Once upon a time, in the Summer of 1996, I was an exchange student to Germany.  Myself and a couple of other Americans, including Sexx, spent a month in Berlin living with host families, going to school and unsuccessfully attempting to pretend that we were anything other than stupid Americans.  We saw all sorts of castles, cathedrals and museums, legally bought beer and porn at age 16, avoided skinheads whenever possible and spent our last week in Germany touring the Rhine, but the single most defining moment of the entire trip was when I experienced the absolute epitome of European sports insanity:  the full-on balls-out soccer riot.  So in honor of the World Cup being held in Germany this month, I'd like the relay the tale of the time .

Now I'll be honest with you.  I know precisely dick when it comes to any kind of football that doesn't involve a quarterback or wide receiver getting dry-humped by a bunch of three-hundred-pound massive sweaty dudes.  So when my host student Phillipp told me that we were all going to go out and see a football match, I was obviously a little less than enthusiastic about it.  It's no secret that there isn't a warm reception to soccer here in the States, and many of us don't really see what the big deal is.  It's usually slow-moving, there's little to no scoring and you get in trouble if you try to injure someone (basically, it's a lot like my days in high school).  But, since I was interested in getting the entire experience of living in a European country, I decided to go along and see what was up.

It was a warm German afternoon when Phillipp and I headed out to the stadium with his younger brother, a couple of the other Americans and their host students.  The sun was shining, the crowd was pumped up and I was ready to sit through a potentially boring soccer match (when I started this article I was going to refer to 'soccer' as 'football', but I just can't in good conscience bring myself to do so).

I guess there's a little bit of back story that I should fill you in on here, even though I'm not entirely certain what the deal actually was.  As far as I can tell there are three tiers of German soccer, which I guess are roughly equivalent to Major League Baseball, AAA baseball and AA ball.  Well at the end of every season, the team that wins the championship for their tier gets bumped up to the next highest tier and the team that finishes in last place gets demoted one step.  Well in the summer of '96 the Berlin team, Hertha BSC, was the second-to-last team in the second tier.  The game we were going to was the last game of the season, and if Hertha BSC lost they would get dumped down into the bottom-feeder group.  If they tied or won the match, they would stay alive and remain in the mid-level group next season.  Obviously nobody wants to suffer the humiliation of having their team demoted out of the league as a result of their tremendous über-suckitude, so the fans who came out were more than ready to cheer on their crapstastic team.

Hertha BSC was playing a soccer club which I will dub "The Yellow Team", because I don't know the first fucking thing about German professional association football.  Coincidentally, I don't know the first fucking thing about the game of soccer either.  I played three years in an under-12 city league, but even then I played Fullback and my only job (as explained to me by my coach) was, "when someone comes down here with the ball, run up and kick it away from them as hard as you can".  I had fun with this, but ultimately running around like a crazy robotic ball-kicking machine gone haywire didn't really do a whole lot to increase my understanding of the sport.  As a result, all I can tell you about the game was that Hertha BSC wore blue, The Yellow Team wore yellow, I bought a Hertha BSC t-shirt and NOBODY scored a goal in the two hours we sat out there.

But no one was complaining.  Sure, it was a little bit too hot, and nobody did much of anything, but if there's one thing I've learned about soccer fans it's that years of watching the sport have conditioned them to be infinitely fucking patient when it comes to goal-scoring.  The game essentially doesn't seem slow to them because they don't EXPECT more than two or three goals to be scored in the entire game.  Obviously, something like a 0-0 draw wouldn't particularly sit well with us Americans who are used to sports where points come early and often, but on the other hand even when there's no scoring the German fans are so fanatically devoted to their team that they don't even seem to mind.

But honestly, I don't even think "fanatically devoted" is strong enough terminology.  I had no idea what I as getting myself into when I agreed to go to this game.  They were rabid from the second the teams took the field to well after the game ended.  There was no drop in enthusiasm throughout the entire match.  It was totally insane.  It was without a doubt one of the most exciting sporting events I have ever attended in my life, despite the fact that it was a goddamned 0-0 tie.  That's pretty fucking impressive.

As you can see from the picture, those crazy soccer hooligans were waving flags like maniacs, cheering every shot and every pass like it was the last two minutes of Overtime in the Super Bowl or the bottom of the twelfth inning in Game 7 of the World Series.  Though the stadium was far from sold-out, the sheer intensity of the crowd was unbelievable.  You can't really do it justice from the pictures, but everywhere you looked you saw a constantly-moving sea of blue and white flags, coupled with deafening shouts, whistles and the occasional chorus of the official Hertha BSC team fight song, which, to the best of my knowledge, has a similar chord progression to "The Farmer and the Dell" and lyrics that go a little something like this:

Hertha BSC!

Hertha BSC!

Hertha BSC!

Hertha BSC!

Obviously I don't speak German, so even if these aren't the lyrics this is what I was belting out while waving the cheap Hertha BSC flag I bought for like 5 Marks from a guy who may or may not have acquired it through illicit means.

