The Weekly Dis
Celebrating Crewsmas with Duncan and Frankie
The Columbus Blue Jackets may or may not be in the draft lottery this year, so try this one:
A generous subscriber, The Professor, and her husband, The Referee, have donated two tickets for tonight's Columbus Crew-Chicago Fire game at the new Crew Stadium for the benefit of local, independent Disrespected media.
The seats are excellent. Parking is part of the package. If you leave $10 in my tip jar before noon today, you are entered to win them. (I get email addresses when I get tips. Mrs. Arace will take it from there.)
The Blue Jackets are returning from the Olympic break to make a playoff push. The Crew are kicking off a new season. You need Disrespect. Sign up by Crewsmas Boxing Day, Sunday, March 8, and your first month of a Silver Level subscription is free. Exclamation point.
The lost episode of Frankie & Duncan
For an old bastid, I've come a long way with the tech on the interwebs since I launched this website on Sept. 12, 2025, my 61st birthday. This month, I even got a YouTube channel online and began loading content. (Like, subscribe, share, rate, review, etc. Please and thank you.)
As far as I've come with the tech, it is clear that I've a long way to go before I approach proficiency. For instance: Yesterday, I accidentally put the word "f****er" in place of "presser" in a YouTube description of a Don Wadell press conference (seen below). The video in question was walled off for anyone under 18, and I had to delete the thing and redo the operation so my cats could watch. True story. Ask Porty.
Two days before that blunder, I pressed up royally. I had two Columbus Crew legends – Frankie Hejduk, who is in the team's Circle of Honor, and another former captain, Duncan Oughton – sit down for an interview at Jimmy V's in Westerville. Lights, cameras, action. We spent a wonderful hour going up and down memory lane, looking forward to new coach Henrik Rydström, discussing his roster and talking about his systems. Terrific stuff. We had a ball.
And then I went to edit the video and discovered that the audio was fubar. Completely unlistenable. The voice tracks were doubling over and echoing. I don't like using artificial intelligence, but I gave it a shot – and even A.I. hadn't a chance of fixing it. I don't have Hans Zimmer's number. I was screwed.
I'm pretty sure I know the error of my ways and I'm slightly optimistic I won't again make the same mistake. I want to apologize publicly to Duncan and Frankie for wasting their time. I hope we'll be able to do another sit-down and, if we do, I hope it has the same crackle to it. I expect it will. It'll be different. Maybe better.
I took some aspirin and chewed a couple of gummies and went through the soundtrack and salvaged some excerpts. Here, a small sample.
2006-2008
Sigi Schmid (RIP) is one of the greatest coaches in MLS history. How great? The league's Coach of the Year award is named in his honor. By the time of his retirement, he'd won more games (240) than any other MLS coach. (His record has since been surpassed by the adorable Bruce Arena.)
Longtime Crew fans remember when Schmid arrived in Columbus in 2006, a season that included a 13-game winless (0-7-6) streak that made Schmid question whether he was the right man for the Columbus job, or any other. His wife told him to suck it up and fight, like any son of a German immigrant whose father worked at a Pabst brewery would suck it up and fight. Which he did.
The Crew posted a combined 17-26-19 record over 2006 and 2007. Through much of this period, Hejduk and Oughton were rehabbing knee injuries.
Oughton: I was just doing rehab the whole time. I had an ACL, so I was coming back from my knee injury. I didn't come back until the later part of that season. It was hard to sit and watch, like, guys just getting battered and …
Hejduk: He was better than me. I didn't even go to training. I can't sit and watch people play. He would go and do his duty every day, while I was like, dude, this is gonna drive me nuts if I just sit on the sideline.
Oughton: It's hard for guys like us who are driven to win and not be able to help. You know it was especially hard for Frankie. We talked about it a lot. It was just hard to see the other guys go through that and not be shoulder-to-shoulder with them, not able to fight with them and stuff. It sucks. That's the best way to put it. It was the opposite of Massive. It was deflating personally. I'm not going to lie, I had moments where I was fricking walking through Schiller Park downtown, fricking crying, just like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to play again. My knees are f****ed. Then, you know, having someone like this guy next to you be like, ‘Nah, dude, we're getting back. We can do this thing. Let's go to the bar and talk about it.’
Hejduk: I took the opposite way. I just went to the bar and I was going to try to be happy as I can, dude, because that one will mess with your mind for a while. We got to go through it together. So it's cool and I think we helped each other out a lot in good ways.
