Hollywood United FC Charity Match

Hmmm... Hollywood and soccer. Two things you probably wouldn't have thought come together much other than David Beckham on a Snoop Dogg television show. But you'd be quite surprised to learn of a football club that was founded in the 1980's by a group of British expatriates who frequented an English-style pub on Sunset Boulevard in the heart of Hollywood.

The ex-pats came to enhance their entertainment career in Hollywood. But whether their careers were in music, TV or movies, they all had one thing in common, an unyeilding passion for the game. Word eventually spread throughout the entertainment world about the club and its players. Soon, not only other well-known stars, but also former national team soccer players from around the world asked to join. From these humble beginnings 20 years ago the Hollywood United Football Club has grown into what it is today; a star-studded world famous soccer club.

Hollywood United Football Club has several teams competing year-round in various leagues throughout Southern California. All teams have a strong camaraderie and a spirit of brotherhood, which has helped Hollywood United Football Club grow to more than 90 players.

On November 22, 2008, Hollywood United FC put on a charity match against Champions United to raise money for people whose lives were severely affected by the devastation of Hurricane Ike. Hollywood United had a star studded starting eleven with players like


Benji Madden from Good Charlotte and


Gilles Marini from Sex and The City.


There was also Jimmy Jean-Louis from Heroes and


accomplished actor, Donal Logue who has stared in Grounded For Life, Max Payne and VHI's I Love The '80s Strikes Back just to name a few. Other celebrities included Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, Santiago Cabrera who narrated series 3 of Heroes, Anthony Lapaglia who stared in one of my favorite movies, So I Married an Axe Murderer, former Galaxy president and general manager Alexi Lalas, Fox Soccer Channel commentator and former MLS star Brian Dunseth, as well as Frank Leboeuf who won a World Cup in France and also played for Chelsea.

Check out a gallery from the event below...

Hitting Florida Like A Hurricane...

In early 2006 I was hired by Nike Soccer North America to travel along side a film crew to capture behind the scenes photos while they produced short documentaries on four star Nike athletes. This was my first project for Nike after my initial gig, so I was a bit nervous and not really sure how things were going to roll. Our first trip was to Los Angeles to film Landon Donovan. (video below)


then to the Netherlands for Demarcus Beasley, (video below)


and finally over to Belgium to pick up some clips from Oguchi Onyewu, (video below)


but we weren't done with the project yet. We still had to get some interview material from Eddie Johnson, so we flew over to Bunnell, Florida to meet up with Eddie as he was coming home to see his family for a couple of days before going back to his then MLS club. Eddie's hometown of Bunnell is a small town of roughly 3,200 residents and is a stones throw away from Flaggler Beach, just north of Daytona Beach. Eddie's mother, Lewanna Johnson, no longer lives in the house he grew up in, which was a one bedroom box of a house in the middle of the Bunnell projects. Thanks to Eddie's acheivments, she now lives in a newer, three bedroom home in a much nicer part of town. Eddie's childhood started on some of the roughest drug filled streets in Florida. With no father figure to look up to, running the streets with his friends was only a foot step away for Eddie. But Eddie didn't take the easy road like those same friends he grew up with. Selling drugs and robbing liquor stores was not in his game. Eddie's game was all on the field!

Visiting the projects where Eddie lived was by far one of the craziest experiences of my life. If we were there at night, we'd be sorry, and if we were there with out Eddie, we'd be DEAD! The field where Eddie grew up playing soccer as a young boy was dedicated to him not to long ago and it was pretty cool to see how proud that made him feel. His passion for his community and his dream that a kid from the same projects he grew up in would follow in his foot steps to things bigger than the gang banging on the streets.

Check out the video we produced and catch the whole story of Eddie Johnson's rise to one of America's best soccer players


This is a gallery of my favorite photos taken during our shoot with Eddie Johnson. Enjoy!

At one time in my life...

