Know Thine Enemy: Kansas City Wizards
Our newest sportsballers, Sounders FC, will play to another capacity crowd Saturday. This week's opponent? The Kansas City Wizards. Here's a little bit about them.
Wizards may be a terrible name for a sports franchise, but it does lend some surrealism to the process of discussing MLS soccer. Like when you have to refer to a player as "a former Wizard." That cracks us up every time.
"Wizards" is actually not even the worst name the franchise has gone by: They began life as "The Wiz." Yes, "The Wiz." Wasn't long before opposing fans were chanting, "You're #1, You're #1," at KC players. Also, the New York-based electronics store The Wiz threatened legal action. They added the "ards" after their first season.
Kansas City goalkeeper Kevin Hartman is the all-time MLS saves leader. He's also, we've deduced from the visual evidence presented above, the world's all-time leader in fantasies about Gwen Stefani.
Three talented strikers form the core of the Wizards' attack (All of a sudden it's like we're playing D&D!): They are Josh Wolff, Davy Arnaud (both of whom have logged time with the US National Team), and Argentine national teamer Claudio Lopez. You'll likely see Arnaud and Lopez up front, with Wolff as an attacking midfielder--at least that's what the Wizards did last game, their first win of the season.
Lopez has the nickname "El Piojo," or the louse. No idea why--because he gets in your shirt? Because he's small? Because you can shampoo, and shampoo, and shampoo, but he never comes out, and you're seriously thinking about shaving your head at this point of some other reason?
After the jump, more about the Wizards, Kansas City, and an extended digression about mass media censorship in America.
You don't think of Kansas City as a particularly interesting place, but then why has it inspired two of the best songs ever written about a city? There's "Kansas City" by Rodgers & Hammerstein, from the musical Oklahoma, and then there's "Kansas City" by Leiber & Stoller, which has been covered by The Beatles, Little Richard, and James Brown, among others.
Both songs contain raunchy lyrics--perhaps a glimpse at a much more lively Kansas City than the one that exists today--that were altered for mass consumption. To wit:
In Oklahoma, the song "Kansas City" contains these lines about a burlesque dancer:
I could swear that she was padded from her shoulder to her heelBut in the 1955 movie version (which starred a 21-year-old, smoking-hot Shirley Jones), the "began to peel" line was, ironically, stripped:
But later in the second act when she began to peel
She proved that everything she had was absolutely real!
I could swear that she was padded from her shoulder to her heelHuh? What? To protect the children from the suggestion of women taking their clothes off? Whatever. Sometimes we hate America.
But then she started dancin' and her dancin' made me feel
That every single thing she had was absolutely real!
Likewise, the R&B version of "Kansas City," recorded by Wilbert Harrison in 1959, started this way:
I'm going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I comeOoh--hot. What's the "crazy way of loving?" Where the girl gets naked too? We've always wanted to try that. Anyway, it was too hot for the Beatles, who sanitized the song's beginning thusly in their 1964 album Beatles for Sale:
I'm going to Kansas City, Kansas City here I come
They got a crazy way of loving there
And I'm gonna get me some.
Ah, Kansas City, gonna get my baby back homeOof. Not quite the contribution to world literature that, say, Eleanor Rigby was.
I'm going to Kansas City, gonna get my baby back home
Well, it's a long, long time since
My baby's been gone
The Wizards play in a minor league baseball stadium which is actually in Kansas City, Kansas, across the Missouri River from the larger Kansas City, Missouri. But the Wizards will get their own soccer-specific stadium in 2011, when they move into a development on the site of a former mall about 15 miles south of the downtown core.
Sounders FC hosts Kansas City Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Qwest Field. The game is sold out, but last we checked there were tickets on both Stub Hub and Craiglist.
