One of Their Own
My phone rang at about 10 A.M. one morning in April. I saw a +44 number, meaning it was coming from the U.K. About time.
“Hello, is this Brendan? This is Josh with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club.”
If only Josh knew how many of dreams started exactly like this. Brendan, we’ve heard you know a thing or two about this club, he'd say, and want to know if you’d like to step into the vacant manager position.
Yes, Josh, I'd reply, with a glint in my eye. Yes I would.
Really, Josh was calling me about a ticketing issue.
I was about three weeks out from traveling from Philadelphia to London to see Tottenham play in real life. It's something I’ve wanted to do since I became a fan of the team on a whim—and my relationship with the squad deepened into something more meaningful than I ever could have anticipated. I would finally see the people I watched every weekend morning. The players whose names I have on the back of a growing collection of jerseys. The guys I control badly in FIFA video games. The club whose gear I wore while undergoing the rigors of treatment for colorectal cancer.
I had tickets to the penultimate match of the season, the last home game at the still-unsponsored, but majestic Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Last year at this time, I was in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery that removed a tumor from my colon and rectum—struggling to maintain consciousness to pay attention, just so I could see the Spurs put a hurting on the dreaded Arsenal.
This year would be a little different.
My choice to align myself with Spurs was mostly arbitrary. Most people inherit their sports fandoms through geography, family, or a combination of the two. Though my DC native father tried his best, I've always been a Philadelphia sports fan, and I wanted a squad that felt like a Philadelphia team. One upon which I would gamble my emotional energy on a regular basis with incredibly mixed results. A team that could soar high one moment, then come crashing back down to earth the next.
That life influenced my decision to pick Spurs. They hailed from a big city—London, but a part of London that was historically a little gritty. They had the capability of greatness, but never really got there. High ceiling, low-ish floor, but not low enough to be relegation fodder. Hell, rival fans invented the term “Spursy” to describe Tottenham’s particular method of stepping on rakes over and over and over. Being that their crest is a cockerel sitting on a ball, people jokingly refer to watching Spurs as cock-and-ball torture.
This was my team, baby. There was no turning back. Tottenham ‘til I die. It just felt right.
What started as a fun way to spend weekend mornings slowly became a part of my identity. As time went on, my knowledge grew, and what started as something I threw on TV in the background while I made coffee became appointment viewing. I even brought a few others along with me. First was my partner of now 11 years, Michele, who in addition to sharing a living room and TV with me and, thus, being subjected to watching games, was a pretty damn good soccer player herself. Another is my buddy Matt, who was never afraid of a beer at 10 A.M. on a Saturday morning.
Before we knew it, we were discussing transfer rumors, analyzing games, and adding merchandise to our closets. When Matt got married, we wore matching lapel pins of the team’s crest.
A few years into my Spurs fandom, the team made a preseason visit to the U.S. to play a few worthless friendlies. I dropped about $150 to go up to Newark, New Jersey, to watch them live. There, I heard a chant I had listened to a million times on TV, directed toward Tottenham’s golden boy, Harry Kane—a pudgy academy graduate who just happened to grow into one of the most dominant strikers in the game.
He’s one of our own, he’s one of our oooooown. Harry Kane, he’s one of our own.
I couldn’t bring myself to sing along. Harry Kane wasn’t one of our own. We are in New Jersey. Something about it didn't feel right.
Toward the end of 2021, I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer that had spread to my lymph nodes. I started chemo in October.
In the months that followed, Tottenham was a constant. Matches were something to look forward to each weekend. I wore my Spurs gear to cancer treatment, too, in a not-so-subconscious way of arming myself against the pain and fear. The chemo chair felt less sickening when I was wrapped up in a Spurs sweatshirt. My thinning hair could hide under a Spurs beanie. When I didn't feel like wearing real pants to an appointment, my Spurs warm-up joggers were perfect. It's corny, sure, but I got a real mental boost from it. It felt like I was locked in the middle of my own game–and I wanted every ounce of fighting spirit I could borrow.
But this isn’t some Tottenham saved me from the horrors of cancer story. This is a story about a beauty I'd find long after my recovery.