A large group of dudes in green, white and black uniforms had been patrolling the edges of the field during the match, trying to preserve order and keeping drunk Germans from running out on the pitch and shivving anybody.  Once the match ended though, some hooligan got the bright idea of running out onto the field in celebration of Herta being just the second-shittiest team in the league and not the #1 most shittiest.  Of course, the dudes in the green jackets jumped on him immediately, took him down like Don Zimmer and slapped some zip-tie handcuffs on his stupid ass.

This brave display of drunken dumbassery clearly inspired several like-minded fans, and before long five or six other jerks vaulted the wall between the stands and the field and ran like lemmings head-first into a wall of angry German security guards.  Oddly enough, they seemed relatively surprised when they suffered the same fate as their predecessor - a government-assisted face-plant onto the turf.

At this point the excrement hit the air conditioning, so to speak.  The entire section that was seated around midfield apparently decided, "you fucks can beat the shit out of some of us, but not ALL of us!" and the entire fucking section charged the field.  Players and coaches quickly sprinted back to their respective locker rooms as the guards frantically attempted to restrain the tide of beer-soaked drunken humanity flowing forth from the stands onto the field.  The fans in our section roared.  Some bald guy held up a scarf.

Before long, a secret doorway in the bowels of the stadium was thrown open and a squad of dudes in olive-drab jumpsuits marched forth at a reasonable clip.  They were clad in white helmets complete with plastic face-guards and were clutching full-length riot shields in one hand and two-foot-long black truncheons in the other.  Phillipp leaned over to me and shouted over the din, "Zeese are za policemen who ah allowed to beat you!"

You could almost feel the panic from the people on the field as the riot cops jogged towards them.  The expressions on their faces screamed, "wait maybe this was a mistake", as the riot politzei attempted to forcibly regain order amid an ever-widening riot.

While the threat of severe blunt force trauma may be an effective deterrent to many riotous Americans, it surprised me greatly when I came to the realization that no self-respecting German soccer hooligan would let something as trivial as a wall of six-foot-tall club-weilding angry police officers stand between them and their ultimate goal of "standing on the field and yelling".  Yet more people got up the sack to run on the field and join the ever-growing mass of humanity gathering at midfield for no apparent reason other than to wave their flags from the stadium floor and get the snot beaten out of them by the fuzz.

Amid the growing chaos, I took some time out to get a picture with Phillipp's classmate Lars.  Behind us, you can see the afore-mentioned white-helmeted riot police making their way to midfield for some good old-fashion German ass whuppings.

I once saw Lars crush three beer cans on his forehead rapid-fire in the span of about ten seconds.

As the stands continued to empty and police-on-fan and fan-on-fan fights continued on the field, I decided that it was time to get down there and bask in the glory of a European soccer riot.  I knew that I could potentially have been beaten, arrested and deported, but how many opportunities does an American have to get in on this type of thing?

Phillipp and I made our way down to the first row of the stands.  At the end of the stairs there was a short, three-foot-tall wall, which I quickly jumped over without a second thought.

At this point I realized that between the first row of the stands and the beginning of the field was a large, six-foot-deep trench.  Though the wall I hopped was only about three feet, the resulting fall was about nine feet down.  Luckily, I didn't kill myself or anyone else, but I was obviously more than a little surprised to find that I was now stuck in a German trench with little hope for escape.  I was finally able to jump up and grab onto the wall on the field side of the trench and pull myself up.  Once I was up there, I was able to help pull Phillipp (and a couple of other people) up onto the field.  After this brief adventure, I turned to survey my surroundings.  The field was packed with bodies, and the police and security had pretty much given up trying to retain any sense of order on the field.  Like any good Berliner, I started waving my stupid Hertha BSC flag for all I was worth.

A close-up of me on the field:

After about ten minutes of everyone milling about like cattle, the crowd realized that charging onto the field really wasn't all it was cracked up to be.  Since there was no longer the threat of being brained by a billyclub or the opportunity to slide-tackle a real football player, everyone slowly started moseying towards the exits.  At this point the PA system comes on and a booming voice pleaded to the crowd:

"Attention fans, we have a game on this field tomorrow, so please do not pull up any of the grass."

At this point I swear you could see a gigantic lightbulb go on over the collective heads of this rampaging mob.  Within seconds, every single person on the field had a large chunk of pitch in their clutches.  Sexx and I scoured the field for empty beer cups, which we deposited our own piece of the Berlin Soccer Stadium turf into.  By the time the field had cleared out, there was little remaining but dirt, trash, vomit, cops and people in handcuffs.  Looking out at the field it was almost as if the Plague of Locusts had swept through the stadium, consuming all that was before it.  Only it was like the Plague of Germans, I guess.  Either way, it was pretty much the awesomest thing ever.

Sexx on the field.

From that day forth, any mention of European soccer brings make fond memories of the day that I was able to charge the field and channel my drunken angry Irish/English heritage by participating in a soccer riot.  I guess it was a little tame as far as soccer riots go, given that there were no dead bodies or flaming automobiles or anything, but it was awesome nonetheless.

And just for the hell of it here's a picture of me and Sexx partying with a bunch of Germans:

All I really remember about that night was that we played a drunken "Americans Vs. Germans" pick-up basketball game and I spent the entire time singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the top of my lungs and trying to kick the ball away from whoever had it.