Recently, Super Bowl 59 was played and the Philadelphia Eagles won. The city of Brotherly Love is elated, for the time being. You see, Philly was the place where Santa Claus got famously booed and pelted with snowballs at halftime on December 15, 1968. Not even close to excusable behavior but, the stands were half shoveled of snow from a recent storm , the team stunk (2 wins and 11 loses) and they’d had enough. Hence, when Santa did a lap around the stadium he became a target. Believe it or not there’s a Wikipedia page about this. Fun facts: the term fan was a derivative of FANATIC, and also the baseball Phillies have an iconic mascot called the Philly Fanatic. In short, Philadelphia takes its sports quite seriously.

Another case in point was a more up-to-date incident in 2019 at a house fire in Philly when rescue workers threw people out windows to be caught. Hakeem Laws, a neighbor and former firefighter and army veteran caught a woman and a child.

He downplayed it saying they were just throwing people out the building and we was catching them unlike Agholor and his mishaps- I just wanna put that out there. Nelson Agholor, who was fast but had “bad hands” was a wide receiver on the Eagles at that time. Check out the hilarious viral video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md1XzbDglZk

It’s not just Philly fans that are fanatics. Many years ago, as part of the journey through journalism grad school I had to write a blog. This was one of my first entries. For the record I am a Braves fan.

EVIL EMPIRE

Yankee Stadium is known as a paragon and “the House that Ruth Built”, I call it hell -on-earth and a relic. My argument is not with the stadium or even the franchise, it is with the fans, the most vile, despicable in all of sports. Like the derelicts that line the neighborhood Yankee fans suck, not from a stem, but in a far more abstract and damning way, at the essence of the game itself.
Visiting teams are treated like the enemy in a war. Bottles, batteries and piss grenades are just some of the weapons. Rooters of the opposition face even worse.
Yankee fans talk in sentences plagued with ain’t , dese (these),dem (them), dose (those) and *uck. They urinate in the aisle.
They fully support the management’ anti-Robin Hood philosophy: steal from the poor and give to the rich. Yankee fans are baseballcentric , all opponents are inferior, mere mud on their boots. They see the pinstriped uniforms as vestments, I see jail suits.
They are the Evil Empire.
Friday night is the worst, the working-class stiffs and Wall Street lackeys’ reek of eight-dollar beers and after the seventh inning, vomit. Just like a badly hooked ball in the stands, they too, are foul.

Another time, way before I was a “writer” I submitted a somewhat sarcastic editorial to a local paper about the hypocrisy of calling the exploits of the high school football team as WE and US when in fact they were not on the team. Worse than that, when they lost a game, it was no longer an US situation, it was a THEM situation.

Lastly, there was an incident at a Baltimore Colts game I attended in the ‘70’s. At halftime a couple of female Miami Dolphins fans thought it’d be a good idea to parade through a main aisle carrying a huge homemade pro- Dolphins banner (a bedsheet in reality). This was a very bad idea eventually when a, no doubt intoxicated, Colts fan set fire to the banner. At first, they didn’t even know it was on fire and the crowd roared. Thankfully, a few steps later they figured out that it was the banner burning and not their bare midriff and hot pants outfits that were causing the crowd reaction and stomped out the flames.

So, are Philly fans really the worst? Definitely not, especially when you scan the globe and look at some of the drama perpetuated at soccer matches overseas. Mayhem, crowd violence and riots are not that uncommon.

https://www.thesportster.com/entertainment/top-15-deadliest-sports-riots-of-all-time/

Being a sports fan, college or professional can be a huge deal. It can be a great vehicle for bonding with family and friends. It can also border on zealotry- don’t be the knucklehead overly harassing  the visiting team fans or bombarding Santa with snowballs. If you do, be prepared to get kicked out of the stadium and/or taken away in handcuffs. Never a good look.

A Loyal Fan

J F Gozzi