Sports Illustrated
Friendly the Bear was discovered, abandoned, in a dumpster. He was perfect.
Salvaged almost a decade ago by a friend of Detroit City Football Club’s founders, the unwanted costume has found new life at 7,933-seat Keyworth Stadium, a Depression-era urban venue that also required resurrection. Friendly is now ironically iconic. He humors thousands at games, and he’s honored with a black velvet painting inside the bar and restaurant that anchors DCFC’s clubhouse.
“We were looking for halftime entertainment and we decided to use Friendly one game, and it kind of caught on,” DCFC cofounder and CEO Sean Mann recalls. “We just loved the idea that it was a dumpster bear. It’s not pleasant [to wear], but it’s not much worse than any other mascot.”
Friendly is the ideal avatar for an irreverent and industrious third-division soccer team that hustles just to break even in a major league city. And he’s a poignant personification of that city, which many once left for dead.
The Detroit City match-day ritual begins at the Fowling Warehouse, a former axel factory that’s been converted into a massive sports bar with 30 lanes for “fowling,” a game where you heave a football at bowling pins. From there, DCFC’s Northern Guard Supporters march half a mile, flags waving and megaphones blaring, down the adjacent hill and through the narrow streets of Hamtramck, an industrial enclave inside Detroit, and turn up Roosevelt Street to Keyworth. Kids wave from windows and porches. Nobody has ever complained about the commotion, Mann says, even with the amplified profanity. There hadn’t been this sort of clamor around here for a while.
