TFC forward Jozy Altidore, centre, participates in a team practice in Toronto on Thursday. TFC will take on defending MLS champion Seattle Sounders on Saturday in the MLS Cup final.Frank Gunn/The Globe and Mail
By scoring the goal that propelled Toronto FC into its second consecutive Major League Soccer championship game – despite hobbling on a bad ankle – Jozy Altidore played his way into Toronto sporting lore.
Just don't ask him to talk about it.
"Yeah, I'll play," Altidore said on Thursday when someone opened a news conference for Saturday's MLS Cup, between the Reds and the Seattle Sounders, by asking how his ankle felt.
The next person up tried again. This time, the question was about any lingering pain in his sprained ankle.
"It doesn't matter," was the reply.
The third reporter to try to get the impassive striker to open up took a different tack. This query raised Altidore's girlfriend, tennis pro Sloane Stephens, who fought back from a long-term foot injury to win the U.S. Open in September.
Was her fight an inspiration? This produced Altidore's longest answer of the session. Now we were getting somewhere.
"Um, a bit different. Different sports," Altidore said. "How she was able to come back and recover, win that big tournament like the U.S. Open, to really go after it, says a lot about her and her character. I'm proud of her. Hopefully, she can keep on next year and do more of the same."
Well, fair enough. Bobby Baun didn't spend much time waxing poetic about that big goal he scored on a broken leg for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 1964 Stanley Cup final. Others would have to talk about the salient points of this year's MLS Cup.
First, there is not much of a sense around TFC that anyone is looking at Saturday's game as a chance for revenge against the Sounders, who, while shutting down TFC's offence in last year's Cup, were not allowed a shot on goal themselves and squeaked out a win on penalty kicks. Revenge implies your opponent somehow did you wrong.
What happened last year is that TFC wasn't quite as good as the Sounders in the esoteric way soccer decides its championships – penalty kicks, if 30 minutes of extra time cannot produce a winner. The sense around the Reds is that this year's title game is more about fulfilling a mission.
TFC management spent the off-season making the Reds into what a lot of MLS observers called the deepest team in league history, with the additions of midfielder Victor Vazquez, defender Chris Mavinga and the promotion of goaltender Alex Bono. They went on to set a record for most points in the regular season with 69, which landed the MLS Supporters' Shield as the first-place finisher, and they won the Canadian club championship. They are now in position for another first.
If the Reds can beat Seattle, they will become the first MLS team to win a one-season treble – the Supporters' Shield, the Canadian club championship and the MLS Cup. In the 21-year history of MLS, only six teams have won both the Supporters' Shield and the MLS Cup. None have hit the trifecta.
"We know it's there," Reds head coach Greg Vanney said. "It was an objective or goal for us, but really, it's about one game."
"Of course we would love to be the first team to win the treble," TFC defender Drew Moor said. "We put ourselves in pretty good position, but we're not thinking about what we did previously this year. We know we're coming off a very good regular season and have found a way in the playoffs to get ourselves back in the MLS Cup.
"We're going to leave it all on the line for 90 minutes, if it takes 120 minutes, if it takes penalties on Saturday night, we've got a group of guys in the locker room and coaches that have experienced a lot. We'll do everything we can to cap it off."
Thanks to the Toronto Argonauts, the city that is starved for major sporting championships was given a recent taste with the Grey Cup championship. But Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment is still looking for its first title as an ownership group that goes back about 20 years, with TFC joining the Leafs and Toronto Raptors in 2007, and the players are acutely aware of the hunger among the fans.
"It's a must win because we set it as our primary goal at the start of the year," Moor said. "We want the league championship for this club, ourselves, the fans, this city. It's been an amazing season so far. To cap it off with an MLS Cup would really reward us."
Back at the news conference, there was one final attempt to engage Altidore. Someone asked both team captain Michael Bradley and Altidore to describe how Sebastian Giovinco has adapted to MLS in the past couple of years.
Bradley, who knows how the media game is played, went on at length about how Giovinco adapted his skills to MLS while Altidore stared off into space. But it was a misty sort of stare. Almost one of those walking hand-in-hand into the sunset with Bradley, Giovinco and the Cup kind of things.