Sounders get poor-mouthed even as MLS champions

Seattle fans were lifting cups in celebration over the Sounders as MLS Champions on Sunday when sour grapes started coming from press box and pundits.

"Arguably, Seattle has been outplayed every time they've reached the MLS Cup final," sniffed an ESPN headline.

SoccerAmerica asked: "How did Seattle win going away in a final it was so outplayed?"

The sniffing extended to local media coverage. A much-admired Seattle critic, Town Hall founder David Brewster, posted on Facebook: "There will be plenty of rah-rah coverage of the Sounders' championship game, so you might want to read a more detached account, noting that the Toronto team outplayed Seattle, and the odd dynamics of the championship round of games."

Successes by the Seahawks, Sounders and Storm have obliterated Seattle's onetime reputation as a "bad sports town." Even those offering a "detached account" of Sunday's game paid grudging tribute to 69,000-plus "rabid" fans who filled the Clink on Sunday afternoon.

Still, there is a tradition of not quite crediting Seattle teams as deserving of their success.

RELATED: 'A week I will not forget': Sounders take down Toronto FC for 2nd MLS title

Brewster was referencing an article in The Guardian, which ceaselessly asks for my money but now will not get it. Its writer gazed down his nose and reported:

"Seattle was second in the West, a hefty 16 points adrift of Los Angeles FC, perhaps the best Major League Soccer team in history (when the ball is in the opposition half anyway). Yet the Sounders knocked them out, 3-1, at Banc of California Stadium with the help of two goals from Raul Ruidiaz.

"Each club's presence on the stage, then, was arguably a triumph for adaptability, stubbornness and the timely seizing of major moments, rather than the kind of consistent excellence that is rewarded over the course of a season-long grind."

We lack "consistent excellence." What was it that Oakland Raiders' owner Al Davis famously said? "Just win, baby!"

A curious strain of this argument has echoed hereabouts, and through multiple sports, for 60-plus years.

"Lee Schoenith was the man you loved to hate -- especially if you were from Seattle," hydroplane historian Fred Farley recently wrote.

Schoenith was out of Detroit, and owner of the Gale boats that in the 1950s fiercely contested the Gold Cup against Seattle-based Miss Thriftway and the Slo-Mo-Shun boats. He knew the rules better than our Bill Muncey, and memorably took a trophy that he should have lost home to the Detroit Yacht Club.

RELATED: A snapshot: Just how good have the Sounders been in the MLS?

When Schoenith's boats lost out here, however, he would blame Lake Washington. Choppy conditions were different from the Detroit River. A wind blew up at the wrong time. "When will that guy get over it?" asked my father. It was an era when you could walk down the block and hear the "ZZZZZZZZZ" sound coming out of every home.

The great USC football coach John McKay compiled an 11-3-1 record against the Dawgs, in an era when the Trojans were winning four national championships. Don James would turn the tables and go 10-7 against the University of Spoiled Children.

One of McKay's rare losses, however, occurred on one of those October days when the Jet Stream had dipped south, and a horizontal rain was blowing across Husky Stadium. The weather shut down his high-powered offense, claimed the coach.

A more recent case of sour grapes came in 2015, when the Sounders were delivering a 3-1 thrashing of the Vancouver Whitecaps. British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, a Whitecaps season ticket-holder, accused lads from south of the border of faking injuries, taking a dive in front of the referee, and snapping back up a moment later.

"The Seattle Princesses are putting on quite a performance tonight. So many miraculous recoveries," the Premier tweeted from her seat.

SEE ALSO: Sounders to play MLS Cup game at CenturyLink, the home they helped get built

The tweet became an issue in the Great White North, with CBC and the Globe and Mail commenting. Down here, Sounders fan Derek Richards said simply: "She sounds like a crybaby."

Premier Clark was voted out of office in 2017, and is now out of politics.

Derek Richards has become a poster child for the Sounders, standing with an expression of bliss and arms extended like Gen. DeGaulle at the liberation of Paris.

The web site mlssoccer.com named the Vancouver Whitecaps to this year's "Bottom Eight." Whitecaps fans, including ex-Premier Clark, watched two of their biggest rivals compete in their third championship match of the last four years ... just 144 miles down the road.

It's hard to get "more detached" about the Sounders.