Each weekend in the spring and fall, crowds gather at the soccer fields along Lake Shore Drive to watch children play in youth leagues. For a lot of Chicagoans, this is their involvement in sports, even if the parents tend to treat it more as a chance to network or catch up with friends or give the dog some air while the kids race about nearby.
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It happened to have been the last day of the local American Youth Soccer Organization season, so champions who’d been crowned that afternoon were invited onto the field to form two lines ushering the Fire and its opponent, FC Dallas, out of their locker rooms before the game. Dozens of kids took the Fire up on the offer, and they and their families made up a sizable chunk of a crowd that eventually numbered only 8,777. The Fire made it to the Major League Soccer championship game just two years ago, when the team was drawing much larger crowds, but in a painful reminder that soccer remains a bush-league sport here, they lost first a big star, DaMarcus Beasley, and then young phenom Damani Ralph to better-paying, more prestigious gigs elsewhere. This Fire team has barely a winning record, and it’s had trouble drawing fans.
The skills that soccer requires aren’t skills Americans tend to esteem. Here, soccer remains a participant sport for kids rather than a spectator sport for adults. So it was no surprise that the best thing about the Fire was the fans who turned the game into a participant sport of their own. I am referring, of course, to the group of loonies who gathered behind the south goal in what’s commonly called Section 8. It actually comprises sections 122 and 123 at Soldier Field, but the Section 8 moniker is a reference to the armed forces’ regulation on insanity, familiar from the TV show MAS*H. Insane is what these fans seemed, standing throughout the game and singing songs to their team, most of which sounded somehow familiar. The main one had hints of “Clementine,” and a new one was set to the tune of OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” A drummer in something of a conductor’s box at the bottom of the section dictated tune and tempo. With his back to the field, he exhorted the fans and scolded them when they let the volume drop below a mild bellow. As for the lyrics, they weren’t too demanding. One song set to the tune of “Can’t Take My Eyes off You” went, “We love you Fire, lo lo lo lo lo lo,” and on from there.
The Fire may be taking the sport to the suburban soccer moms and their offspring who are theoretically the sport’s fan base, but in the process they could lose the urban kooks who are not just their fiercest fans but also their games’ most consistently entertaining element. Now that’s insanity.
