When the Wright brothers launched Flyer I in the sand dunes outside of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, no one had ever heard of the place. Hell, no one had even heard of the two brothers from Ohio who specialized in bicycles before they pushed their flying machine down the track and into the sky. History has a way of picking the unknowns from the margins of history and pushing them into the headlines. The events enshrine their locations, imbue them with meaning, changing them forever. We do not know the history we create in the moment. Only time will tell, but things will never be the same.

Unexpected Heroes

Elliot Barr did not have the typical soccer background. Growing up in Richmond, Virginia, his goal was always to play American football. He was a big kid and playing a game that values size appealed to him. That was his path until in middle school he suffered a concussion in a game. His mother, a nurse, decided he would find another sport to play. “He’s not playing anymore.” And that was it. Heading into high school, Eliot switched to soccer.

As he got older and went to Virginia State University, Elliot found himself playing the game less and less even as his exposure to the world game grew. “Guy who lived across from me in college was from Amsterdam and had a XXX flag. It looked cool.” After college, he went into the teaching profession and got roped into working a youth soccer camp. One of the perks of the job was tickets to Kickers matches. Elliot fell in love with the team during the summer of 2014.

Soccer fandom in Richmond is “very niche. The thing about it, Richmond isn’t a great sports city.” To get around the limitations of the fanbase, the Kickers would distribute tickets to youth programs in the area. In fact, the club would build the cost of tickets to the match into the entry fees of local camps to ensure fans would show up to the matches. Matches drew 5,000 to 6,000 fans, but the club’s stands were a decidedly lighter shade of skin tone than the city itself. Taylor Rockwell, host of the Total Soccer Show and well-known Richmond Kickers fan, described the attendees as “a pretty caucasian crowd.” The club focused on attracting fans from the more affluent parts of Richmond, which Elliot doesn’t begrudge them for. “I don’t blame them for recruiting who they recruit to. Any kind of money is good money.”

But recognizing the club’s diversity problem in the stands doesn’t mean Elliot was always thrilled with it. “Being a Black supporter, you always have to look over your shoulder and be like ‘am I being judged for this?” When Elliot proposed to his wife at a Richmond match, her tense, whispered command, picked up by a microphone, was “don’t you dare embarrass me in front of these white people.”

Eliot is a member of the Red Army supporter group. The Red Army typically brings 100 fans on a given gameday. Less than 10% of that crowd are Black. “As a Black supporter, I had to learn to be more outspoken.” Elliot decided to form a supporter group for Black fans of the Kickers - Riverside 93. It gave him a platform to begin to educate the Red Army as a whole on race issues. “If I don’t do it, it will be harder for other supporters of color to feel welcome.”

Across the country, in Madison, Wisconsin, Kyle Carr grew up a soccer fan from birth. His parents, both immigrants from the Caribbean, had a passion for the game that they passed to their son. Kyle was a Liverpool fan, played FIFA, and watched soccer with his dad. He attended Milwaukee Wave matches as a kid. And, while he enjoyed playing the game, his playing career was over very early in his childhood. “I like slide tackling and apparently that’s frowned upon.”

The soccer scene in Madison was incredibly fractured in the era before a local team established itself. “Everyone had a premier league team, so there were lots of fan chapters here.” Each bar was a homeground for fans of the English clubs on the weekends, with groups of fans gathering in the early morning hours to watch their favorite teams play halfway around the world. While some connective tissue grew among the fans of a league far away, it wasn’t until Forward Madison was established that those diverse fan groups finally came together.

Kyle was a fan of Forward Madison from day one, almost literally. It was at one of the first meetings, with the ownership group introducing itself to the fans, that Kyle decided the Flamingos would be his club, though this was before the name or mascot of the club was known. He immediately appreciated the approach of the owners, who seemed to truly care about the fans’ input. From Kyle’s perspective, that approach hasn’t changed in the years that followed. “The club’s leadership is a hardworking group, a fun-loving group, a group that wants to be the best they can be. They put in the work.”

Soon after the announcement of the club’s name and mascot, the Flock was born. The supporter group gained traction early on, both in Madison and across social media. Soccer fans previously divided by Euro club rivalries had a common purpose and rallied around their local club. Kyle was no exception to this rule, but certainly stood out in the crowd because of the color of his skin.

“There’s a decent population of Black people living in Madison, WI, but when you go to Forward Madison games, it doesn’t show it as much.” The stands simply didn’t reflect the demographics of the city. La Barra 608, one of the earlier supporter groups within the Flock, brought together the Latinx fans into a unified block. When a few of the other Black Forward fans recruited Kyle to help them found a similar group for Black and African American fans, he was all in. “It was something we had always wanted to do...to create a safe space for anyone who identifies as Black or african american that comes to Forward Madison games. To see people like you, makes it a little bit easier.” Featherstone Flamingos was born.

The Blackness of the Rivalry

“I was on twitter and Elliot had reached out and asked ‘Do you want to wager for Richmond versus Forward Madison,” Kyle reminisced. “So I accepted and it became a bottle of Hennesey and I was like ‘even better!’ because I love Hennesey, I love liquor, I love wagering...with liquor on the line...as a classic Wisconsinite does.” Elliot remembers the night in similar fashion. “I was on Twitter and this other Black guy started talking stuff, named Kyle. So we were joking back and forth and I hit him up, ‘whoever wins the Forward/Richmond match gets a bottle of Hennesy.’ And that was just between me and him. We were the only two that knew about it.”