I was just like them. When skating was the most important thing of the day and we were too busy thinking about where were we going to go? And, what were we going to find out there for us to skate? If you asked me right now, I may tell you it was a long time ago, but it wasn't that long ago in actuality. Come to think of it, it has been close to four years since I photographed inline skating. One of the things I remember most about that year photographing inline skating for Valo and various magazines was during our almost daily road trips around California. Staring out of Jon Julio's 3 series BMW from the passenger side window, with the only intention of finding something new to skate. Didn't matter what it was, or where it was, we would stop and check it out. If one of the guys thought they could bust a sick trick, we'd unload, skate and shoot. After we got bored, we moved on to skate something different. This was our routine and our lifestyle. Those were good times and good friends that I will never forget!

During my hiatus as a skate photographer I helped the owner of Valo Brand, the famous Jon Julio, with photographing the first advertisements (below) which helped mold the beginnings of what is now THE BIGGEST inline skate company in the industry. Here's some of those advertisements...


Team Photo, Pikes Place, Seattle, Washington


John Starr, Somewhere in LA, California


Mike Lilly, Tallahassee, Florida


Charles Dunkle, Montgomery, Alabama


I even got my own page in a Be-Mag photo issue!


Here is a slide show of my inline skating images, some from above and some that never made it to print. (I'd also have more but a computer failure has taken some work away from me)

Futebol in America

This is futebol in America... Brazil style! I was hired to shoot two Brazil matches this summer for Nike Brazil. The first match was in Seattle, Washington as Brazil would be playing an international friendly against our neighbors to the north, Canada! (loud screams) The second match of the America Tour, Brazil was set to play Venezuela in Boston, Massachusetts at Gillette Stadium the following week. Check out this gallery of my photographs from those two games (with a couple of images from a USA/Brazil game) as well as my behind the scenes accounts of shooting the Brazil America Tour for Nike Brazil below.

I've traveled to Seattle once before so I kind of new what I was getting myself into weather wise. It was late June, but wouldn't you know it, slight chance of rain on the forecast. I rented a 400mm for these two jobs (cause I'm not rich and both games are at night) and was kinda sketched out about it raining on this rented $7,000 lens.
I had protection but it's something I had jimmy rigged in Portland from a 99 cent store out of a water proof laundry bag with a draw string and a hole cut in the bottom, so you can understand how I was still nervous about it raining.
Turns out it just sprinkled pre-game and we stayed dry during the game, thank god! The game wasn't too thrilling, Brazil beat Canada 3-2 (I think!) but I got many good images of Nike athletes Robinho, Pato, and Adriano, which helped out my sleep pattern that night.

But before we hit the pillow for the night, we hit the downtown Seattle bars! I met up with a friend who lives in Seattle named Rob Nana. Rob and I used to skate back in middle school and high school together, and he was the one I started shooting skate photos of first, which lead to my previous trip to Seattle to shoot an advertisement for a skate company. After we played some pool and had a few too many drinks,

the Heist Crew and I called it a night and stumbled our way to the hotel. A quick trip via this guy below

to the airport at 7am and a flight home and I was already geared up for my trip to Boston.

Less than a week later, I'm back at the Oakland Airport to catch a red-eye to Boston at 11pm. I land in Boston at 7 am their time and catch a shuttle to my hotel which was next door to the airport. The hotel had a great view of the Boston Skyline from across the river, or bay, or lake, what-ever it is.

