Portland is allowed to call itself weird, but you can’t. Spring is headed to summer, which means they’re all mostly outdoors now — tree-hugging, bike-riding, downward-dogging, having vegan picnics in the park, racing to Powell’s Books to buy “How to Survive in the Woods.” Except for the night the Portland Fire packed them inside Moda Center like sardines.
It was the first WNBA game there in a generation — 24 years — and the eclectic crowd of 19,335 on May 9 was the league’s largest for an expansion debut. Management had already nicknamed the place “The Firepit,” and between the pyrotechnics and the alternative dance team called the Firewerks and Ashanti’s halftime show straight out of an era gone by, it was a night that made grown women cry. Or at least the woman who, in some ways, willed the W back into town all by herself.
“I shed real tears,” said Jenny Nguyen, who created a women’s sports-only bar called The Sports Bra that — one profound day back in 2023 — hosted WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and got this whole ball (or basketball) rolling.
Nguyen, whose backstory makes you want to cry yourself, calls herself “a Pacific Northwest girly.” But a ton of other Pacific Northwest girlies are now at Fire games with her, where there has already been a transgender woman singing the national anthem, a reunion of the 2000-to-2002 team that Paul Allen abandoned and an early buzzer-beater victory over the Liberty that only lent credence to the provincial notion: Portland is the global epicenter of women’s sports.
“Well, I think a part of it is that Portland has always prided itself on being different, unique, innovative,” said Nguyen, who in 2024 was highlighted in SBJ’s Power Players: Women’s Sports. “It has never shied away from weird or strange. It’s something that we’ve actually embraced. And so, if at some point decades ago this idea of women kicking ass at sports was weird, Portlanders are like, ‘Hell yeah, I’m behind that.’”
So let’s dive into the weird.
The year was 1977, the auspicious spring and summer of Bill Walton, Blazer Mania and a championship parade that officially turned Portland into a basketball town. A men’s basketball town.
The same year, the prep editor of a small Portland newspaper, The Oregon Journal, decided to select Portland’s first all-city girls’ high school team, even though it was still a club sport. Who knows why; maybe because his daughter played. He gathered the five girls together for a grainy black-and-white photo, which may have seemed like nothing — until it turned out to be everything.
“I think it was very well received,” said the prep editor, Dwight Jaynes. “The sports editor thought it was a great idea because it brought more eyeballs to the section. But at that time it was unheard of.”
Flash forward nearly two decades, and Jaynes was a columnist for The Oregonian covering the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The U.S. women’s basketball team particularly dominated, and, as Jaynes was interviewing players, forward Katy Steding rushed over to show him her gold medal. She was from Portland.
“You want to hold my medal?” Steding asked Jaynes.
He held it tight, a little overwhelmed by all the progress. This time, a grown man teared up.
Point was, Portland was now a men’s and women’s basketball town, and, right after those ’96 Olympics, the city was granted a franchise in the new women’s American Basketball League. They had the rock-’em, sock-’em name of Portland Power, and played at the then-Trail Blazers venue, Veterans Memorial Coliseum. Steding was their top 3-point shooter, Natalie Williams was all-ABL and a young Jenny Nguyen remembers buying $5 seats behind the Power bench.
“We would wear our basketball shorts and practice tennies and heckle the other team,” Nguyen said. “It was so intimate, accessible. I remember thinking, not having seen that before, ‘They’re just like us.’ And I remember yelling toward Natalie Williams, I thought she was the best. I was just talking about her shoes or something, and she looked over and smiled. I was like, ‘Oh my God!’”
But Nguyen hadn’t seen nothing yet. Two years after the ABL went bankrupt in December ’98, NBA Commissioner David Stern gifted a WNBA franchise to Blazers owner Allen. To be symbiotic with the men’s brand, they were anointed the Portland Fire — and the marketing team promptly had kerosene on the brain.
On opening night in 2000 against the three-peat Houston Comets — an unfair matchup of expansion team vs. champs — the Rose Garden crowd was introduced to their mascot: a Dalmatian “fire dog” named Spot. Fans were handed matchbooks … in case they wanted to light up a cigarette? During player intros, pyrotechnics flared from the top of the backboard, and former Fire forward Vanessa Nygaard remembers it being “super smoky” well after tipoff.
Good thing it was a thriller, though. The smoke had worn off by the second overtime, when the Comets — behind Sheryl Swoopes, Tina Thompson and Cynthia Cooper — eked out a 93-89 victory that won over the city of Portland and the now young woman Nguyen.
“The WNBA was here, and I felt like we’d turned a corner,” she said. “I was seeing Sheryl Swoopes with her own shoe. I was seeing Lisa Leslie on TV, on a Wheaties box. There were so many things that were happening for women’s basketball, and I thought, this is it. We’re here.”
The Fire wasn’t winning, but were drawing — averaging 8,000 and change, the league average. The players felt the love whenever they were out and about. Nygaard remembers signing a photo a fan took of her and then, a week later, signing a photo of her signing that original photo. She then signed a photo of the photo that was hanging in the fan’s home. And, another week later, she autographed a photo of the photo of the photo of the photo that she first signed. Got it?
