At The California Clasico, Or A Night Among San Jose's Believers

The Earthquakes are optimistic. With a team "surprisingly better than I thought they would be," as a top-hat wearing gentleman told me between sips of Trader Joe's beer, San Jose's MLS side are going into their biggest match against a hated rival with momentum on their side. The week before, the Quakes' star Argentine carved up the league's best D with a left-footed dagger.

The Earthquakes are also optimistic as, like, a way of life. California's a tough state to dichotomize, regardless of Tim Draper's wish to split it into six parts. So many people have shown up over so many years looking for a promised land, fleeing Oklahoma's dust bowl and CIA-sponsored death squads in Central America or the insufficiently innovative thinkspace in South Africa. The Bay Area is full of people whose lives are both barely okay and wildly better than they could have imagined.

There's a type of evangelism loose in Silicon Valley. Even the most virulently atheistic hacker is all about improving life by following the lead of exemplary individuals. Last week in Palo Alto, the California Clasico between the Los Angeles Galaxy and San Jose felt like a revival meeting. Or a TED talk, maybe, but a bit louder and with a more balanced gender ratio.

Palo Alto's summer idyll was full of tailgates, food trucks, and covers of the more PG-13 Rolling Stones tracks. This, I was continually assured, was good. San Jose's fans mostly hail from the South or East Bay, but the 45-minute drive to Silicon Valley was (also) good. There's a bigger stadium out there, after all. The Quakes academy is making a big push into the affluent Peninsula, away from the East Bay, but that is also good, I was told. It's growing the game, after all. When asked about the oddity of seeing Liverpool or Chelsea shirts near the Faultline, the south end's supporters' section, a San Jose fan told me with a beatific smile, "maybe they'll buy Quakes jerseys at halftime." It's good. It's all good.

This goodness was emphasized by the Faultline capo's five-year-old son Alex running around in a Shea Salinas shirt. "He worships him," Chris Ibarra said, in reference to a winger I once compared favorably to a pair of khaki shorts. Chris' son once told his classmates that all he wants to do is pass the ball and love God. It's amusing out of context, but in the context of the Faultline—where Bears (subculture, not fauna), USWNT shirts, and large families sit side-by-side—the overwhelming goodness was astounding. (The walleyed-drunk and stubbornly shirtless snakes in this particular patch of grass were the Ultras, none of whom would comment but one announced, "the fuck you smiling about, lameass? I've had like 17 beers, I'm good.")

Ultras aside—and all other fan groups kindly ask to keep Ultras aside—the good faith was returned. Paul Swanson, leader of the OG fan group and current non-profit The Casbah (you see, the original MLS San Jose team was called The Clash) had nothing but kind words to say about the Quakes or Stanford Stadium, because of course he doesn't. As the stadium filled and the sun set over the Santa Cruz mountains, only the sight of an Ultra peeing on a shipping container set all this apart from a sweet-natured summer camp.

The 50,422 announced soccer evangelists came all this way to support their team, and they game served as a great sermon. LA's Juninho opened the scoring with an incredible strike, but Chris Wondolowski's 28' equalizer made it easy to see why the whole dang fanbase is in love with the player some in the soccer universe regard as a poacher. Matias Perez Garcia, the 5'5" Argentine, did the hard work of undressing a defender and putting in a perfect cross, but Wondo's goal was emphatic. Each of his 102 MLS goals have been the one that wins state against the snobby private school, the one with the blond kids. His celebration is more vindicated than exultant, an underdog's howl. The rest of the Quakes kind of jostle each other so that someone else will be the first to slow him down by congratulating him.

The last hour of the game was the Earthquakes at their best. They pushed Galaxy possessions to the sideline, harried the ball-carrier with two or three defenders, then countered down that touchline until LA over-committed and left a man open. The effect was something like locking poor Dan Gargan in his closet and going through his drawers as he watches through the slats. The Earthquakes went up 2-1 on a well-designed corner corner in the 53rd minute. Twenty minutes later, Shea Salinas finally realized that [passing the ball] and [loving God] isn't an either/or sort of thing and nicely set up Cordell Cato for a game-icing goal. The post-game fireworks featured no shortage of kids perched heartwarmingly on their parents' shoulders, looking up slack-jawed with fingers plugging their little ears.

Sports are many things. A business, of course. A TV show, most certainly. They are also a religious experience, if not necessarily one of those big, challenging, ones where the thunder crashes. It's something more subtle (or dangerous), where a smiling man asks you to wear a weird robe and say a few things. Sitting around a few thousand people who are earnestly enthusiastic and legitimately endearing—one Faultline cheer involved waving balloons, fer cryin' out loud—and simply want you to share them in enjoying this week's 5,400 seconds of soccer is enough to wear down the stoniest skeptic.

It's a gospel of something rather silly, a respite from the Valley's weekly ritual of high-stakes pitch decks and mission-critical stand-ups. But it's also enough to bring a man back to see if the Quakes can do it again. This may be a middle-of-the-pack team in what is decidedly not the world's most talented soccer league, but/and it involves caring a whole awful lot about something not remotely within your control. That's sports. It's good.