22

Last week I was drifting around Sokol'niki and found myself in the middle of a huge red-clad throng yelling obscenities.  Actually I wasn't drifting at all; I went there on purpose to see a hockey match with my friend Marina and her husband, Alyosha.  Just, it was such a startling experience.   It was a playoff game between Moscow's Spartak, in red and backed by thousands of drunken bull muzhiks, and Petersburg's SKA, whose side boasted about 40 fans down from Leningrad, in blue and spirited, but a bit cowed by all that angry flesh.  Since Marina's husband is from Petersburg, and they're the ones who invited me, we were going for SKA, and sitting in the small section at the end of the stadium reserved for enemies.  A riot-armored chain of Russian swat officers formed a circle around our little section to make sure nothing unpleasant went down just because of what was happening out on the ice.  For, sitting there--and this was the strangest thing in comparison to sports in the U.S., where it seems to me fans mostly keep things civil and the fights that do break out are between Ron Artest and Pacers fans--I never got over the impression that all those Spartak fans in red there giving us fingers, singing "We will, we will, f--- you" (you see, even your average Russian snow shoveler has enough grasp of English to fill that one out), howling, would surely have beaten us to death otherwise.   Not least of all because, well aware that they had a role to fulfill, our SKA fans would return these epithets with some of a similar strain aimed at Moscow.  Probably for the best, SKA, after being up 2-0 in the first period, went down 3-2 under a deluge of slapshots from a captain named Rybin, or Fishman.  As far as the hockey goes, you are all probably wondering if I even know the rules.  Well, no, not really, I can't say I do, beyond a very primitive understanding of penalty boxes and holding your stick up too high.  But I enjoyed it.  Quite a bit.  I won't say more because there's nothing more intelligent to say about it.  The whole experience really was a great one, so much enthusiasm and unbridled passion, but it was a bit tempered by the fact that the police held us at the stadium for an hour after the end of the match to allow all the jubilant Spartak would be-batterers to disperse.  And then, rather than simply walking us to the metro, the cops herded us all onto a bus headed to Petersburg, despite our appeals of "we live in Moscow!"  I seriously thought for a bit that I would find myself in Peter the next morning.  Finally, instead of dropping us off at a metro--any metro, please!--they just pulled over onto the side of a highway and let us out.  When I asked Marina and Lyosha why they didn't just continue on until they drove by a metro when it would cost zero additional effort, she returned, "In Russia we do everything one way, and that way is-- ass."