“She just kept sending pictures of me signing pictures,” Nygaard said. “Did it five times. I was going to see how long we went. I’m thinking, ‘There has to be an end to this.’ But, I mean, it was just fun.”
They were part players, part publicists. In those days, the team issued paper tickets, and Nygaard remembers being told to keep a couple duckets in her hip pocket — “in case you ran into somebody at some burrito shop who’d never been to a game.” Every player could buy 10 season tickets, but were gently urged to donate them to youth centers.
“We’d go to Powell’s Books and Jake’s and Papa Haydn — those are the places we hung out," Nygaard said. “We hung out with the team’s hip-hop squad. It was just how Portland was: quirky and green and beautiful. And we were there the best time of the year, summer. Sunny until 9 o’clock at night and all sorts of outdoor stuff.”
But something was ominous, something was off — and it emanated from the chairman’s suite. Allen was a mystery, an absentee who’d be stone-faced whenever he did appear out of the ether. “The only time I remember him actually being around, we were told we weren’t supposed to look him in the eye when he walked by,” Nygaard said. “I was like, ‘This is so weird. Come on, whatever.’”
It was an omen, more than anything. In 2002, Stern offered all of the league-owned WNBA teams to their individual ownership groups, and Allen told the commissioner he’d pass. The team disbanded after 10-22, 11-21 and 16-16 seasons, with various conspiracy theories wafting in the air. Jaynes believes Allen was so immersed in the Blazers, the Fire “was a distraction for him … he just didn’t want to do it.” Nygaard thinks so many Trail Blazers players were getting arrested (hence their nickname, Jail Blazers), “We were making them look bad because we weren’t in jail.”
But, publicly, it was that age-old excuse: economics. “When I met Paul Allen years later, God rest his soul, he said, ‘I’m really sorry,’” said Donna Orender, the former WNBA president. “I said, ‘Why?’ He goes, ‘Well, I was losing a million a year, and I just couldn’t do that. I just didn’t see it.’ But at the same time, he was losing $166 million on the Rose Garden and the Blazers. So …”
Either way, it was a bitter end to a civic treasure — three years and out. Portlanders went back to their ashtanga yoga and organic Macheezmo Mouse burritos, all to a Pacific Northwest girly’s dismay. Nguyen will never forget the day she saw city workers, with no pomp or circumstance, painting over a Fire logo on the side of a building.
“I remember thinking, ‘How sad,’” she said. “How sad.”
That began a nearly two-decade walk through the desert, with a few diversions (and a television show) tossed in. By 2011, Portland was on the map again through the satirical series “Portlandia,” starring Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, zeroing in on the city’s DIY, hippie, women-first, goth culture. The Portland-approved word “weirdo” was even written into the script. Then, in 2013, the Thorns showed up.
They were a soccer team, not basketball, but the furor over the franchise surpassed the Fire and perhaps the MLS Timbers. The Thorns ended up leading the NWSL in attendance 10 times and, for road games, packed people into sports bars, including Nguyen and her friend group from an adult basketball league. But whenever they’d ask the bartender to switch to a women’s hoops game, they’d get side-eyed.
“Sometimes they would reluctantly do it, sometimes they wouldn’t,” Nguyen said. “And a majority of our group is LGBTQ-plus or BIPOC. And we would feel like we did not belong there, or it wasn’t safe for us there, or we better stay quiet or pipe down.”
They began staging watch parties in somebody’s basement, pulling games in on Sling TV. But they tried a sports bar again for the 2018 NCAA women’s basketball final — which ended on Arike Ogunbowale’s epic buzzer-beater for Notre Dame. They were forced to watch on a puny TV, but were still delirious.
“What a game!” Nguyen said.
“Can you imagine if the sound was on?” said her friend.
Nguyen was triggered. It dawned on her that she’d been normalized to accept inequity — no sound for women’s sports! — and did something about it. She brainstormed The Sports Bra, symbolically flipping the “a” and the “r” the same way she’d ask sports bars to flip the channel. She’d show only women’s sports.
“I wrote in my business plan: If The Sports Bra doesn’t work in Portland, I don’t think there’s a single city on the planet it’ll work in,” Nguyen said.
It opened in 2022 and became a Portland institution, lines out the door. Nguyen was out for sushi early in 2023 when an unrecognizable number appeared on her mobile. She let it slide to voicemail and listened later. It was U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon. He explained that WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert was coming to Portland and he wanted her to see The Sports Bra, to see “where women’s basketball lives in Portland."
“I called him back right away,” Nguyen said, “and I was like, ‘F*** yeah, I’m in.’”
That February at “The Bra,” as Nguyen calls it, Engelbert was greeted with what’s been described as a “political rally” that included Wyden; Dewayne Hankins, Trail Blazers president of business operations and alternate governor; GM Joe Cronin; and two Blazers staffers who played in the W — Sheri Sam, scouting manager; and Asjha Jones, director of basketball strategy. A youth girls’ basketball team dribbled in. Oregon and Oregon State officials showed up. The bar’s capacity was supposed to be 50, but people were standing on tables. Amid Thorns and Portland Fire 1.0 memorabilia, they all said it again: Portland’s the capital of women’s sports. Who was Engelbert to argue?