Unfortunately they didn't have my room ready so I sat and ate a $30 breakfast in the hotel restaurant. And for $30, it wasn't that good but I was hungry. After breakfast my room was ready so I took a quick shower and napped for a couple of hours to re-gain my head after that long over night flight. After a few missed calls from Jordan I finally got ahold of him and was informed that he wasn't able to give me a ride to the game. Turns out he had to pick up some rain gear and wouldn't have time to pick me up due to my location. Hoping on a shuttle that took me over to the rental car offices my first stop was Hertz and man that was an extremely bad move! There was a huge line and 20 minutes later I find out that there are no cars to rent from them. I quickly storm out of there, swearing under my breath, I look left, I look right, and decide to head over to Alamo. As I am walking up to the office I'm greeted by a italian guy with an awesome New York accent standing on the porch of the office who says "I got whatchu need!" and I'm like "Sweet bro!" I didn't have my return flight info for him, which apparently he needed to rent me a car. He could see I was about to break down inside from all the stress, so he tells me "If you take care of me, I'll take care of you," in a strong New York accent to make it even more enthralling. I'm like, "sure dude, get me a car asap! I need to be at Gillete Stadium in three hours!" "Three hours!" he exclaims. "You're gonna hit tons of traffic man!" As he walks me to the car he asks me if I'm going to "take care of him?" I'm like sure boss, I dive in the wallet to see only a $1 and a $20... why couldn't I have a $10? I gave him the $20 and got on the road. Turns out that he wasn't going to be the only nice person I was fortunate to meet on this trip. I hit a toll both as I'm driving out of the airport. I'm feet from the entrance to the freeway that I need to go south on. It's $3 and I only have a buck! I cruise up to the booth and ask the guy if he excepts visa and that I only have a buck otherwise. The guy looks at me, takes the one dollar from my hand, and says have a nice day. Wow! Hook up number 2 in Bean town!!

I finally hit the freeway and I'm trying to get a GPS signal to my phone for navigation, but all the freeways near the airport are in tunnels. Not a good sign when you're driving around an area you have never been. Once I'm out of the tunnels I hit traffic, all bad! Turns out the rest of the drive to the stadium would be me sitting in traffic... for two and a half hours! Finally make it to the stadium with 30 minutes to spare, get down to the field and was able to watch a little bit of a New England Revolution soccer match before the Brazil match started. The Revolution was playing FC Dallas and I bet you didn't know this but all the old ladies love to take pictures of Dallas's Kenny Cooper! "He's so dreamy!"


The Brazil v Venezuela match was much like the match against Canada... BORING! I got some good photos of the Nike players but it could have been a little more exciting on the offensive side of Brazil's game as they lost nil-1. My highlight of the trip came after the match when I was blessed enough to sit in another two hours of traffic trying to leave the stadium. I didn't get back to the hotel until 3 am and i had to be at the airport at 6 am for my flight home. It wasn't the funnest thing but it just meant that I would be tired enough to actually sleep on the plane ride home.

Thanks for reading my behind the scenes of shooting the Brazil America Tour 2008 for Nike Brazil.

They will rock your world...

I was able to shoot this awesome reggae/rock band from LA named DREADSTARR at a Galaxy v NY Redbulls soccer game. Red Bull put on a huge tailgate party on the David Beckham Academy fields above the Home Depot Center in Carson California. Things were rolling along, free Red Bull everywhere, free tacos that were out-standing, graffiti artists working on a 10 foot by 10 foot mural, and the kick-ass band DREADSTARR tearing up the stage!

Check out their MYSPACE PAGE and give them a listen!

From their webpage -
"From the South Bay of Los Angeles comes the band DREADSTARR, an international collective that has exploded onto the LA music scene with it’s high-energy, dance-hall / rock sound. DREADSTARR has built a loyal fan-base by performing at numerous high-profile events and some of Southern California’s top venues. Through online, e-mail, myspace and grassroots marketing, DREADSTARR has empowered it’s fan-base to play an interactive role in the band’s success."

Red Bull Soap Box Race

I was able to enjoy a sunny sunday in San Francisco at Delores Park for the Red Bull Soap Box Race not to long ago. It turned out I wasn't the only one that decided to venture towards the historic park as a mass of 100,000 people showed up to watch the race. I got there at 11am, walked around the track a little, snagged a free red bull and looked for a good spot to sit and wait until the races started at 1pm. Red Bull always puts on a fantastic event and the soap box races were no exception. I could have used a little more freedom to move around without being blocked by thousands of people to shoot but it was still fun. Can't wait until the next Red Bull event! Check out my photography at TobyPagePhotography.com