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In The Fan In You (TFIY) series, TSG explores how a fan became fanatical about their favorite team. This piece about the sport itself.

Arguably Benfica's greatest....Eusebio...

By: RJ DeMello

The beautiful game enveloped me completely in the summer of 2006. A school trip in my sophomore year of high school to Portugal opened my eyes to the sport I had written off years before. It was pure coincidence and has turned into pure addiction.

Growing up in Rhode Island (you know smallest state, mobsters by the name of Joey Bananas, something written by the Farley brother, I get it) I had the typical American attitude towards the sport.

Joe Max for the Revolution...

My dad will always be the ultimate sports fan, if jai alai was on, he would find a reason to get behind one player and watch the entire match. He would turn on the Revolution in the late 1990’s to “support the home team.” He had zero concept of what was going on but nonetheless there we were sitting and watching the ball go back and forth, and back and forth. I just sat there, petulantly stewing all game long, complaining of how boring and stupid the game was.

Anything but this would be better to watch, give me jai alai, the Electric Company, FALCON CREST!.

Years of this went by until I hoped on a plane in May of 2006 with a few of my classmates to visit Portugal on a school trip.

All of a sudden, this weird game Europeans loved so much enveloped me. Driving down the main drag in Lisbon I distinctly remember seeing a giant banner draped over a building with Cristiano Ronaldo on it and thinking, “Who the hell is that pretty boy?”

Sporting Ronaldo...

Looking back at my naivety, I am embarrassed. One of the biggest stars of the sport, I am even in his home country, and I don’t have the slightest clue who this guy is.

It only gets worse from there. On our continued tour of the city, we stopped outside of the big red wonder that is the Estadio de Luz. One of the great stadiums the featured one of the greatest teams in Europe.

Nene The Great

Greats like Eusebio and Nene!, and all I can think about is, “Benfica….what a weird team name to call yourself.”

Foolhardy.

We stopped in a small town on the coast after we left Lisbon called Nazare. There, the soccer crazed kids on the trip dragged me out onto a built-in futsal court sitting only feet from the beautiful blue Atlantic.

Now this was foolhardy.

My uncoordinated feet swinging around at the ball. Here let me queue up the reel:

But something bigger happened to me that day.

I may not be magical, devastating with ball at my foot, but I fell in love with watching and understanding the sport.

I took every opportunity to play on the rest of the trip, even starting an impromptu game against some diehard Porto fans by the hotel playground. Embarrassingly fun.

One week and it was all over. One week was all it took.

Conversion.

Then back to little Rhode Island and dead parakeet named Petey–c’mon we’re not that stereotypical in the Eastern seaboard’s toothpick.

Arriving back at home it was prophetic. On the kitchen table was Sports Illustrated, the World Cup edition with Landon, Gooch, Convey, Beasley, and all of those stinking balls.

The start...

I know what I thought next may cause hysteria but in my head I said, “What the heck is the World Cup?” Absurd as it was, until that moment the event had never existed for me. Somehow, in the previous 16 years of my life I had managed to not see one single article, book, or person that tipped me off to its being.

Now you may stereotype Rhode Island.

I spent the summer watching the elbow, the stomp, and the head-butt.

Ronaldo’s tricks, Zindane’s ease, and his incredibly weird hairline, my soccer journey was fully on the way.

Converted to addict.

There is all of this talk about when the U.S. will become a soccer nation.

Last year the US team World Cup broadcasts outdrew all but three sports broadcasts in the United States–despite the team being on at off-peak hours.

The rise in the last years has been meteoric.

For me it all started at Portugal.