As many of you know, I love football and support God’s true team, the Chicago Bears. However, I have long complained that I never take the kids to football games because of the pervasive swearing and drunkenness. For families, the most obnoxious element has taken over these games, drunken, adolescent adults who use games as an excuse to shed every notion of decency and civility. We are experiencing what Europe has faced with soccer hooligans as families are increasing abandoning stadiums. Last night showed the depth of the problem. After fans recently went to his house after a loss to berate him, Texans quarterback Matt Schaub lay on the field with an injured leg as Texan fans cheered his injury.
It was a frightful demonstration of how base and crude football fans have become. They no longer treat players as humans. They do not consider this man’s wife or children or all the things that he has done for the team. It was truly disgusting as players of both teams expressed after the game.
This is precisely the type of fans that I do not want to expose my kids to at a stadium. We stay home and watch on television. It is not a perfect solution of course. I know a number of families who have sold their season tickets due to the obnoxious, drunken conduct of fans. We have surrendered stadiums to the lowest common denominator of society, but the alternative is to force your children to listen to some drunk loser swearing throughout a game and cheering injuries of players. With families withdrawing, it seems to be only increasing the problem as obnoxious fans feed off each other.
As an ardent football fan, I find the trend at stadiums to be really depressing despite efforts of some stadiums to nail the worst offenders. It is a great game that is being degraded by a segment of the fan base that is using games as an excuse for booze-soaked venting at fans and players.
pete, Good find on Ditka. He doesn’t lack a strong ego!
if sandra bullock had been there, nobody would’ve boo’d.
at least the bears ex coaches are humble
http://www.mediaite.com/online/former-chicago-bears-coach-mike-ditka-says-his-biggest-mistake-involves-obama/
ModernMiner, I go to 2-3 Packer games a year. And, that’s over the last 30 years. I’ve been to many NFL venues. Packer fans get every bit as drunk, if not more, than other stadiums. I agree w/ you they are for the most part, good natured drunk. But, they still use very profane language in front of kids, puke[I’ve been puked on], and generally make asses of themselves. I see fewer and fewer kids @ games in Green Bay and elsewhere. Cost is a factor. Most of the fans in Green Bay are regular, blue collar folk. As you know, Lambeau sits in a blue collar neighborhood. Night games are pretty bad.
Bread and circuses …
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18ybnn8ntx144gif/ku-medium.gif
Professor,
As another fan of God’s team, Da Bears, I agree that this would never happen in Soldier Field.
Good Article Professor JT:
I stopped going to all St. Louis professional games (since my alma mater is Saint Louis University, I still attend SLU basketball games: no hysterical fans) due to drunk fans who enjoy shouting and talking during the entire game. Who wants to pay to see a class of beer spilled on your spouse, especially after she just had her hair done a couple of days ago?
Anyway, Go Cardinals! We have Adam Wainwright on the mound tonight. Do I hear 3 games to 0?
What Nick S said … plus …
Hey, it’s the Christians in the coliseum … got lions … what can I tell you bro?
Grammar Hammer,
Can you not imagine a VERY busy family man and professional, who I imagine fires off these articles lickety-split for the benefit of the public?? Give the man a break!!
How can these guys even afford to go to the game? I would’ve thought the ridiculous ticket and beer prices would lead to lots of guys in suits sitting around quietly clapping at a football game. But somehow the hooligans remain.
Grammar Hammer,
“Lie, lay, have lain
When are you going to get a proofreader?”
Lame. Conjugate with yourself.
I stopped watching football a year ago, and after seeing PBS’s “League Of Denial” this past week, I’m glad I did. It’s sickening to see people take glee in others’ injury – in any other situation, we’d call such people sadistic or mentally deranged. How does being a “sports fan” make such behaviour acceptable?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/league-of-denial/
Watch the part where Leigh Steinberg talks about Troy Aikman being concussed, and Aikman’s inability to remember a conversation from five minutes before. Schaub is likely in the same condition, unable to think and losing his short term memory, whether temporarily or permanently.
To anyone who claims to “love football”, have the decency and courage to do this: go to your local high school, put on the equipment, take a blindside hit from a teenage linebacker and see if you can get up. Odds are, you won’t even be awake.
But odds are, “football fans” wouldn’t do it. There’s a reason they are called “Monday morning quarterbacks”: they are as cowardly and hypocritical as the chickenhawks who want war but are too afraid to fight in one.
This is generally true at most stadiums I’ve been to. But I’ll make an exception for Lambeau Stadium in Green Bay. I’ve found Green Bay fans to be some of the most gracious fans around. I’ve even seen Packers and Bears fans tailgating together on game day. Perhaps it’s because this is one of the oldest rivalries in professional football and they’ve had ample time to learn how to co-exist. I’d have no problem taking my 11-year-old to a game at Lambeau.
That’s a sign of the influence, that their Freakin’ Geebus has on them, down there in TEXASS………….
American football is a violent sport, among others. The players are the gladiators and the people watching them are increasingly the angry mob which needs to see blood. My right-wing brother with a penchant for violence was nearly choked to death when he taunted the British soccer team on their turf while wearing a scarf with his team’s colors. When the home team loses, the Belgian police gears up for more calls about domestic violence directed at women and children.
Jonathan, Jonathan…God’s true team, the Chicago Bears!! Really! And this from a Cubs fan. I sold my Bears and Cubs season tickets 20 years ago for the same reason. Bad fans aren’t just in Texas. Ended a treasured family tradition, and the hardest part was trying to explain to two young sons. I spent 4 years in the military, saw some rough times, but even I learned some new words and phrases at Soldier and Wrigley Field’s (along with getting doused by enough beer to start my own bar), not to mention the inevitable fights between fans so drunk they could barely walk. Never could figure out the mentality of people who would pay a lot of $$ for tickets, parking, food, drinks, then get so drunk they haven’t a clue what happened at the game and have to watch reruns on ESPN the following day. The in-your-face mentality is part of the “new norm” – sadly. And it permeates every aspect of society, not just sports.
Meanwhile, as you overblow this incident, have you noticed that American Military Heroes have been selflessly sacrificing limbs and lives for all of you worshipers of the insatiably selfish “Sweaty Baboons” and “Darlings” of the entertainment industry.
That is an indictment of these Americans Values, and they are ugly as hell.
NFL games are drunken debauchery. This behavior just being one of millions of examples.
I’ve only been to one NFL game in my life, and I will never go back. The dehumanization of the game extends from the owner’s box right down to the field. Even sports writers have fallen into the depths of the dehumanization of the players. One writer in today’s Washington Post suggested that the players are “interchangeable,” suggesting that injuries are unimportant because they are simply a part of the game. Many sports fans, as you surely know, live their lives around what the writers write and the radio personalities say. (One of the ways that sports and politics are so alike.) You probably remember the very last play of Football Hall of Fame inductee Michael Irvin’s career. He lay on the deplorable old stadium floor of the Philadelphia Eagles, having taken a horrible fall on the folded, matted carpet they called a field and landed on his head, wrenching his neck. And the fans in the stadium cheered up to and including the time they took him off the field on a stretcher. This was more than a decade ago. It’s only gotten worse.
I hadn’t heard about the Matt Schaub incident until now. It was not mentioned by any of the Sunday Night Football commentators when they discussed the happenings of the games earlier in the day. Not to call the fans in Houston out, with two veteran players and one Superbowl-winning coach there, to me is just as bad. At least there is a football-loving law professor who could not sit back without saying something. Thank you, professor.
Lie, lay, have lain
When are you going to get a proofreader?