EDITOR's NOTE: In celebration of Major League Soccer's 30th season, MLSsoccer.com is exploring untold stories of all 30 clubs. "30 Clubs, 30 Stories" will be unveiled throughout 2025.
The sky is orange and Taylor Twellman is trying to ruin it.
The 2006 Houston Dynamo have reached MLS Cup. They’re the first Houston Dynamo team to make it there because, at that point, they’re the only Houston Dynamo team to ever exist. And Twellman, in front of over 22,000 fans, thousands of which have travelled in a highlighter-tinged caravan from Houston to Dallas with monetary support from Greater Houston’s most notable furniture salesman, is trying to ruin what should be a perfect day for the league’s newest team.
But 113 minutes into a scoreless match, New England’s Khano Smith picked up the ball at midfield, barreled past a defender and snuck the ball to Twellman as he sprints toward the 18-yard box. One touch and a rolling left-footed shot later, and the Revolution are roughly eight minutes away from their first league title.
Houston take the ensuing kickoff as soon as they can. The broadcast is still busy showing replays, stats and hero shots. The ball goes wide right to Houston’s Brian Mullan. He sees striker Brian Ching, the furthest orange shirt forward, sprinting. Mullan thumps it toward him. The cross is deflected. But the ball is still heading toward Ching. And Ching is still heading toward the goal.
Houston-bound
There have been rumors for a while now. The 2005 San Jose Earthquakes, in the middle of a Supporters’ Shield-winning season, heard plenty about relocating that season. It came as no surprise in December – a month and a half after the Quakes crashed out of the playoffs in the Conference Semifinals – when the league announced the whole club would be packing up and moving to Houston.
Even if the decision to move the team didn’t sneak up on head coach Dom Kinnear, it didn’t make his decision to follow them to Texas any easier. Kinnear grew up in the Bay Area. He went to his first Quakes game as a 7-year-old. It hurt to see his local club no longer be local.
The logistics weren’t easy either. If he moved with the team, so did his wife and three young kids. After changing their minds more times than they could count, the Kinnears decided to give Houston a shot. In part because Kinnear didn’t want to see anyone else in charge of his Shield winners.
“I loved coaching the team. I didn't want anybody else to have the chance to coach that group of guys. That was it,” Kinnear, who’s now an assistant coach with FC Cincinnati, told MLSsoccer.com.
“We were, in my mind, probably the best team to never win MLS Cup. Look at that team. It was a roster full of some great MLS players. Now, times have changed, rules have changed, styles have changed. I still think that team was pretty damn good.”
As pretty damn good as they were, the full-scale move could have easily derailed them. The Dynamo roster spent preseason focusing on the Multiple Listing Service as much as Major League Soccer. Players regularly missed time to look at houses or pick up a car as the squad tried to settle in a new city.
“Let's just say, I think this day and age, we do a better job of making sure we're taking care of players so they can move,” said Pat Onstad, a goalkeeper on that squad who is now Houston’s president of soccer.
“I was actually the first one kind of through the door, the first one to arrive in the city, and it was a bit of a mess. Fortunately, I have a very understanding wife. But we had two little toddlers in tow. It took some time to kind of get us going.”
Even with an XI that included early MLS standouts like Dwayne De Rosario, Alejandro Moreno, Ricardo Clark, Stuart Holden and Brad Davis, the 2006 Dynamo could have struggled and no one would have been surprised. Who knew how they’d deal with so much change, so much heat during the summer, and so much uncertainty about how the city would embrace a new soccer team.
Turning out
For better or worse, Jim McIngvale is a Houston legend. As the owner of Gallery Furniture, he first caught Houston’s attention in March 1983 when he began recording increasingly absurd commercials for his store. They are perhaps the most Local TV Commercial of any collection of local TV commercials ever. It’s mostly McIngvale – possibly in costume – talking just short of Texas cattle auctioneer speeds in hopes of convincing you that stocking your home with his store’s furniture will “Save. You. [does a little jump while holding up cash] MONEY.”
“Mattress Mack” and his commercials have been an inescapable part of existence in Houston for decades now. He’s recently become known for cashing multi-million dollar bets on Texas sports teams as another way to draw attention to his business. So maybe it was out of the goodness of his heart, just another marketing opportunity, or both when he decided to provide everything Dynamo fans could need to travel to MLS Cup 2006.
Mack paid for several buses full of people to make their way to Pizza Hut Park in Frisco, Texas. He also reportedly covered several hundred free parking spots for anyone making the drive. So, the day of the match, thousands of orange-clad Houston fans gathered at Gallery Furniture and took off together to turn a “neutral-site” game into something much less friendly for New England.
