Where I got the idea for THE COLORS WE BLEED FOR
The kids these days don’t drink. I get it, less than twenty years ago you could buy a 30 rack for $6.99, less if you were in a fraternity and got a pallet discount and paid a Jimmy John’s driver a little extra to transport all those cans from the liquor store once a week. Those days are long gone and I am closer to driving a Gran Torino and saying ‘get off my lawn.’ I’m not sure when, but at some point, I became old. Culture and drinking culture were different back then. The stories, the myths, and legends, that old men would tell in bars, are in danger of being lost. So, I decided to turn a couple of my personal favorites into a book.
By Adam Faraca, weary traveler
8/12/20254 min read
Brady Street in the mid 2000s still had a Little Italy vibe, but also had a grittiness that you had to be there for to understand its charm. The Gloriosos still owned Glorioso’s, Mr. Glorioso was still alive, Jack’s was Vucceria (I’d bet anything I spelt that wrong), and Peter Sciortino’s was glorious. My college job was down there, and so was my favorite watering hole. The Nomad. It’s still there. But the 2000s were truly the glory days.
It was before the smoking ban in bars and restaurants. Bohemian hipster girls hand rolled cigarettes. Intellectuals drank away their sorrows. Magic Hat Number 9 provided apricot deliciousness before the craft beer movement gained steam. It was a soccer bar. It was a Brady Street bar back before the irredeemable shit sippers of the Murray Avenue Neighborhood Association ruined North Avenue. It was a Dutch bar that was not a part of the Benelux Group. It was nostalgia on tap in a time when the world was simpler and optimism sprang eternal. It’s still there, still good, but don’t expect to be taken back in time fifteen or twenty years the second you walk through the door.
What I loved most about prime Nomad was the people. There was always at least one guy with a soccer jersey, scarf, and little hat, 365 days a year. Every exotic tobacco in the world filled the air. The lighting was bad, in a good way. The beer was like a dollar more than the place next door, which was enough of a deterrent to keep out most of the riff raff. They had their world-famous special, the Prix Fix (a loose cigarette, a shot of rail whiskey, and a PBR). There were usually people from every continent, many of whom had arrived in Milwaukee that very day. If you were a world traveler, you just knew it was the place to be. And if you weren’t, you probably didn’t know about it at all. It was the epitome of the phrase ‘if you know you know.’
At the time I was a sponge for old soccer stories. There would always be an old guy who insisted he saw Beckenbauer or Puskas or some other legend when he was a kid in Europe or South America. Men who played in rec leagues, amateur, or even low-level pro leagues would come in wearing track jackets or parkas with their club badges and numbers or initials on their chests. If you got too rowdy you got collared and belted. Somebody was always cracking a beer and lighting a cigarette and then sharing a personal story about a soccer legend, then finishing the story by the time they finished their pint and smoke. That’ll never happen again, but at the time, it was epic.
Ronaldinho was in his prime, Carlos Tevez was at West Ham, and the Ronaldo and Messi era hadn’t even truly begun yet. Oh god, take me back. Those were the days. All roads led back to Nomad. It was not too long after George Best died, so plenty of old timers were willing to offer up stories about the fifth Beatle and other players from the 60s and 70s.
The ones I liked best were the stories that had been passed down through generations. Some old guy would claim his grandfather personally knew Giuseppe Meazza, or that he was in Torino that fateful day, one guy even claimed that his dad missed his own birth to see Pele in 1958. They were all exaggerations told by worldly old men, but they all had at least a grain, if not a ton of truth to them. The men who told those stories are probably all dead by now. They were old back then. But I was there, and their stories live on in me.
I didn’t want to just write a book of collected works of stories and second-hand anecdotes, I wanted to research the stories, find out what I could about the men who lived those lives, and keep them alive. I didn’t want it to be the American soccer version of Aesop’s Fables, but I didn’t want it to be a dull dry biography, either. I wanted the book to be mostly grounded in reality, to honor the men I was writing about, but to keep some of the authenticity and enthusiasm the storytellers had delivered when they regaled me.
That was really hard to do. It turned out some of the stories were more stories than recounts of factual events. In some cases the truth was stranger than fiction. Sometimes guys I discovered in research would become scene stealers who ended up going from footnotes to main characters. Initially I wanted to include the text ‘An Unauthorized Nonfiction Novel.’ But I realized I’d exaggerated exaggerations and caricatures of real men who were too far removed from the stories of their own lives. The next draft was just ‘A Nonfiction Novel’ and was true to the information that was available twenty years ago- the truth at the time I’d heard the stories. Only that wasn’t the truth. My research kept coming up with countless contradictions and time gaps I couldn’t account for. The second draft was entertaining, but still not true enough. I wanted to honor my heroes by authentically telling their stories in a meaningful way but not losing the spirit of the oral tradition that had been passed on to me at Nomad. I reached out across the pond to world travelers and people with greater knowledge of the subjects than me. They filled in the gaps as best they could. Finally, nearly 20 years after I’d gulped down import beer and listened, I was ready to capture the emotion and tell the true stories of THE COLORS WE BLEED FOR.