Since there is no Crew game this weekend, seems like a good time for a Crew-related announcement.

This fall, I’ll have a new Crew book available. A Massive Collection, Volume 1 contains 43 stories spanning from 1997-2019. There are long-lost tales from the early days, some popular favorites, and three stories exclusive to the book, including a delightful 16-page anecdotal portrait of Crew founder Lamar Hunt.

Rather than being chronological, the book is broken down into seven subject groupings:

• Origins
• Players
• Founder’s Park (In Memoriam)
• Staff
• Surreal Events
• Big Events
• Miscellaneous Silliness

This project started in January of 2016 when I learned that Mark Dougherty’s then-girlfriend / now-wife Jane Muir had unearthed a lengthy feature I had written about Doughboy in 1999 after he was snubbed for that year’s All-Star team. At the time, I just figured people needed to know more about Dougherty, so I went to Crew training one day at the stadium and then he and I sat in the empty locker room afterward and had wide-ranging conversation about his soccer career up to that point. It was a lot of fun.

Jane’s industriousness made me think of all the old stuff that would otherwise be lost forever except for the most intrepid researchers, so I wanted to put some stuff together to preserve some slices of Crew history for posterity. With the exception of my 2004-2005 output, which was not backed up and lost in a hard-drive crash (with the exception of a few random pieces I found in my email), my back catalog includes many features or Notebook excerpts that can stand on their own. A Massive Collection includes 40 of them, plus three new pieces exclusive to the book. All in all, I went through and counted 117 different Crew players whose names appear in the book, plus another 42 non-player Crew folks (coaches, executives, staff, media, etc), so it’s a collection that covers a lot of different ground. Columbus fought so hard to preserve the Crew and its history, so A Massive Collection, Volume 1 intends to celebrate that history.

The book isn’t a greatest hits per se, as there will be a Volume II and the stories are grouped by subject/theme, so if you have a favorite that didn’t make the first 288-page collection, it may very well appear in the second based on how things got grouped.

I’ve had to do some tinkering after the test printing process, so more test printings are on the way, but more details on the book and its release will follow in the coming weeks. For now, I just wanted to share some Crew news since a weekend without our Crew needs a dash of Black & Gold.

Note: This is an independent publication and not an official Columbus Crew publication.

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Twitter: @stevesirk
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A MASSIVE SEASON is now available as an ebook.