Incomparable and Massive
The incomparable Guillermo Barros Schelotto, a legendary player for the Argentine powerhouse Boca Juniors, might've thought he was semi-retiring to Columbus when he joined the Crew in 2007. Schelotto made his Black & Gold debut on May 5, 2007, a day after his 34th birthday.
The Crew were 0-4-3 in their first seven games with No. 7 playing the No. 10. Then, things began to click, and the Crew got themselves into the playoff hunt. They wouldn't qualify for the tournament, but they discovered something about their collective. Meanwhile, the Massive movement was going from an inside joke in the Nordecke to point of pride for the city.
The next year, 2008, the Crew won the Supporters' Shield/MLS Cup double. Schelotto was the regular-season and playoff MVP. He had three assists in the championship game, the coup de grace being a no-look, parachuted flip onto the head of Hejduk for the final goal in a 3-1 victory over the New York Red Bulls in Carson, Calif.
Oughton: Sigi, what he was really, really good at was working the rules and putting together a locker room of guys that may not be, quote-unquote, the best players, but would die for each other.
Hejduk: He got a bunch of misfits, dude, that like no other team wanted. He got a lot of players with chips on their shoulders, and I think that's a big deal in sports in general. Anyone with a chip on their shoulder, whether it be a contract year or whatever it is, you're gonna go times 10. We had a tough group of like 15, 20 guys with chips on their shoulders. No one was really super happy with what was going on until we all finally gelled and molded. And like you said, that came together in the middle of '07, I think, once we got Schelotto. Like once that happened …
Oughton: Once we understood him – because at first it wasn't good. The guys were like, he would give the ball away nine out of 10 times, but the 10th time was a chance, was a goal. And we all realized we just have to work to win it back around him and get him the ball because one out of 10 is going to be a goal. So if we can get him the ball 20 times, we're scoring two goals. That's pretty good odds. If we can get him the ball 40 times, well, we got a good win here.
Once the guys bought into that, we worked it out as a group. And respect to Frankie. Forget The Disrespected right now. Respect to Frankie’s surfer mentality of like, Come on lads, come on, let’s go. It was awesome because sometimes I was the other way. I was like ‘Pull your finger out of your ass, you gotta do better.’
Hejduk: Once we figured out like, dude, he doesn't have to work as hard as us because his touch and his mind work so much different than ours. Then that's when we figured it out. … We figured out that he’s just Guillermo, and this is the way he’s going to play.
Duncan: He got better, though. He got better at the run and the fight.
Frankie: He just switched, man, then we made that run in '07 where we had to watch DC on television, and we were all at, I remember, the Irish bar Claddagh. Down on Front Street. And this was '07, and if DC tied or lost or something, we were going to the playoffs. So we still had a minimal chance. Guillermo was there, and DC ended up winning, I think, so we were out. But that got us a taste of like, bro, this can happen. Like this guy, this guy can change a whole team. And especially with the guys around him that he has that are just fricking fighters.
Oughton: Guillermo bought into the cause. He was at every event. Like, we had team gatherings. Had a big party at my house. Had a big party at his house. But he, he was at this one gathering with his kids and everyone on the team was there except one guy. That's not normal for a team. We were a proper team.
Hejduk: I mean, everyone was having fun, partying, doing whatever we could to just be misfits.
Oughton: Chad Marshall met his wife at one of our gatherings. That was our team. Proper.
Contextually, this next excerpt is not fair.
New coach Henrik Rydström recognizes that his team has had trouble defending counterattacks. Indeed, he has been quite candid about discussing the problem, often in a humorous way. (See my podcasts.)
The grizzled veterans who sat for my interview were not overly critical – they see that the new coach is taking stock and needs time – but the context is lost in the following piece of Q&A. I include it because I found Oughton's and Hejduk's candor to be refreshing.
Hejduk: If you’re a soccer player, bro, and you don't see that every goal that's scored on the Crew is a counterattack, I mean, come on.
Oughton: Up the spine of a team is always the most important. Yeah, the wingers and all that are hugely important, but this day and age, those that have a center back that’s just a rock, that will organize, has pace and is just a beast … If you can find one of those, whether it be on the left or the right, shouldn’t matter whether he's left or right footed, someone that can make sure everything's solid around you. You know, like that type of guy is huge.
Disrespected: Another Chad Marshall?
Duncan: Kind of, yeah, 100 percent.
