Culture
Why an NFL star fell in love with Wrexham: ‘They could lose every match and I would still support this club’
At first glance, former NFL quarterback Joey Harrington’s career doesn’t have too many parallels with Wrexham or soccer, a sport he stopped playing around the age of 10.
But the third overall pick in the 2002 NFL draft insists the Welsh club’s rise chimes with his own. So much so that Harrington and his family regularly wake up at home in Portland, in the west-coast state of Oregon, early on Saturdays to watch Phil Parkinson’s side playing live 4,750 miles away.
“If you had told me 10 years ago that I’d be buying a subscription to something called the Vanarama National League,” he says about the competition, the fifth-tier in English football’s pyramid, Wrexham won in 2022-23, “I’d have laughed at you.
“Now, though, I’m up at 6.30am every Saturday to catch the 7am match (3pm UK time). No way could I have imagined doing that just a few years ago. But, as a family, we’re totally wrapped up in the club and the journey they are on.”
Harrington’s own sporting journey comes with pedigree. His dad John played quarterback for the University of Oregon in the late 1960s and his grandfather Bernie did the same for the state’s University of Portland around 25 years earlier. If he hadn’t served in the Second World War, Bernie would no doubt have played in the NFL after being heavily courted by several teams, among them George Halas’ Chicago Bears.
Joey’s three years following in his father’s footsteps as Oregon’s quarterback proved transformational for the team, as they went from also-rans to being ranked No 2 in the U.S. college game. Harrington was the key man — and a Heisman Trophy finalist in 2001 — before the Detroit Lions drafted him the following year. Only fellow quarterback David Carr (Houston Texans) and future Hall of Famer Julius Peppers (Carolina Panthers) went off the board quicker.
He spent four seasons in Detroit, then had stints with the Miami Dolphins, Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints. An impressive resume by any standards, but one that showed no indication of a retirement involving a small club playing a totally different sport on the other side of the Atlantic.
Enter series one of Welcome To Wrexham, the documentary charting Hollywood celebrities Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds’ takeover of the club, and a subsequent family visit to north Wales.
“Our sons, Jack and Emmet, had reached the age where you want to start exposing them to international travel,” Harrington says. “To give them a perspective of the world and what’s out there.
“We framed the trip by getting tickets through Nike (a major backer of the University of Oregon’s sports teams) to Manchester City versus Liverpool. The boys, both goalkeepers, were thrilled, as they had gravitated towards soccer, even though everyone assumed my kids would play American football.
“The plan was to spend time in London, call in to see some friends in Bristol and drive to Manchester. Jack, my eldest, then says, ‘Can we stop by Wrexham on the way?’ We’d all watched series one of the documentary by now and loved it.”
Wrexham were locked in a two-way scrap for the National League title with Notts County at the time, but when the Harrington family visited the ground they were given a warm welcome, including an impromptu ground tour from Geraint Parry, club secretary and Wrexham’s longest-serving member of staff.
“The first person we bump into in the tunnel is (Wrexham’s then goalkeeper and former England international) Ben Foster,” recalls Harrington. “He walks straight up to the boys, and I’m not exaggerating here, starts talking to them like they were family, asking all sorts of questions.
Harrington’s sons with Ben Foster (Joey Harrington)
“When he found out their favourite position, straightaway he says, ‘I’m a goalkeeper, too, my name is Ben’. You could see the click in Jack’s eyes, as he realised, ‘Oh my God, this is Ben Foster, the England goalie’.
“Another three steps down the tunnel and (Wrexham’s manager) Phil Parkinson appears. He says, ‘Hi’ to the boys and then has a conversation with my wife, Emily, that she still talks about today. It’s probably a conversation he’s had a thousand times, one that he doesn’t even remember. But the fact he took a few moments to talk family and the boys with Emily said a lot to me.”
The Harringtons’ whistle-stop tour also involved meeting the club shop staff and head groundsman Paul Chaloner before calling in at The Turf, the pub next to Wrexham’s home which has been made famous by the documentary.
“Wayne (Jones, landlord) was brilliant with the boys,” he adds. “Made them feel so welcome that Jack, who remember is 13 at the time, so this is his first time in a bar, says to me, ‘Dad, can we play pool? There’s loads of quarters lined up on the table we can use.’
“I’m, like, ‘No, no, no, that isn’t how it works’. But the guy whose money it was said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you can have my slot’. At a time when the entire world was starting to convene on this small town in Wales, these guys treated my family like we were the first to visit.
“I’ve seen professional sports at the highest level, including a decade in the NFL. I’ve seen what that world looks like. So, as a father, to see how everyone — literally to a person, from the club shop staff to the guy running the pub and the Premier League goalkeeper who stopped a PK (penalty kick) against Notts County just a couple of weeks later — treated my kids and my family, Wrexham could lose every single match for eternity and I would still support this club.”
