In which we interrupt our regular content to venture into sports journalism:

I experienced a new slice of Portland life last evening: attendance at a Portland Timbers FC match. It was the last home game of the season for our local minor-league footballers, and they drew a record-breaking crowd. The 15,000+ spectators (and several hundred additional fans, every bit as enthusiastic as the ticket-holders, lining the street that overlooks the park) don’t sound too impressive until you’ve been among them. Unbeknownst to most Portlanders, there are soccer-mad citizens among us who could do themselves proud in England, Italy, or Brazil. They call themselves the Timbers Army, and stadium management graciously allows them to bring in enormous flags on eight-foot poles, drums, trumpets, cowbells, inflatable dolphins, streamers, and green smoke bombs. They never sit down during the match, and neither do they shut up. For the 90 minutes of the game, plus the warm-up, half time, and a good fifteen minutes after the victory, they were in constant song, chant, and heckle. Their ditties range from the title of this post, accompanied by manic hand-clapping, to the merciless “There’s no pity in the Rose City!” for fallen opponents and the jingling of car keys and lusty chorus of “Go home, you bums, go home”, to the derisory “Helen Keller” chant (”I’m blind! I’m deaf! I wanna be a ref!”), to this downright bizarre adaptation of a popular Christmas song:

Gone away is the quiet
Over here is a riot
Just walkin’ along, singin’ our song,
Walkin’ in a Timbers wonderland.

The maestro of the whole performance is the team mascot. Timber Jim is not an overstuffed bobble-head cartoon lumberjack trotting about waving an inflatable ax, as you might expect. Timber Jim is a burly 60-year-old powerful enough to stomp around the edge of the pitch brandishing and revving an enormous chain saw over his head (Shindaiwa is one of the team’s sponsors) and to scale the 80′ tree trunk that flies the Timbers flag, but nimble enough to stick back-flips and rappel from the stadium ceiling with his saw and drum. When the team scores, Timber Jim buzzes off a 2″-thick slab of his gigantic log, which is trundled out on a wagon before each match, and presents it to the man with the golden foot. One fellow scored a hat trick earlier in the season and could barely stagger off the field with his three trophies. The Army harbors a fierce love and idolatry of Timber Jim: they wear scarves bearing his name and he has several of his own chants and songs, including a tender bellowing of “You Are My Sunshine” in memory of his teenage daughter who died in a car wreck. They are a clan, the Timbers fans, and Timber Jim is their patriarch.

Shouting and cheering in the midst of this raucous crew, I couldn’t help thinking back to my days as a student of anthropology. I read a very interesting book that came out of fieldwork among the “hooligan” soccer fans in England, but you have to get down among the sweaty, beer-drenched, exultant masses to appreciate what an outlet for camaraderie and devotion the stadium can be. It’s spoken of in baseball, particularly (in my experience) in Fenway Park, but I’ve rarely seen it sustained so electrically for so long. Soccer doesn’t offer the deliberate, structured pauses of baseball: everyone is in motion every minute of a well-played game, and a second or two of brilliant or lax play can change the tide at any point. And unlike many of the more popular American sports, it’s better viewed in person than on television with extensive commentating. There’s little need for instant replay; the ball is large and easy to see at all times; the fans can truly appreciate how hard the players are working as they sprint up and down that big field with no clock stoppages for 45 minutes. Stats don’t matter; fitness and vision and innovative connection with other players do. That’s what I like to see in all the sports I watch, so I may have to make Timbers games a regular part of my summer schedule next year. I can probably even employ my knitting skills to improve on those acrylic scarves. It shouldn’t be hard to work up an intarsia chart for NO PITY, right?