The rivalry doesn’t really make sense on paper, which Elliot freely admits. “It’s so weird because Richmond and Forward are complete opposites. They’re so much opposite, they’re alike. We’re this old-school team, 4-4-2, we don’t really talk about ourselves, we’re not really on social media like that. And here comes Foward Madison and they’re like ‘fuck it, to the wind.’ They’re Meme FC, they’re about fun.” So why the decision to bet that night? “It’s simple. They had a black supporter group.”

The Blackness of the Derby is an aspect of it that can not and should not be ignored. Even the choice of wager is essentially Black. “Hennessey is a cultural drink. It’s that drink, when you’re at the cookout and having a good time, you pour yourself a glass and just talk about good times. It’s not something where you drink a whole bunch and get shit faced,” Elliot explained. “You just drink and hang out and chill. There’s just something in the Black community, we just naturally gravitate to it. The Henny Derby probably doesn’t get started if Kyle had said ‘Nah, I don’t like Hennessey.’”

While the Henny Derby had begun to percolate on Twitter, it wasn’t until the third match of 2019 that it really blew up. As Kyle puts it, “the third match was how the Henny Derby kind of became what it is. It was an overlapping of great timing.” That timing, of course, began with Elliot being tasked by the Richmond Kickers to create a cultural night, because “the Kickers front office was like 6 people.” So he decided to have a day in soccer focused on Black supporters, a community night. Elliot coordinated multiple local non-profits to come in and have the crowd help raise money for them. For three months leading up to that night, September 14, he was a one man promotion machine for the event.

At the same time, Forward Madison was doing a road trip to the match, making stops across the country (Elliot described that road trip as “white people love this kind of shit and blew it up”). Members of the For The Culture podcast/video team showed up. NCFC, another USL League One side, had a group of supporters show up for the match. The Total Soccer Show crew had invited Pablo Maurer down for the match and he took a picture of the Henny Derby Trophy that “broke the internet.” “All these people showed up, it was kind of this phenomenon...We had guys from Atlanta, from Massachusetts, from New York, everyone wanted to get to this spot,” Kyle remembers. “That’s when the Henny Derby became this thing.” The night was nothing short of a massive success for Elliot, the non-profits, and the Derby. The only spot on the evening was the scoreline. “We lost, but it didn’t matter.”

A Lasting Legacy

Aaron West, a well-traveled journalist who has witnessed some of the biggest rivalries in soccer around the world, sees the Henny Derby as unique in American soccer. “It’s not something you can force...Rivalries come from teams playing each other, going head to head. We haven’t really had too much of that happening over the last 25 years. We just haven’t had that much history. We have to build our history.” And while the Henny Derby is as fresh a rivalry as there is, West was immediately attracted to it. “I was reading about it and was like “Holy shit, this is dope!” I love it. I love the idea of it. I love the ownership aspect of these Black supporters groups making something their own.”

Alexis Gurerros of the Soccer Cooligans sees “the perfectly named Henny Derby” as a uniquely American experience. “There’s so many questions when it comes to American soccer, about what the culture should look like. No one really knows. Every fan sort of brings what they’ve experienced growing up to it. So what exactly is American culture? If you had to ask me, there’s very few instances where I can say ‘this is American culture’ and the Henny Derby is one of those things. It’s wildly organic, it was created by the fans, everyone seems to agree, everyone loves it because it’s dope...This is exactly what American soccer should develop into.”

The Blackness of the Henny Derby is central to its fundamental authenticity. Taylor Rockwell seized on this idea as he focused on the founders and how the Derby came to exist. “It’s a very unique thing for American soccer and certainly for lower division American soccer. And it’s also very representative of the groups that started the rivalry. It’s this thing that exists outside of mainstream, white, soccer culture. It isn’t meant for anyone else.” The ownership of the Derby lies with these two Black supporter groups, separated by 943 miles, led by these two outspoken leaders, Kyle and Elliot.

Kyle sees the future of the Henny Derby as a cultural touchstone for Black soccer fans across the country. “I think it’s going to be one of those things where, especially in the Black soccer scene...it is like a homecoming, like a reunion, it’s kind of like the 4th of July party that you have, it’s that big event, and I think it’s going to become this thing that many Black soccer supporters are going to want to attend it at some point. Kind of like a Mecca almost. I can see it getting to that level, where you have to go to the Henny Derby.”

Elliot's words mirror Kyle’s. “The Henny Derby shows all the beautiful aspects of Black culture in soccer. It truly is one of the best aspects of, not only Black culture, but American soccer culture. If you ask someone what is American soccer culture, they have a hard time answering, because we want to model so much on the European game and not creating our own. That’s what the Henny Derby is - it’s its own thing. When you hear the word derby, you think of two teams that hate each other, that’s not the case with Forward and Richmond. I want this derby to be something that both communities feel that this derby opened doors and broke down barriers.”

Maybe history can be written in a Twitter DM between two soccer fans talking shit. Maybe a simple bottle of liquor can represent the cultural ties that stretch across a country’s geography and unite two men, two fanbases, two clubs, into a beautiful brotherhood. The history of the Henny Derby will be written each season moving forward, with different names on the backs of the jerseys and different faces in the stands. But the Derby’s foundation will continue into the future unchanged: two Black soccer fans, looking for a comfortable space, and finding it in a rivalry. Today continues that rivalry.

- Dan Vaughn