Immediate success
The Dynamo found out whether or not Houston would pay attention the first time they took the pitch. On April 2, 2006, over 25,000 people crowded into now-demolished Robertson Stadium for the club’s first-ever match. None of them knew how long it would take the team to get comfortable in their new home.
They got an immediate and noisy answer. Brian Ching scored four times and Alejandro Moreno got on his bike to add another as Houston rolled to a 5-2 win over Colorado. It became apparent that this would be a mutually beneficial relationship for everyone involved.
“I think what we were all unsure of is we had a lot of media coverage, and we did a lot of appearances when we first got to Houston, but I don't think we understood the impact that we had in the community and the support that we would get,” Onstad said. “So that first game, I think for everybody, really, right away, we just kind of became part of the community.”
After that first game, Houston rolled to a second-place finish in the West. Despite adjusting to a new city, a new climate – seriously, the heat came up a lot in interviews – and a new stadium, the Dynamo set themselves up to avenge the 2005 Earthquakes’ playoff mishap.
The redemption arc didn’t come easy, though. Houston went down 2-1 to Chivas USA in the first leg of the Conference Semifinals. But the series had to go back to Houston. Houston tied things up on aggregate with a Brad Davis goal in the 64th minute, then went ahead and won the whole series thanks to a 92nd-minute winner from Ching.
Ching, obviously, had a knack for showing up in big moments. That’s probably because he’d fight through whatever he needed to fight through to make those moments happen.
“I remember I was doing a halftime talk. [Ching] split his eye open in the first half, and he's on the table getting looked at and getting stitched as he's listening to my halftime talk,” Kinnear said. “Further on, you know, he would get his knee drained at halftime to play games, and would just do anything to play. And not just to play, but to win.”
Houston followed that up with a less dramatic 3-1 win over Colorado in the Conference Final. They were now a win away from giving their new home a title.
Hero's moment
Ching is still heading toward the goal. And Brian Mullan’s deflected cross has skipped off a Revolution defender and directly into Ching’s path. Seventy-three seconds after New England started considering the best technique for lifting a trophy, the Dynamo tied the game.
Penalties followed. But, c’mon. That goal, in front of a full house of Houston fans, reminded everyone that this was the Dynamo’s day.
“Once we got into the penalty kicks, I think our team just kind of felt like it is just destiny, right?” Ching said.
“All I remember was the sky being orange. You know, it was just like everything kind of worked out for us through a lot of hard work, through a challenging season of movement and dealing with the heat and a lot of injuries personally. Getting to lift the Cup at the end of the year was very special.”
Ching’s goal is one of the most unexpected moments in MLS history. But it’s also a moment that fits neatly into the story of a team that prided itself on dealing with whatever came its way.
It also set the tone for what would come next. The Dynamo ran it back the next season and, for the second MLS Cup in a row, came back from a 1-0 deficit to beat New England.
20th season
It’s been a while since the Dynamo have topped the MLS world, but they’ve won a couple of US Open Cups in the meantime. Now celebrating their 20th-anniversary season, Houston are trying to put together a side and club culture that resembles those early days. If it does resemble those teams, the folks at the club feel that it will resemble the city itself.
“It's a fine balance of looking back and trying to recapture that moment in time and those cultures and those teams when the league is very different now and the landscape is different in every aspect,” said current Dynamo head coach Ben Olsen, later pinpoiniting defenders Griffin Dorsey and Franco Escobar as players who could slot right into Houston’s mid-2000s squads.
“But I do think identity is still important to have in who you are as a team and organization. What do you want to be about? And I do think those teams being gritty and resilient and tough to break down, hard working and diverse, I think those resonate with the community of Houston.
“I'm not going to sit here and act like I'm an expert on Houston, but what I've known of Houston, and what I know now over the last couple of years, is that it is a working class, it's resilient, tough, it's gritty. There is that side to Houston that I certainly try to tap into with our group, when we talk about identifying with our fans and what this community is about.”
Nothing beats a first title, though. Not when the first remains a true original in MLS lore.
“I think there was a lot of mental toughness that had to go on throughout the season,” Ching said. “Like I said, it’s the transition of guys going away from their families and then getting their families in, acclimating, getting kids into new schools, and adjusting to life off the field.
“ …So for me, I think I was most proud about that season out of all that I've been through as a professional. I think that season and that group, to be able to deal with what we did, and the transition of moving, experiencing a whole new city, the whole environment regarding the heat, and then coming out on top at the end – I don't think a lot of teams could have done that.”
