To date, winning the 2012 Lamar Hunt US Open Cup is the greatest accomplishment of Sporting Kansas City head coach Peter Vermes' coaching career. The dramatic penalty kick victory last August was the club's first major trophy since 2004, and a night that no Kansas City supporter will ever forget.
Nor, obviously, will Vermes, so it would only make sense that the coach would design some kind of a memento to carry with him wherever he goes, to serve as a reminder of that night. Most coaches might do something small, something discrete. Perhaps a tiny stitching of the date — August 8, 2012 — on a sleeve's end of the jacket he wore that night.
What no one expected, though, was a series of photographs of the iconic moment when Sporting KC lifted the Open Cup trophy after the game to be printed or stitched into the inside of his suit jacket. In the above photo (and zoomed at bottom of this page) — taken April 17, 2013 at Red Bull Arena — you can as plain as day this is exactly the route Vermes opted to go. More power to you, PV, you did this even before the NBA Draft guys did it.
And no one bothered to notice it for three months. Naturally the person to unearth this gem and bring it to our attention was MLSsoccer.com's very own Josh Whisenhunt.
"Our tailor guy, Tom Paolini, I told him -- because my suit from last year, it got beat up a little bit because we won the Open Cup last year, they poured all the stuff all over me and it was in my suit," Vermes told MLSsoccer.com on Tuesday.
"Now I went and got it cleaned — and it's still wearable, don't get me wrong — but I was like, 'Hey, I think I'm going to need another one if you can pull one together for me.' And [Tom] goes, 'All right, I think I'm going to do something different.' So he just put, in the lining inside, he put a picture of the team winning the Open Cup. I wouldn't pick it. It's not me. It's not my style. But it's a neat thing to have."
