Gordon Monson: He went from fetching coffees to signing players. Can Elliot Fall bring Real Salt Lake fans a trophy?

After Elliot Fall hit bomb after bomb on his way to shooting a leisurely 1-under par 18-hole round at Bonneville Golf Course on Saturday afternoon, it dawns on Fall’s playing partner for the day, the one distracting him with a thousand questions, a recorder rolling and more than a few shanked shots, blown putts and intemperate verbal outbursts, that Fall might be a better golfer than he is a general manager.

If that sounds like a putdown, it isn’t.

Watch the man draw back a 3-wood, coiling up and unwinding and unloading like a hungry rattler on attack, sending a Pro V1 290 yards from a tight fairway lie onto an even tighter green. Not bad for an amateur who plays Rory McIlroy’s game only here and there, just now and again, between making deals with clubs of another kind, assembling rosters made up of players from far and wide, smoothing through salary caps, observing complicated acquisition rules, making sure the culture on the soccer side and every side of Real Salt Lake is preserved.

That last part is what Fall’s done for RSL since taking over as GM for the team a handful of years ago, at the age of 34, as the youngest Major League Soccer executive to hold that position.

His story regarding how he climbed to that role, soaring and bumping and skidding through years of ascension, acclaim and adversity and potential acclaim again, as a fresh-faced intern straight out of school to an experienced executive now, is unusual.

Before we get to it, consider this: After Monday night’s best-of-three playoff game in Sandy against Houston, Fall is the only person who has attended, been on hand for every playoff match in team history, all 33 of them, working his way from a not-so-glorified gofer in the PR department to the club’s top dog, one of the top dogs, as GM-in-charge.

It may be a cliche, but if it is, it rarely actually happens, where the eager local kid who humbly begins his employment in the company’s basement mailroom works his way to the boardroom. That’s what Elliot Fall has done, not simply leading RSL to a promising future with its current young and talented playoff team, but having steadied it through a period of wicked undulations, of difficulty and, in the worst of times, desperation.

The opening act for Fall began two years after Dave Checketts launched RSL in Utah in 2005. He grew up in Sugar House, attending Judge Memorial High School during the morning and midday hours, and manning the desk, among completing other menial tasks, at Mountain Dell Golf Course. He worked and he played, worked and played.

After graduating from the University of Utah, having considered becoming a doctor, before settling instead on earning an economics degree, the brainy pupil who somewhere along the line had been a mediocre prep soccer player, bagged the pursuit of finance in more traditional corporate settings and latched on first as an unpaid volunteer and then as an intern at … well, you know where.

“You could tell right away that Elliot was intelligent, affable, engaging,” remembers Trey Fitz-Gerald, the man who hired him full time, so intelligent, affable and engaging that Fitz-Gerald immediately elevated him to completing lofty tasks, such as having him fetch his coffee on a regular basis.

Fitz-Gerald, still with the team as its head of communications and overall team guru, laughs at that beginning now, fully aware that the young buck he brought aboard and ordered around in those early years is now the big boss. His humorous situation is not dissimilar to that of the late actor Kirk Douglas, who ruefully noted at the Academy Awards gala one year, after his son Michael won an Oscar: “If I’d known you were going to be this successful, I would’ve been a lot nicer to you when you were a kid.”

The kid is all grown up now, having played a significant role in keeping Real Salt Lake afloat over subsequent rough stretches.

The slight wrinkles in Fall’s still youthful face indicate the hardships of his upward move. Since running errands, printing information sheets, straightening the press box, videoing and posting player interviews through the early years at Real, in short order, his acumen, his wizardry with numbers was noticed by former GM Garth Lagerwey, who promoted Fall to the soccer side, relying on him to help manage the complicated matters of cap figures, player allocations, transfer fees, building out salary models, helping with negotiations and the entire process of player acquisition, international and domestic, according to rather byzantine MLS rules. Fall worked as Lagerwey’s right-hand man, loosely in the manner of Jonah Hill’s mostly fictionalized role beside Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane character in the film, “Moneyball.”

He was there when RSL won the MLS Cup in Seattle in 2009, and thereafter hunkered down as the team was sold from Checketts to Dell Loy Hansen. When Lagerwey left RSL in 2014, and Craig Waibel took over as GM, Fall was boosted as his assistant, managing the Monarchs and overseeing the team’s academy in Arizona and later at a new facility in Herriman.

When Waibel was ushered out in a storm of controversy, that’s when Fall took over as GM, first with an “interim” attached to his title, but later that was dropped. Through that period, the club transitioned from an aging veteran team to a reconfigured one. Coaches spun through the organization, from Jason Kreis to Jeff Cassar to Mike Petke to Freddy Jaurez to Pablo Mastroeni, and ownership went into spin-dry, too. COVID thrown into the mix also had to be navigated.

