So long to duNord, for now anyway …

Bruce McGuire with Dark Cloud supporters at a Thunder game.

It’s a good time to bring up something I should have mentioned a week or two ago. If any of you were duNord followers you know that Bruce McGuire has decided to take a break from his website for a while, maybe for good. I’m lucky I can call Bruce a good friend. He’s been very supportive of what I’ve been doing here at IMS and helped me make great connections in the soccer journalism world.

Rochester, Minnesota born and bred, McGuire grew up playing soccer in his junior high and high school years. Like many in his age group, he learned a lot about soccer in the early years from PBS’s “Soccer Made In Germany” program, a weekly show hosted by Toby Charles. Bruce has been profiled on several websites, but none better than Adam Spangler’s, This is American Soccer.

Bruce was active with Warner Brothers records in the 90′s and worked with groups that you and I have in our CD libraries–groups like Flaming Lips and Jane’s Addiction. However, in my opinion, Bruce’s greatest contribution has been duNord Futbol. DuNord Futbol started out with a different name and as a personal blog in which Bruce posted a lot of soccer information that was unintelligible to most of his non-soccer friends. Bruce started another blog, this one just about soccer, for his soccer friends. That quickly grew into duNord Futbol, a blog many of us have grown to depend on for all of our soccer link needs. In several years’ time duNord became an American soccer landmark website. Bruce is what I call a human soccer aggregator,  but he’s done so much more than that. Bruce has a way of looking at the big picture, cutting through the crap and getting to the point. Those qualities can often be head when talking to Bruce about soccer or listening to him on the many soccer talk-show podcasts he has been a guest on. His quirky sense of humor always comes through in his posts and in conversation and endears him to many.

Hanging around with Bruce is sort of a surreal experience. Bruce is one of those people who, even discounting his 6’5″ frame and red beard, seems to be bigger than life. His stories take on a life of their own. He always seems to lead the way, not by choice necessarily, just because that’s who Bruce is.

Bruce is also the guy who coined U.S. soccer, “The sport of the internet.” The sport had a great following but the mainstream media wouldn’t cover it, so we went out and created the content ourselves. That’s exactly what happened and Bruce would spend hours a day combing the internet for U.S. soccer stories first, as well as international features, compiling all the best from that day and then sharing them with us. In fact Bruce created an art form of searches, keeping them a semi-secret, using his different search engines and key-words and a complicated system he had created to dig up some of the most obscure but interesting soccer stories on the net.

In the end, the hours and hours a day he spent doing this got be too much and he’s decided to take a break for a while. It may be for a few weeks or may it may be forever. Whatever the case, we all are indebted to Bruce McGuire for all he’s done to promote soccer in this country. However, knowing Bruce, he will pop up on the soccer scene again soon, with something creative, new and different. Enjoy the rest Bruce, you deserve it.

Spangler of TIAS also penned another article about Bruce and duNord on Friday, which was somewhat the motivating factor for me to post this article. However, Spangler is introducing another perspective on how to replace the ‘missing links’ from duNord. I recommend giving his article a read. I will also be posting about this same subject later today.