It is almost playoff time for the NFL, and that means a few things. Games and action often get more exciting. Teams will be eliminated with each passing week, until we have the two Super Bowl participants battling it out for the title. Heroes and, most likely, goats will emerge in this process. In the end, the best team will be crowned champion.
But there are other stories that go unreported, as well. Domestic violence goes up a notch or two in the city where their team has just been eliminated. Sometimes, there are violent riots and gatherings, in both winning and losing sports cities. And you can count on ugliness in general from overzealous fans for all teams.
There is a video an reaction of the reaction by a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers from that team's loss to the New England Patriots this past Sunday that has been generating some publicity. I ran into it a few days after this video was apparently taken.
But there are other stories that go unreported, as well. Domestic violence goes up a notch or two in the city where their team has just been eliminated. Sometimes, there are violent riots and gatherings, in both winning and losing sports cities. And you can count on ugliness in general from overzealous fans for all teams.
There is a video an reaction of the reaction by a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers from that team's loss to the New England Patriots this past Sunday that has been generating some publicity. I ran into it a few days after this video was apparently taken.
When I was a kid, and throughout my teenage years right into young adulthood, I was much more into sports than I am now. One of the things that I did to compensate for never going to games back then was to go to a ton of games once I could. And perhaps what surprised me most about doing this was that it was not nearly as exciting as I thought it would be.
In fact, on many levels, it was downright depressing!
How? Well, frankly, because of fans like this.
Yes, I know that it was not this guy, specifically. He is a Steelers fan, and I have no idea who he is, or if he is from Pittsburgh or not. But what I found was that there were a lot of fans almost exactly like this.
Now, I do not want to sound judgmental, although it will be difficult to make the points that I want to make here without passing some judgment. But what I saw, time after time, were people very much like this. People who were pretty transparently unhappy with their lives, and who got way too into sports, beyond all reason, frankly. People who's fandom became the equivalent of ugly nationalism, if you will. People who would consume the products of their team and wear them proudly, and who became visibly unhappy when their team loses big games. Kind of like this guy.
I read some of the comments posted on Youtube to this video, and some people seemed to get the point of what is going on here, and some people do not. Some of the people commenting seemed not to think it strange that this man would react in this way, and they focused on the legitimacy, or lack thereof, concerning a controversial touchdown call that might have changed the outcome of the game. Some fans insulted the New England Patriots (and their fans), others fans insulted the Pittsburgh Steelers (and their fans), but all of them seemed to be way off the mark, and miss the point of why this video has generated as much attention as it has. And that blindness is probably the main problem with sports fan culture.
Whoever posted this video either thought it was a funny reaction by a friend, or a crazy/scary one. One way or the other, it is obviously an unusual reaction, and it is this reaction that personally scared me once I began going to the games. No, not by this particular fan, but by the legions of fans just like him. They might not look exactly like him, and surely their lives are different. Also, different fans like different teams. But for all intents and purposes, when you go to the tailgates scattered around the parking lots just before NFL games (and presumably, perhaps those of other major sports as well), and seated next to you inside of the stadium, these are the kinds of people, and the kinds of responses, that you will surely see.
That was what frightened me, when I went to those games. There was an anger that smacked of deep and very serious unhappiness with life in general, and a depressing and deflating emptiness in so blindly turning to sports for escapism in these fans. And I saw myself walking among them, seeing it time and again. I enjoyed going to games then, and still do to some extent now. Yet, some aspects of it were not so pleasant, and almost everything unpleasant that I saw - from rising ticket prices, to annoying lines of traffic and even lines to get into the stadium itself, to mind-numbingly stupid and often violent interactions between fans of competing teams - stemmed from this ugly and excessive sports fan culture.
Yet, many of the comments seemed to totally ignore this. Typically for sports fans, some of the comments betrayed this very blindness. Some were from Steelers fans who could sympathize, and some were from Patriots fans, who blasted this and other Steelers fans, and suggested that these were the rules, and to stop hating on their team.
It seemed to me obvious that they were all missing the point of this video, and why it has generated the reaction that it has.
Obviously, this man is completely overreacting to what is happening on the television screen, which is showing a bunch of spoiled millionaire athletes in one uniform playing a game against another bunch of spoiled millionaire athletes wearing another uniform. These men have no real loyalty to this particular fan, and in many cases, they do not seem to care much about the fans in general, even though it is the fans who essentially pay for the hefty salaries of these athletes.
And in the case of the star quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, let's face it: he is a rapist who was able to get away with his crimes because of who he is, because of what he is able to do on a football field, and for the big money that he brings to his team, and to the league in general, as well as other sponsors for the Steelers.
This mindlessness and blind devotion towards something that actually is not a real prat of a fan's life, - and certainly nothing that this man, or other dedicated fans, can control - is exactly what I saw all around me during those games, and whenever I see people (mostly, but not exclusively men) who are proud fans of this or that franchise.
