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By Mark Starr
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This is a culture that embraces the notion that the real football fan is a man who dresses up as a hog or maybe a dawg; or someone who sits bare-chested and face-painted in subfreezing temperatures; or someone who will tell his wife any lie to sneak off with the guys to the big game, or even someone who stays at home and, while consuming platters of nachos, fantasizes that he's not really a couch potato, but a sleek 6-foot-2, 230-pound running back. Now do we really think "he" does any of these things sober?
The NFL would love you to believe that the fan meltdown that started in the Cleveland Browns' famed Dawg Pound last Sunday, after a controversial call went against the home team, was an anomaly in what is usually civilized territory. Granted this fan uprising, where the weapon of choice was plastic beer missiles, was a particularly vile outburst. And it put officials, players and fans at risk of serious injury. But it was not exactly out of character for NFL fans. Despite the outpouring of condemnation from the league and on the airwaves of talk radio, just one day later New Orleans fans began tossing beer bottles at officials after a costly pass-interference call against the Saints.
At Giants Stadium a few seasons ago, a similar aerial assault was carried out. Then, the weapon of choice was snowballs. The word "snowball" conveys benign images of a child's fight in the fluffy white, which doesn't quite capture the lethal potential of these chunks of solid ice. Jack Kemp, who not only endured 12 seasons of pro football but the slings and arrows of political battle for even longer, once confided to me that he never faced a scarier assault than when Patriots fans began bombarding him and his Buffalo Bills with snowballs.
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As a Patriots season-ticket-holder, I can attest that more aggressive security has dramatically reduced the number of ugly incidents in the stands. Then again, it couldn't have gotten much worse. Back in 1980, after a Monday-night game, Patriots fans ran amok, trashing the stadium and the environs and even assaulting police officers. Local politicians eventually responded by banning "Monday Night Football" from Foxboro, Mass. The prohibition lasted until 1995, when current owner Bob Kraft bought the team.
Patriots coach Bill Belichek knows something about the perils of the Dawg Pound. Those mutt-faced fans in the end zone have long symbolized Cleveland's fervent devotion to pro football. And when the NFL renamed the team the Ravens and sent it south to Baltimore back in 1995, those 'dawgs' became the human embodiment of the tragic plight of the city's abandoned fans. But Belichek recalls what else they embodied. He was the Browns coach in their final game at the old Cleveland Municipal Stadium. And late in that finale the Dawg Pound habitues were hurling so many things onto the field that officials had teams switch sides every time one crossed midfield so as to avoid even approaching the mayhem in the end zone.
Whatever Cleveland's sins in Sunday's game, they were, of course, compounded by the mortifying comments by the both the team owner and president. They came to their senses the next day, though I suspect it was the sense that came to them in the form of a blistering dress-down from league brass and other NFL team honchos. Team president Carmen Policy, who originally saw the incident as the embodiment of fans' passion for the game--"I like the fact that our fans care"--suddenly comprehended that the behavior was intolerable. (It's easy to see, though, why Policy was confused. After all, he was so confused by the salary cap while running the 49ers, he broke the rules, bringing heavy fines and penalties down on him and the team.)
Policy and owner Al Lerner may have found themselves a little lonely, with support from only a few local talk-radio yahoos. But the truth is this country has an unconscionably high tolerance for the lunacy of football fans, viewing even its extreme manifestations as amusing or, at the very least, understandable. That's how newscasts treated the recent incident when a man snuck through security in the Atlanta airport, shutting down operations for several hours and inconveniencing thousands of passengers. Why was that funny in this age of terrorism? Why was this misguided soul worthy of our sympathy? Because he was just a crazed Georgia Bulldogs fan desperate to make his flight for the game at the University of Mississippi. Delta canceled 450 flights that day. Do you think any of those other folks might have had somewhere more important to go?
Football has undoubtedly established its primacy in the hearts of American sports fans. But it is also at the center of a pathology among too many men in attendance (let's not even call them fans) who view the outing as some kind of adolescent frat-boy ritual. It would be dangerous enough without alcohol fueling the foolishness. And that, sadly, is seldom the case. The mixture of booze and sporting passions is a particularly combustible one, compounding whatever demons are already rooted in the stands. It produces brawls, X-rated stadium sections where no parent would dare take a child and, on Sunday, the ugliness that was Cleveland.
But the Browns were luckier in the mayhem than they were in the game. After all, it was ugly, but ultimately not tragic. There was no maiming injury--no player's career ended, no child's eyesight damaged. Nobody should count on that kind of luck again. Now is the time for the NFL and the Browns, indeed all leagues and teams, to display zero tolerance for fan abuse of any kind. Every stadium and arena now has screenings, patdowns and bag checks to protect fans from terrorists. They need to start protecting us from some of those so-called fans too.
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