Disrespected: Frankie, how do you fix the counter-attacking problem?
Hejduk: You do the opposite of them. Let them have the ball every once in a while. And you counterattack them. Don't play out the back every freaking single goal kick. Like, God, man, play it forward every once in a while. It's okay to play the ball forward and then pressure them in their own half. And we counterattack.I don't think we do that enough. We're so prideful on the way that we want to play, I think. And for me, teams have figured it out and they know. Like, it becomes a little bit predictable for me. Isn’t like the definition of soccer to be unpredictable?
I like Conor Garland acquisition. Do you?
Pop quiz: What did Columbus Blue Jackets president/general manager Don Waddell do at last year's trade deadline?
If you don't remember, leave me a tip.
Truth is, I don't remember, either, so never mind the tip (unless you are a very nice person).
Last year, Waddell claimed Christian Fischer off waivers from the Detroit Red Wings and traded a fourth-round draft pick to the San Jose Sharks for Luke Kunin. I had to look it up, and then double-check how to spell their names.
The Jackets missed the playoffs by two points.
Now, trade-deadline activity does not necessarily impact a team's playoff potential. But adding forgettable depth forwards – no offense to (checks spellings) Fischer or Kunin – is not exactly a turbo boost.
This year might be different.
Here's Don Waddell's press conference Friday afternoon.
Waddell wanted to add a top-six forward. Check. (With the proviso that Garland is best suited for middle-six duty)
Waddell wanted a player with term, for a measure of cost certainty, as he looks ahead to negotiations with pending restricted free agents Kent Johnson and Adam Fantilli and five unrestricted free agents, including Charlie Coyle, Mason Marchment and Boone Jenner. Check.
As for those UFAs, Waddell concluded a month ago, before the Olympic break, that he was going to keep the band together for the playoff push and worry about contract negotations at the end of the season. (The same holds for interim-not-interim coach Rick Bowness.)
Waddell was a buyer and not a seller. Both of those things, he felt, were important to the locker room. Check, check.
"You can, as good as we're going, we could destroy that room with the wrong move," Waddell said. "Pretty much all the UFAs knew that they weren't going anywhere ... and we were going to try to add to this group. So the mood in the room is critical and Rick and I talked about it last night we talked about it today. He's ecstatic that we made the one move and we didn't move anybody out. We didn't clog up anything. He said we have a great room. Got lots of depth at each position now. So I think the room is going to be fine."
I put out a question to a few people in the league I know well and respect fulsomely. The text exchanges went like this:
Emptier afternoons
I did not know Jim "Boomer" Gordon, the longtime host of an alleged hockey talk show on SiriusXM's NHL Network station, but, oh, did I enjoy his company.
It was long ago that I cut my sports-talk radio consumption down to near zero. I kept my satellite radio subscription in part because I loved Boomer's show, The Point. He could talk about sports, and he knew them all. But, then, he could talk about anything, and he often did. You know authentic when you hear it. There was nothing fake about this man.
Boomer became my afternoon companion when I was picking up kids from school, and he remained so as my nest emptied and emptied. He died recently after a long bout with cancer, and I, like millions of others, will miss him. Boomer was 55. Afternoons will never be the same for me. RIP.
Posts
I write M-W-F for paid subscribers, and on Saturday I present The Weekly Dis, free to all. This week had a regular rhythm. If you're not a paid sub, please consider it. I'm cheap.
Monday:
Self explanatory.
Michael Arace
Wednesday:
Man, this playoff race is tough on the nerves of Blue Jackets fans. Depending on the day, you're either full of joy or jamming pencils up your nostrils.
Michael Arace
Friday:
I'm not a genius, but a genius was not needed to predict that Waddell wouldn't be a seller at the NHL trade deadline.
Michael Arace
Pods
My podcasts – Cannon Balls and The Crewcible – are available at Spotify and Apple Podcasts, among other platforms. You can also check out my new YouTube channel. (Like, subscribe, share, rate, review, etc. Please and thank you.)
Crew fans can find fresh interviews with Rydström and Chicago Fire coach Gregg Berhalter, formerly of Columbus and the USMNT.
Thanks for reading. If you're enjoying what you see and you are of a mind, click on the link below and leave a tip. If you've yet to subscribe, consider making a small hop over a paywall. It'll help keep local, independent media disrespected. You can follow me @MichaelArace1.bsky.social. Have a nice day.
Click below to leave a tip. Thanks.
Michael Arace