In the early part of the new year, Matt, Michele, and I decided that we would celebrate my 31st birthday by going to London to finally watch Spurs. It felt like a make-up for my 30th, which I spent at home a week after my first surgery. With three TVs set up around the room, my friends and I watched all of the games simultaneously to see who would emerge champions, who would face relegation, and who would earn European competition. Don't get me wrong—it was a great time and I wouldn't trade it for anything. But I wish I didn't have to think about whether my temporary ileostomy bag was showing underneath my Hojbjerg jersey, or whether I was hunched over from incision site pain.
As my date with Spurs neared, the club let me down in all the ways I had expected them to let me down. While spending most of the season semi-comfortably near the top of the league, Spurs faced a crisis of identity, where it didn’t know whether it would be a defending or attacking team, so it decided to stop being both. Shortly before that, competitive psychopath/Spurs manager Antonio Conte held an absolutely unhinged press conference where he unloaded his grievances on the club and its lack of true winning spirit. He wasn’t wrong! But he was also an asshole.
Then they hired his right-hand-man Cristian Stellini, who also let the team down, forcing them to turn once more to academy-product-turned-manager Ryan Mason, who was great, but not the answer. Spurs seemed rudderless. The game we bought tickets for? It became a well, it’ll just be fun to see them thing. There was a freedom that came with knowing the stakes were low. I have ruined plenty of Saturdays and Sundays by watching Tottenham Hotspur. The real chef’s kiss double-header is when an 11 A.M. Spurs loss feeds right into a 1 P.M. Eagles loss.
But as the match grew closer, narratives surrounding certain players leaving the club surfaced. Mostly regarding Harry Kane.
Harry Kane.
What can you say about Kane? The “one-season wonder” for nine straight seasons. The man who captained England in the World Cup. Harry Kane. He was one of our own. He was born to play for Spurs.
Since his ascent at Spurs, the narrative was always that the club was beneath Kane—and he would inevitably leave for a place where he was guaranteed trophies. After a terrifying summer when he tried his damndest to move to Manchester City, Kane stayed put. Even with his contract running down, he was still there.
But it would be naive to assume he’d play for Tottenham forever. At this point, the club could cash in and really fund a rebuild—and there were plenty of indicators it would be this summer. I knew it then, even if I didn't want to fully admit it—I had tickets to Kane's last Premier League game for Spurs.
In early August, Kane transferred to Bayern Munich. Looking back, there was no wow, he's really going to leave moment. Even up until he really did leave. The lanky kid who was once thrusted into goal in the Europa League, the guy who ripped his protective face mask off in excitement after a worldie against Arsenal, the three-time Golden Boot winner, Tottenham's all-time record goalscorer with his mural in front of the stadium—Jesus, I really could keep going forever—is gone.
I used to joke that gearing up for Kane's departure was like when I downplayed chemo right before I started. Like, yeah, it'll be rough, but we'll get through it. Then, of course, it started. Shit, this is so much worse than I thought.
But there's always excitement in what comes next—and beauty in the fact that life always goes on, no matter how you feel.
The morning of the game, I put on my Son Heung-min jersey, but with a black hoodie on top. In London, with rival teams only a few miles away—and fan violence always a possibility—I figured it was best to cover up until I had safety in numbers.
When we arrived at the train station, we noticed plenty of Spurs jerseys waiting around. About a half-hour ride north through London later, we were there. White Hart Lane station—the previous name of Spurs’ historic ground. I walked off the train and took my phone out, taking a blurry photo of the sign pointing to Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
“Whatcha taking a photo of, Brendan?” Matt asked, laughing.
The sign. What's wrong with that? He and Michele looked at me, holding in more laughter. Suddenly, it hit me. It had been right there the whole time. The stadium. The giant, silver-paneled, futuristic-toilet-looking monstrosity that I watched rise through its construction on YouTube livestreams. We were there.
Through the gate of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was the field. The stands. The golden cockerel watching the players warm up below him. Somehow, a stadium so new, so metaphorically massive, felt small. My fantasy bubble burst, but not in a bad way. All of it was just, for the first time, real.