I felt extremely lucky to see the Giants host the best team of the first half of the 1990's, the Dallas Cowboys. Not once, but twice. The first time was great. It came in 1994, and we took off work on Christmas Eve for the game. We got scalped tickets for less than I imagined, and we saw a good game, which the Giants won. The second time came two years later, I got tickets well in advance, and they cost far more. And the crowd was ridiculous, almost violent at times. There was a guy seated behind us who was so drunk, he could not fully stand on his own. Yet, he kept trying, and was yelling at the top of his voice, yelling at Michael Irving (as if he could hear this clown), and claiming that he was no role model, with his history of substance abuse (except he was using very crude and, frankly, incomprehensible language at times, often slurring his words). At one point while doing this, he actually fell, almost right onto my girlfriend/future wife. I had to physically hold him up, and he was a big guy, so it took some doing. Had she not been there, I would simply have let him fall, and hopefully hurt himself enough to perhaps learn a lesson. The Giants ended up winning a shocker, but I still remember not enjoying that game, and my memories have remained sour. That was the first time that I began to really get sick of going to these sporting events, but it was not the last time.
Don't get me wrong: I obviously like sports, and write about them quite a bit here, to boot. And will continue to do so.
But I think that we need to start taking the kind of blind and dangerously obsessed behavior that we see in video like this a lot more seriously, and start asking questions, about people like this, and about our own conduct if it is even remotely similar.
Whoever posted this video either thought it was a funny reaction by a friend, or a crazy/scary one. One way or the other, it is obviously an unusual reaction, and it is this reaction that personally scared me once I began going to the games. No, not by this particular fan, but by the legions of fans just like him. They might not look exactly like him, and surely their lives are different. Also, different fans like different teams. But for all intents and purposes, when you go to the tailgates scattered around the parking lots just before NFL games (and presumably, perhaps those of other major sports as well), and seated next to you inside of the stadium, these are the kinds of people, and the kinds of responses, that you will surely see.
That was what frightened me, when I went to those games. There was an anger that smacked of deep and very serious unhappiness with life in general, and a depressing and deflating emptiness in so blindly turning to sports for escapism in these fans. And I saw myself walking among them, seeing it time and again. I enjoyed going to games then, and still do to some extent now. Yet, some aspects of it were not so pleasant, and almost everything unpleasant that I saw - from rising ticket prices, to annoying lines of traffic and even lines to get into the stadium itself, to mind-numbingly stupid and often violent interactions between fans of competing teams - stemmed from this ugly and excessive sports fan culture.
Yet, many of the comments seemed to totally ignore this. Typically for sports fans, some of the comments betrayed this very blindness. Some were from Steelers fans who could sympathize, and some were from Patriots fans, who blasted this and other Steelers fans, and suggested that these were the rules, and to stop hating on their team.
It seemed to me obvious that they were all missing the point of this video, and why it has generated the reaction that it has.
Obviously, this man is completely overreacting to what is happening on the television screen, which is showing a bunch of spoiled millionaire athletes in one uniform playing a game against another bunch of spoiled millionaire athletes wearing another uniform. These men have no real loyalty to this particular fan, and in many cases, they do not seem to care much about the fans in general, even though it is the fans who essentially pay for the hefty salaries of these athletes.
And in the case of the star quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers, let's face it: he is a rapist who was able to get away with his crimes because of who he is, because of what he is able to do on a football field, and for the big money that he brings to his team, and to the league in general, as well as other sponsors for the Steelers.
This mindlessness and blind devotion towards something that actually is not a real prat of a fan's life, - and certainly nothing that this man, or other dedicated fans, can control - is exactly what I saw all around me during those games, and whenever I see people (mostly, but not exclusively men) who are proud fans of this or that franchise.
I felt extremely lucky to see the Giants host the best team of the first half of the 1990's, the Dallas Cowboys. Not once, but twice. The first time was great. It came in 1994, and we took off work on Christmas Eve for the game. We got scalped tickets for less than I imagined, and we saw a good game, which the Giants won. The second time came two years later, I got tickets well in advance, and they cost far more. And the crowd was ridiculous, almost violent at times. There was a guy seated behind us who was so drunk, he could not fully stand on his own. Yet, he kept trying, and was yelling at the top of his voice, yelling at Michael Irving (as if he could hear this clown), and claiming that he was no role model, with his history of substance abuse (except he was using very crude and, frankly, incomprehensible language at times, often slurring his words). At one point while doing this, he actually fell, almost right onto my girlfriend/future wife. I had to physically hold him up, and he was a big guy, so it took some doing. Had she not been there, I would simply have let him fall, and hopefully hurt himself enough to perhaps learn a lesson. The Giants ended up winning a shocker, but I still remember not enjoying that game, and my memories have remained sour. That was the first time that I began to really get sick of going to these sporting events, but it was not the last time.
Don't get me wrong: I obviously like sports, and write about them quite a bit here, to boot. And will continue to do so.
But I think that we need to start taking the kind of blind and dangerously obsessed behavior that we see in video like this a lot more seriously, and start asking questions, about people like this, and about our own conduct if it is even remotely similar.
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