Fan Violence

My days of attending professional football games might have just come to an end this past weekend.  No I haven’t been priced out.  Well not yet anyway.  Once the 49ers get their new stadium they’ll likely do what other teams have done and that is to raise ticket prices to a level that only CEOs can afford along with levying a usury personal seat license which will allow me to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege to pay thousands of dollars.  And no I haven’t given up on the local club despite the fact that they’ve been horrible over the past decade.

I’m looking at bailing because the 49ers haven’t made a public offer of awarding hazard pay nor are they going to offer supplemental life insurance in the event that I don’t come home alive.  Last Saturday it became apparent that football is becoming more dangerous for the fans than for the players.  To paraphrase the old joke, last weekend the 49ers and Raiders staged a fight and a football game broke out.

Sad to say this was no joke.  During the game numerous fights broke out in the stadium (Google 49er-Raider fight for the blow by blow).  One man was beaten unconscious in a restroom and was hospitalized in serious condition.  One You Tube video shows a parking lot brawl lasting several minutes that sort of meandered around a section of the lot like a scrum gone insane.  Apparently is was ladies night in the lot as many of the brawlers there were women.  To their boyfriends and husbands I can only say, “You boys sure know how to pick ‘em.”  Those who escaped physically unscathed apparently had to deal with verbal abuse.  According to an L.A. Times article, “Callers to a Bay Area radio show Sunday described navigating a gauntlet of drunk and abusive fans in order to reach the restroom.”  And if you managed to escape the physical and verbal abuse there was just that feeling.  You know the feeling you get when you find yourself driving through the very worst part of town and the engine starts missing and sputtering?  Yeah that feeling.  The Chronicle’s Gwen Knapp described it perfectly, “When I drove in to the main lot, I headed way toward the back to avoid a group of people in 49ers gear who were blocking some open rows, yelling and striking intimidating poses. This was not the typical football rowdiness. In 16 years of covering games at Candlestick, I have never felt unnerved by a crowd, whether I've driven in, taken the game-day bus or ridden on Muni's T line. (Whether in a car or on BART, I've never felt the same level of hostility at the Coliseum, either.) Saturday was different.

But these were just the prelims.  The main event occurred in the parking lot after the game where there was not one, but two shootings.  Apparently both victims will survive, one after being shot several times in the stomach and the other having received relatively minor wounds.  I know that when I’m getting ready to go to the game I go through my checklist; Niner jacket, check; binoculars, check; seat cushion, check; ticket, check; gun, check and double check, lock and load.  Am I missing something here?  Was I out of the office for awhile and not get the memo about going to a sporting event strapped?

In the early eighties I got season tickets to the Forty Niners.  They were a successful team and tickets were impossible to come by if you didn’t hold a season ticket or know someone who did.  During those glory years the stands were peaceable places.  The joke around the league was that Niner fans were white wine sippers and quiche eaters.  Oh there were fights now and then but they were pretty rare occurrences.  There was some heckling that went on between fans of the 49ers and the visitors but for the most part we just dipped our quiche in a nice Chardonnay and enjoyed the games.  You see if you, your guest or someone using your ticket got overly unruly you ran the risk of losing your season ticket; for good.  By the late nineties I was taking my son to games and those were great times.  I had no qualms whatsoever about bringing him.  Yeah he was going to hear some rough language and “F” bombs but nothing that would physically endanger him or scare him.  I should add here that this was still a far cry from when I was a kid.  When I went to a game with my parents, baseball or football, if some fellow’s language went south of salty he was often shushed by those nearby, “Hey knucklehead there’s a kid there, watch the language.”

Some years back the tickets were sacrificed to the axe of the domestic budget.  A few years later the 49ers went from good to worse and tickets became available to the riffraff at best and the bullies and thugs at worse.  There was no waiting list of tens of thousands for season tickets and in a business decision the team apparently abandoned the behave badly and lose your ticket policy.  About three years ago I went to a game against the Cincinnati Bengals and was shocked by the experience.  In that one night there were probably more fights and near fights than I had seen in all of my years of being a season ticket holder.  As we left the game a fiftyish Bengal fan and his wife talked about the verbal abuse they took during the course of the game.  She had apparently been the target of personal insults.  Like Ms. Knapp, I came away feeling that something about the so called fan base had horribly mutated. 

That was the last game that I’ve been to and it might be the last game I go to in some time, if ever again.  When my son was still a child I looked forward to the day when he would be old enough to come to a game and appreciate it and I cherish the good times we had; great tailgate barbecues, memorable games and a ride home in a limo after the 49ers beat the Cowboys in a championship game.  But as things stand now I have no desire to run gauntlets let alone expose my wife or grandkids to louts, thugs, jerks and knot heads who think that a Glock is part of the game ensemble.   

This is where I can go on the tirade of we’re just a violent, rude; me first, in your face society and it’s just exacerbated by being an out of control gun crazed society.  And I believe all of that to be true.  But we’re also a money talks society and the NFL and the teams have shirked their responsibilities because they’re afraid of turning off loyal if “boisterous” fans who spend money.  Hopefully last Saturday’s violence orgy is the last wake-up call the league needs (they’ve been ignoring years of fan violence alarms).  But hell would I be surprised if the league just dropped all pretense, went all in and decided to start marketing body armor in team colors?  Not one whit.  After all I do keep hearing that "it's just a business."

Here’s the proverbial bottom line.  Team loyalty and fan exuberance notwithstanding, going to a sporting event is supposed to be a fun, family friendly activity like going to the movies, the aquarium or the amusement park.  We shouldn’t have to consider personal safety as a major factor when deciding on an outing.  Traditionally a dad looks forward to that first pro sports game with his son and he shouldn’t have to get in a moral wrestling match with himself over whether he’s exposing his boy to a dangerous situation.  What is wrong with us?