Throughout my treatment, I had moments when I thought about dying, but I wouldn’t say I feared death the way some people would assume a cancer patient would. Really, I just feared missing out. Not whether I was dead or alive, but if I was in bad enough shape to have to stay home. I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to miss his own funeral, because I know it would be a great crowd. You don’t get to have a lot of parties where all of your friends are there. With each scan following my surgery, I feared the cancer coming back—not just because I didn’t want to do chemo and radiation and surgery again. Or even die. I only wanted to get on with my life.
As I walked up the stairs to take my seat, I couldn't help but think that that's why I chose to survive cancer and do things like this in my life, as much as I could have possibly controlled that outcome. I didn’t fear death so much as I feared missing moments like this.
The players ran onto the field—to the song where Darth Maul battles Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jin in Star Wars Episode I—and from there, it felt like any other game. I critiqued things like Davinson Sanchez spending too much time on the ball instead of clearing it.
A few minutes in, Spurs got a free kick about 20 yards out. Kane lined up over it, as he always does. Now, for the non-viewer, while Kane is a generational, lethal striker, he is not a free kick specialist. But he tries to be. I thought about filming the moment, before thinking, Kane doesn’t score free kicks.
Wrong. Kane painted the ball right into the top-right corner and the place exploded. In that moment, all of the money I could’ve spent to go to London was worth it.
Now, what came after that was a run of three unanswered Brentford goals. Classic. The people in the stadium who get to do this on a regular basis, including those who have spent a not-insignificant amount of money on season tickets, were pissed. Like I said, rudderless.
Still, when the final whistle blew, we walked down the stairs for what the club arranged to be a lap of appreciation from the footballers to the fans. (Even if the fans weren’t feeling very appreciative.) The players, surrounded by their wives and kids, walked around the pitch, many clapping for the Tottenham faithful, some holding their kids and waving. Kane walked around with his three small kids and then-pregnant wife, Kate. He did not seem like a man ready to uproot his family, I thought. His demeanor said nothing about this is the last one. Shows how much of a body language expert I am. As Son came around, I thought for a second about taking off my jersey to ask him to sign it, but remembered I was on the verge of turning 31—and was probably past the time for acceptably being shirtless in public for an autograph from man a year younger than me.
As Son passed, his face was visibly pained. His season hadn’t gone the way it should have, and it showed in his demeanor. I kept my shirt on. But I wanted him to at least know how much he and the team have made my life better, just by playing the game we both love. I hope that he somehow felt that from me and the others who stuck around.
The next day, we went to Paris, seeing as there aren’t many opportunities for a Philadelphian to hop on a two-hour train to Paris.
We were in a little bar in the 11th Arrondissement at midnight, when I officially turned 31. The server found out it was my birthday, and brought over shots of Fernet. (They didn't have Jager. I love disappointing sports teams and gross liquor.) We told him we were visiting from Philadelphia, and we got to talking hoops—he was a Lakers fan. We talked about the woes of the Philadelphia 76ers, before someone mentioned that we had attended the past night's Tottenham Hotspur game.
“You’re Tottenham fans?” he asked.
Yep.
“Oh, so you like teams that never win.”
Exactly.
It's funny: in England, they don’t really use “fan” to describe a fan. They call them “supporters.” I like that better. It feels like you’re an integral part of the squad's success or failure. Maybe that’s why it hurts so much when they lose, and feels so good when they win. Their highs are your highs, and their lows are your lows.
That’s really the magic of soccer. The simplest, yet most difficult game on the planet is powerful enough to capture the entire world. It takes kids from the harshest environments imaginable and shows them hopes of glory they could never dream of, and yet they achieve it on a regular basis. We deify guys like Harry Kane who defy the odds and show the world what they can do.
Like I said before, it’s impossible to explain to the outsider. Especially the American outsider. But what starts as a way to make your Saturday mornings a little more meaningful turns out to make your entire life more meaningful.
After Kane scored that goal, the stadium erupted in that familiar song that I’ve only heard on television and in New Jersey—except this time it was much, much louder.
He’s one of our own. He’s one of our oooooown. Harry Kane. He’s one of our own.
That day, in London, I sang it, too. Harry Kane is gone now, but I hope he heard me. I was finally getting on with my life. And I felt like one of their own.
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