Autzen Stadium; Eugene, Oregon. October 12, 2024.
Actor Kaitlin Olson is back at her former university for the huge college football matchup between Oregon, who are ranked No 3 in the nation, and second-placed Ohio State. She’s joined in an Oregon record crowd of 60,129 by husband Rob. As in Rob McElhenney, her co-star in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Wrexham’s co-owner.
2 years ago @Wrexham_AFC welcomed my family. Saturday my OR&Wrexham worlds collided. ExDir @thehumphreyker is running 26.2 for @WrexhamMiners. To help, I’ll match every $ donated 2his cause up to $2,620. It’s a small world &kindness comes full circlehttps://t.co/DyzB8WQ2JD pic.twitter.com/1tYU2SpfFx
— Joey Harrington (@joey3harrington) October 19, 2024
Also in attendance is Harrington, back where it all began for him as a college quarterback in the 1990s. They all get talking during the afternoon and later pose for a post-match celebratory photo that sees the trio perform the ‘O’ hand signal that has become synonymous with Harrington’s final Oregon game before turning pro.
“This was the first time I’d met Rob and Kaitlin,” he says. “They were great, no pretence about them at all. You’d never know they were Hollywood stars. They were just part of the family and were so welcoming to me and my friends.
“We chatted Wrexham and I showed them the photo of Ben Foster with the boys. How they both were didn’t surprise me. It’s exactly how we’d been treated in Wrexham, where the town, the team, the organisation follow the example of the leadership.”
Harrington and his family are yet to visit Wrexham for a match, though he hopes to rectify that next year. They did attend the pre-season friendly against Manchester United in San Diego, California, last year where Paul Mullin suffered four broken ribs and a collapsed lung, along with this July’s match between Wrexham women’s team and Portland Thorns that attracted a crowd of 10,379 — a record for the Welsh club.
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The latter came shortly after Harrington had been confirmed as an investor in National Women’s Soccer League club Thorns, alongside two-time Olympic decathlon Ashton Eaton and Olympic heptathlon bronze medalist Brianne Theisen-Eaton.
It’s quite the turnaround for someone who readily admits to being turned off the game for years by what he considered to be play-acting in men’s football.
“I’d see the guys go down on the pitch and a stretcher would be brought out to carry him off,” says Harrington, 46, who has pledged $2,620 to executive director Humphrey Ker’s fund-raising attempts for the Wrexham Miners’ Rescue by running next year’s Manchester marathon.
“He’d then get to the sideline, where the magic spray would come out and he’d be fine. I had no respect for that. So, despite playing until fourth grade, my experiences with soccer were not very positive.”
It took watching Canada’s Christine Sinclair, the sport’s all-time leading international goalscorer with 190 goals in 331 games, play for the University of Portland in the early 2000s to start changing his mind.
“Christine got knocked off the ball,” he recalls. “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh great, here come the theatrics’. But, no, she popped right back up and gave the girl an elbow on the way back up. Not only was she instantly my favourite player but I thought, ‘I’m only going to watch women’s soccer’.”
Harrington playing for the Miami Dolphins in 2006 (Al Bello/Getty Images)
Welcome To Wrexham helped change that stance, especially after he started to spot those parallels between his own career and how the Welsh club’s fortunes were being transformed under Reynolds and McElhenney.
“What really resonates is the similarities with what has happened at Wrexham and my own time with the Oregon football programme,” he says. “When I showed up in ’97, we were seen as irrelevant by the rest. We were afterthoughts. So, a group of us sat down and decided to change things. We were going to win things, and specifically a national championship.
“A lot of people laughed at us. But we stuck at it and things began to change. OK, we didn’t win the national championship in my senior year, we finished No 2 in the country. But to put the programme in a place where we remain part of the national conversation was incredibly special.
“Later, I got to the NFL and it was a business — ‘What can you do for me? How am I going to get mine?’, stabbing people in the back to get another year (on your contract). Which I get when you’re in a multi-billion dollar business.
“But my point is I’ve personally experienced what can happen when you get a group of people together who truly not just care about the goal — which is coming out of irrelevance into prominence — but also each other. I see the same thing at Wrexham.
“There’s more to it than just putting butts on seats, there’s more to it than just scratching and clawing your way to the top. It’s how you do it and who you bring along and why you do it that also matters. Wrexham get that.”
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(Top photo: The Harringtons on their visit to the Racecourse Ground/Joey Harrington)
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself — or have a lasting influence on an author. With that in mind, this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the final stops for five authors after a life of writing. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
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