Osman Bukari, know that it’s not always like this.
Austin FC’s newest designated player, in Austin ahead of the summer transfer window’s opening on July 18 and first chance to play two days later, met Austin fans and media on Tuesday afternoon in one of the settings the club favors for welcome events — a small, dark nightclub in the middle of the day.
Tuesday’s setting, the Continental Club on South Congress, was where Josh Wolff was unveiled as Austin’s first head coach back on July 23, 2019. That event was decided more staid and traditional than Bukari’s welcome on Tuesday. The tweet from that day is still up, with an #UnleashTheWolff hashtag, showing a welcome video and then Wolff coming out to a table on stage with the club’s majority owner Anthony Precourt and president Andy Loughnane.
Five years later, and the welcome event at this same spot for this record designated player involved a DJ spinning to warm things up. It also involved event emcee Melot asking those assembled to go back outside the club and squint into the sun as Bukari was driven to the club’s front door in one of the custom hot rods intertwined with the Continental Club’s identity — fittingly, by Continental Club owner Steve Wertheimer.
As is now de rigueur for Austin FC events, La Murga brought drums and horns, first playing outside where drums and horns are pleasantly loud, and then inside the Continental Club’s confines where they become, through no fault of their own, a little more unpleasantly loud.
The media interviews with Bukari and Austin FC sporting director Rodolfo Borrell happened next to the stage. Side conversations from many of the 60 or so attendees still there bounced off the club walls and created a cacophonous backdrop. Those of us asking questions had to get really close, perhaps uncomfortably so, nearly touching Bukari and Borrell with our microphones and smartphones. One fellow journalist needed to lean on me to move his recording apparatus close enough to ask his question.
This is some of what I was able to decipher from my audio (and Eric Goodman’s audio, as he was about two feet closer and some of what he captured was clearer, and a little later, from the Austin FC comms team, which had a really good and helpful mic).