Those were “wild” times, Fall correctly says.

One of the reasons Fall expanded his reach of influence with the franchise was because he was one of the few club staffers who stood up to Hansen when the big-personality owner proposed off-target intentions. For instance, when the pandemic hit, Hansen quickly wanted to furlough a whole lot of employees. Fall told him that was a bad idea, and even though the owner eventually went ahead with the furloughs, he delayed them for a time.

“I was proud of that,” says Fall.

“Dell Loy was a smart guy who did some good things and some bad,” Fitz-Gerald says. “But he was surrounded by yes-men. Elliot was the truth-teller. So, Dell Loy took what Elliot said at face value. He’d tell him, ‘If you’re going to do this or that, this is how it’s going to play out. He spoke brutal honesty.’”

Hansen later infamously ran into trouble with public comments made outside of the team and accusations from others about him made inside of it that resulted in him selling the club, and the organization floated in a kind of abeyance for 15 months as the league owned and oversaw it, searching for new buyers.

It was over that span when Fall and others, including former player and now assistant general manager Tony Beltran, went to work pulling Real out of the funk into which it had tumbled in the midst of so much inner turmoil, when enthusiasm inside the club sank, when a positive vibe evaporated, when breathing suffered because oxygen in and around the club was scarce.

“We had to rebuild the culture here,” Fall says. “It was tough, but it was rewarding because we built something that was sustainable and that could lead to success, something the new owners, whoever they were going to be, could buy into.

“Basically, we became a family again. In 2009, ’10, ’11, that was something special. It was an environment where everybody came to work everyday, working with people they cared about. That’s important and we wanted it again.”

Says Fitz-Gerald: “It was a return to what Dave Checketts taught us — that this could be a highlight for the community and the soccer world. It was an organization about people.”

“It was the phoenix rising out of the ashes,” Fall adds. “It ended up being tapped back into what the club was at its apex.”

Only now, shortly thereafter at least, in January of 2022, it would be a club with solidarity and more money. That’s when Jazz owner Ryan Smith and multiple team owner David Blitzer who possesses parts of teams in the four major sports in the United States and parts of eight pro soccer clubs overseas, bought the franchise.

Fall stayed the course in the GM’s office through all the transition.

Culture wasn’t the only thing resurrected, talent was, too. Although RSL had made it to the playoffs in five of the past six seasons — including last season’s run to the Western Conference final — the lone miss coming in the COVID year, team powerbrokers want more. With new resources and with Fall and his staff, including a technical director and scouts, doing the legwork, Real appears to be on the brink of winning more.

The club recently spent $16 million on player acquisitions, including guys like Chicho Arango, a star Colombian goal scorer who had shortly been playing in Mexico, but who RSL signed at great expense. He’s the highest-paid Real player ever — making more than $2 million — one younger players on the roster are eager to learn from. RSL also now features young talent such as Diego Luna, a 20-year-old American midfielder with a stellar future ahead. Also, they’ve developed and brought and re-invested in players such as Colombian forward Andres Gomez, Colombian midfielder Nelson Palacio, Colombian defender Brayan Vera, Paraguayan midfielder Braian Ojeda, American defender Justen Glad, among others.

“We feel great about the talent level of the roster and the trajectory of the team,” Fall says. “Most of these players are in their prime or coming into it in the years ahead. …”

He hesitates,

“… It’s been fantastic.”

It’s left to be seen if this postseason will be fantastic, as RSL faces a difficult elimination game with Houston.

Even in the preliminary stages of Real’s future promise, Fall is fully aware he plies his trade In a business not exactly known for job security, But he feels if not secure at least proud of his accomplishments with the team since his arrival 16 years ago, working both in the shadows and in the light.

He was a baby-faced newbie back in the day, and is a grizzled veteran now, but a vet who lacks the splash and panache of some of the bigger names in Major League Soccer. All right, he says he’s OK with that.

The GM also says he thinks he’s appreciated by ownership, and he concedes that it does no good for him to swamp himself with concerns over whether he is or he isn’t.

“I’m confident in what we’ve been able to build here,” Fall says. “It’s just my job to do what’s best for the club. I’ll continue to do that for as long as they’ll have me.”

Yeah, come what may, the local boy-turned-man will happily fill that role. And he’ll occasionally, here and there, just now and again, swing a 6-iron, almost always hitting it pure from 215 yards out straight onto what for him are welcoming greens. Oh, one last thing, the club brand of his choice? Titleist. Forever Titleist. It’s a label, a designation he’d like to have attached to, seared into his other club, the one he manages full time, the one he’s worked to push and pull through sweet times and sour for the better part of half his life.