It’s unlikely that I’ll ever attend a major sporting event again. I much prefer watching the same competition on television. I prefer the televised version because when I’m viewing the match or game from home I have control over the circumstances. That control is notably absent when you choose to attend at a venue full of sporting fans.
Also, the televised option has a myriad of camera angles and replay, and you’re not going to have to concern yourself with inclement weather. But the most attractive part of televised sport is that you don’t have to deal with the people that fill the stadiums and arenas around the world.
Because those sport fans are a challenge for me to endure. I suppose that not all the people who gather for a hockey or football game are assholes. But as soon as you start counting spectators in the thousands then it’s inevitable that a certain percentage of the seats will be filled with not just asses but assholes. Actually the assholes I speak of rarely fill any of the supplied seating. They much prefer to stand so that the person behind them can’t see and is also compelled to stand. Then everyone behind the original standing asshole is also forced to stand if they want to see anything.
I call this the asshole wave.
I kind of get it if it’s the bottom of the ninth and your team has a one run lead. I kind of get it if your team is down a goal and the goaltender is pulled for the last minute of the third period. I still only kind of get it though, because I experimented with clapping my hands and making cheering noises while sitting, and surprisingly I managed just fine. So, if you’ve chosen to stand in the first inning of a scoreless game then you’re one of the reasons I prefer television.
I was at a football game a few years back between the Forty Niners and the Chicago Bears. There was this guy in the row behind us and each time Chicago had the ball he screamed at the top of his lungs that the Bears were the Maaaaafia. He was both a pain in the ass and ill informed, because from where I was sitting it looked like everyone on Chicago except the quarterback were black dudes. So, there weren’t any Guido’s or Giancana’s or Nitti’s that I could see on their sweater backs. Eventually the loud whiny nasal tones of Maaaafia guy became so annoying that the guy next to him forcefully asked him to shut the hell up. Mafia guy was upset and countered with getting up in the grill of the guy that bitched because it was his right to Maaaafia. Annoyed guy countered with a right of his own. Only his right was a bitch slap to the head of Mafia guy. Many spilled fifteen dollar beers later and security had to intervene. Mafia guy got to stay, but on the plus side, he was quiet for about forty minutes. I was pleased for the forty minutes of hurt pride bitch slapped silence. But mostly I was pleased that the stadium security apparently gives zero fucks about Mafia guys second amendment rights, so he was metal detected at the entrance gate and therefore unarmed.
And that’s a good thing because I’m sure the slapped fella felt threatened, and precedent would suggest that in America if you feel threatened then you can just start blasting away. I think that America should institute some sort of default setting where as soon as gunfire is detected that the P.A. system automatically starts playing Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Caught in the Crossfire as a courtesy to the people who were out of Maaaafia range but within Glock range.
A musical heads up to keep your head down would be a fine idea I think.
I wondered how the guy that slapped Maaaafia guy felt as he was escorted out of the stadium. I wondered if he felt that he got his entertainment value from the 200 dollar ticket and the fifty dollar beer and pizza. Probably not. He likely concluded that he could have just found someone annoying to slap at a local sports bar and saved himself a couple of Benjamins.
American football fans are a pretty devoted group but they’re rank amateurs next to real football fans, and by that I mean soccer. Soccer fans are in a league of their own. I can’t think of a time where a baseball or hockey team was forced to play a fan free home game because their fans were either so repetitively violent or crude that they were banned from in person viewing. English fans were actually banned from not just stadiums but from continental Europe in general during the height of hooliganism. I will say this in defense of the English football fan though. They weren’t just dicks in Paris and Brussels. They also kept alive a fine English tradition of assault and the occasional stabbing among their own club teams. In fact the British parliament had to pass laws to stop a modern day soccer War of the Roses between Lancaster and York.
I should add that when I say the English have a tradition I’m not exaggerating. Edward the second banned soccer in England in 1314 because he was tired of his subjects beating the shit out of each other over inter village soccer rivalries.
Edward was unsuccessful by the way.
I wonder what goes through the mind of an architect tasked with designing a soccer stadium in Europe, the middle East or any Latin American country. First you have to make it huge. One hundred thousand people huge. Next you have to ensure the stands won’t collapse when all of those people get altered and begin to jump up and down in sync while chanting some fight song. Then you need to design huge impenetrable cages to house the opposing team fans that dare to come to a hostile stadium. Then you need to design the exits so that streaming masses of humanity can stampede out in the event of a riot or a mass crushing event. Also, those exits need to be separated so the fans from opposing teams can’t mingle either on the way in or the way out, because letting the rival fan bases mingle is a recipe for a melee. Finally, you need to build covert escape routes for the referee’s in case the fans and sometimes the players lose their shit over a non-call, and decide the officials need a good beating.
Mexican soccer fans would think my distaste for North American fan behavior is not very macho. In fact kind of Ehhhhhh, puto. They would think this because a Mexican soccer match typically involves not just homophonic chants but also double D Duracell’s and bags of piss thrown from height at opposing players.
And from the look of things everyone stands for the entire event. I guess it’s easier to see and dodge a battery or a bag of piss if you’re already on your feet.
Maybe my dislike for fans of any ilk is based on the fact that I’m not a very good participant in mass human rituals of any kind. If I like a particular team I never find myself using the word we when I’m discussing the teams fortunes, and so I’m not able to connect at that level where I want to dress in the same colors as everyone else, and repetitively chant some idiotic pseudo-song.
Screw that.
Everyone needs to sit the hell down.