Welcome Geovanni to San Jose Earthquakes

Headed over to The Fairmont this afternoon for a quick press conference to mark Brazilian Geovanni Deiberson Maurício aka Geovanni signing with the San Jose Earthquakes as their first designated player!

I embarrassed myself a little at arrival, pull up, ask the valet guy where I could just park my own car, apparently they only have valet! Ha! So, I drove down the street and around the corner to park in a general public lot which was still a paid lot, then walked over to the Fairmont. But all media were given a free tshirt, so I was instantly in a good mood =)

Originally we were going to do some head shots and environment shots of Geovanni standing on the field after Quakes practice on Thursday. But the PR Director, Jed Mette, called to say we would have to instead do head shots at the press conference today because Thursday he and Geovanni had to go together to Tijuana and walk across the border. All for immigration/visa rules, but he was still friendly and nice and seemed genuinely happy to be there and meet people!

Geovanni came in with Quakes GM John Doyle and Coach Frank Yallop. He gave a quick speech in rehearsed English, and then took questions from the media. Most questions were asked in English and then Jed had to translate into Spanish and he responded in Spanish for Jed to translate. Keep in mind, he's Brazilian, so his native language is Portuguese. Pretty impressive.

Also standing by was fellow Brazilian, former teammate, current (injured) Quakes player, and the leading force behind the signing, André Luis. He made the first call to Geovanni and talked up San Jose, the team, the area, etc to convince him to come.

After all other media had left, Geovanni posed for his headshot. Since he can't really speak English very well, I thought I should speak Spanish to him, especially since I don't have a real conversation, more so just, "hello, sit here, smile, good, thanks." He looked kind of surprised and said "you speak Spanish?" I'm not sure if he was shocked at how bad my accent is, or shocked/impressed/pleased that I spoke Spanish since everyone else (except Latino media) was speaking English and Jed was translating. Either way, I'm going to tell myself it's the latter =)

I'm excited because my photos ended up (with credit!) on the San Jose Earthquakes home page, and in a gallery on their site and the MLS home page. Also, when I was checking out those photos, I saw that Pepsi launched the MLS Pepsi Refresh Campaign and my photos of Arturo Alvarez (blog from that shoot here) were all over the place. Awesome!

Now I'm super excited for tomorrow's game vs LA Galaxy. See Geovanni play, see my new head shots on the video board, see the hype surrounding Landon Donovan visiting, and hopefully see the Quakes win! =)