of “Ararat!” in the huddled mass of Armenian flags.
The pair of squads are led out by children from the local Armenian school, who turn out to be possibly the worst ball kids in the history of soccer.
During the game, instead of chasing errant shots, the second- and third-generation Armenians are mostly staring at likely the first athletes they’ve ever seen in person that look like them. The game will feature multiple delays as these eager pre-teens simply forget to retrieve balls when they fly into the home-run fences at the park.
Not that it matters though, as the level of play is generally poor, with the fourth-division Fuego, who don’t have their full roster available, enjoying large periods of dominance over the once-great Armenians.
Eschewing the press box that lies miles away from outfield-laid grass, I take my place on the sideline next to the official Ararat photographer.
Ararat quickly score on one of their only opportunities of the night, before a player receives a second yellow card just prior to half-time, leaving the visitors to play a man down.
The Bee’s Angel Moreno tells me during the break that Fuego general manager Jeremy Schultz has attempted to convince the referees to allow Ararat to play with 11 men, but when the sides take the field, the Armenian side trot out with just the 10.
The match continues, and gradually cools to a 1-0 Ararat victory as chants from the Armenians become louder and louder.
The 200-strong Fire Squad, fully intoxicated with stadium Tecate tallboys, continue their jovial back-and-forth with the less-organized Armenian group.
Ararat walk off the field, victors in both the game, and to their idolizers.
But the real winners are those in the Armenian community, for as much persecution as their people have suffered, they finally have a day of their own to celebrate and bring awareness as Fresno fully wakes up.
Evan Ream covers Sacramento Republic FC for the Davis Enterprise. His book on the Republic is due out later this year. Reach him at evanream3@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter.