Nguyen and Co. organized a petition for a WNBA team, gaining 5,000 signatures right off the bat. All they needed was an owner. Since the late Paul Allen’s younger sister, Jody, was now in charge of the Blazers, the stars seemed aligned.
Until they weren’t.
To hear insiders tell it, Jody Allen only briefly discussed pursuing a W expansion team. But it was a nonstarter. The Paul Allen Estate was selling the Blazers and wasn’t looking to add assets.
ZoomInfo co-founder Kirk Brown — an Aces fan from Las Vegas — leaped in, apparently willing to pay the $50 million expansion fee. Portland would enter the W in 2025, alongside the Valkyries, and an October 2023 press conference was scheduled in pencil. But Engelbert and Brown reportedly clashed at the 11th hour — she wasn’t a fan of his proposed name, the Rose City Royalty, for one — and The Oregonian wrote that because Brown was “uncomfortable” with the W’s conditions for ownership, he pulled out.
Engelbert sent an explanatory letter to Wyden, never mentioning Brown and saying expansion had simply been “deferred” while the Moda Center completed consecutive summer renovations. True or not, Portland needed a rich hero, and the new owners of the Thorns — the sister-brother combo of Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal — eventually volunteered. Portland was back in the W. But were the Fire?
Naming the team was a Rubik’s Cube. Rose City Royalty was out, but Lisa Bhathal Merage hinted trademark issues were derailing other juicy, undisclosed options. First choice or not, they landed on Portland Fire 2.0.
The nostalgia crowd, which is much of Portland, adored it. But the crowd the show “Portlandia” was loosely based on — the tree-hugger crowd — shook its collective head. Oregonian sports columnist Bill Oram started an article like this:
“Barely an hour from Portland’s city limits last week, nearly 150 buildings, including 56 homes, were wiped out by devastating human-caused blaze, but …
Go Fire?”
So the front office had some PR and brand work to do, and the hiring of Kimberly Veale as senior vice president of marketing and communications was a step in the right direction. She and general manager Vanja Černivec had arrived from the expansion Valkyries — the W’s top revenue team — and, although Veale did not have a hand in it, the Fire’s partnership team brought in longtime Warriors/Valkyries sponsor Kaiser Permanente.
“Just doing this with Vanja, obviously we did it together last year with the Valks,” Veale said. “There’s been kind of a nice familiarity there. And we’ve had several laughs, because we’ve kind of seen this movie before.”
Right away, Kaiser Permanente purchased naming rights for the impending Fire-Thorns performance center. Then the Fire partnership team recruited Chime as their shoulder jersey patch sponsor and Lashify as their marquee jersey patch sponsor. There were also partners that overlapped with the Trail Blazers, such as Spirit Mountain Casino, First Tech Federal Credit Union and Daimler Trucks. The latter meant the Fire could replicate Daimler’s popular Blazer promotion “3’s for Trees,” where for every Fire 3-pointer, trees would be planted across Portland. For the tree-huggers.
In a 180 from Paul Allen, the Blazers were also completely on board — jealous, to a degree, that the Fire gets Portland’s summer weather and can activate outside Moda Center. Through Tom Dundon-owned Rip City Management, the Blazers essentially operate the building for them, run retail for them, arranged Levy as their food and beverage partner and drew up a lease in which the Fire can monetize a number of premium suites. The Blazers earn a percentage of the gate, but nothing exorbitant. It’s a win-win.
Blazers sources said they have even given the Fire access to their database, while the ticketing/marketing teams from both franchises remain in constant contact. Fire President Clare Hamill — the former Nike executive who replaced the ousted Inky Son after less than three months on the job — has gone so far as to hire Blazers ticketing and partnership employees (long before the recent Blazers layoffs). The Fire can ask the Blazers anything.
They can also ask anything to Nguyen, who’s been told by locals, “Jenny, I don’t know if we would’ve gotten a team without The Sports Bra,” and is about to open Sports Bra franchises in Las Vegas, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Boston and Portland, Maine. In fact, Nguyen said Veale did ask her how she felt about the retro matchbooks Fire 1.0 used to hand out. To which Nguyen said, “Back then, totally rad. People love matchbooks. So it’s a good idea, but it’s also a bad idea.”
Regardless, the Fire experience so far has been so retro, so Portland. They got Brownstein and Armisen of “Portlandia” to film their schedule reveal in character. And, speaking of matchbooks, player introductions consist of a match strike, a sizzle, the arena going dark, a video of the original Fire team, pyrotechnics, then a video of the modern team. The pyro doesn’t smoke up the building.
They also invited Nygaard and her former teammates to town for a “Legacy Reignited” game, and their plan was to stop by The Sports Bra to see what the fuss is all about. Nguyen, meanwhile, looks around at the Fire billboards in town — painted on, not painted over — and gets misty again, thinking about Portland’s circuitous WNBA journey.
She won’t miss a game, like she’s 12 all over again, and was courtside for the Fire’s buzzer-beater over the Liberty when the loud crowd nearly broke her eardrums. It was the weirdest feeling.
