:-D An incredible Yank, Iggle-fan bashing article from the online edition of British national newspaper, The Guardian. Anyone have any opinions?
Quote
Blinkered America is already among the thugs
They like to glamorise European soccer hooligans, but nobody in US
sports seems to realise that they've got a homegrown problem of their own,
argues Steven Wells
Steven Wells
Wednesday December 07 2005
The Guardian
The original premise for this article was to wander around Philadelphia
on the day that the hated Dallas Cowboys gridiron team came to town,
verbally assaulting Texans. "Who are ya?" and "Where's ya top boyz, zen?"
I'd yell until my antics were noticed by Eagles hooligans who would
initiate me into their "crew" - and thus start me on a journey of
violence, homo-erotic male bonding and - ultimately - self-discovery. A bit
like Bill Buford's Among the Thugs or that film Green Street. Only in
reverse.
It didn't work out like that - not least because nobody walks around
Philadelphia wearing Dallas colours. Ever. Nobody, not even a Texan,
would be that insane. And that might in turn explain why I couldn't find a
single hooligan - not just in Philadelphia but anywhere in the United
States of America.
That's the wonder of American sports. There are fistfights, showers of
beer (and faeces, canned dog food and coins), portable toilets kicked
over with opposition fans inside them, knifings, deafening verbal abuse,
full-scale riots, cars set alight, disabled fans stripped and their
clothing destroyed, players puking because they've breathed in the pepper
spray used by police to dissuade two sets of fans from kicking the
sweet bejesus out of each other - and not a single hooligan in sight.
Amazing when you think about it.
But first, here's a few brief extracts from America's ongoing and ever
growing fascination with "soccer" hooliganism.
"We all know that in Europe you're not really considered a sports fan
until you've been crushed to death against a chain-link fence," chuckles
US TV satirist Steven Colbert.
"I just came from a soccer game, We got destroyed," says a beat-up
looking dude in the Metro newspaper strip Girls & Sports."That must have
been a pretty physical game," says a friend."Actually," says the severely
bruised dude, "I was in the stands." Ba-dum-tish! (That same issue
carried a 60-word article about how the city of Boston paid $5.1m to the
parents of a female student killed by police during the riot that
followed the Red Sox winning baseball's World Series in 2004.)
In August I saw Chelsea play Milan in Giants Stadium, New Jersey. As is
usual when the soccer superpowers come to town, the atmosphere was
carnivalesque. There were Chelsea and Milan, Poland, Portugal and England
shirts with nobody so much as exchanging a dirty look.
Compare that to an incident at a 1980s Philadelphia Eagles game (as
recounted in Jere Longman's new book about the Eagles, If Football's A
Religion, Why Don't We Have A Prayer?). Two Philadelphia fans assist a fan
in a wheelchair to the top of a steep ramp. They notice that he's
wearing a Dallas shirt, so they turn him round and say: "Take off the jersey
or you're going for a ride." The terrified Cowboy strips off his shirt
- and the Eagles fans rip it to shreds.
Meanwhile, back at Giants Stadium, things do indeed turn nasty, but
it's nothing to do with soccer. On the concourse, a tiny New York Giants
gridiron fan spots a giant in a Phialdelphia Eagles shirt and goes nuts.
"Eagles suck! How many Super Bowls you won? Huh, huh?" he yaps,
spraying beer-spit everywhere, standing on tip-toes and prodding the big guy
hard in the chest. The soccer fans part on either side of the
increasingly violent bickering.
There's not much soul-searching about sports hooliganism within the US
- and what little there is tends to focus on the behaviour of
African-American basketball players rather than predominantly white football
fans. For no matter how many college games end in drunken mob violence (as
many do), no matter how many American city centres see running battles
between sports fans and riot police, the US sports media continues to
present hooliganism as something utterly un-American. (This blinkered
provincialism has parallels with the 1996 decision by the US State
Department to "red flag" parts of south London as no-go areas for American
tourists, claiming that Millwall was as dangerous as Guatemala - which,
at the time, was overrun by right-wing death squads.)
When it comes to hooliganism, the US media really is the pot calling
the kettle black. Riots at US sports events occur far more frequently
than they do in the UK. And yet, in American popular culture, the
"hooligan" is almost without exception portrayed as a soccer fan (and nearly
always as English).
Which might explain the success in the US of the movie Green Street.
This, as I'm sure you know, is the story of how American Frodo Baggins is
taught how to beat up idiots by a Brad Pitt lookalike West Ham hoolie
with the worst cockney accent since Sir John Gielgud played Arthur
Mullard in the Young Vic's disastrous 1991 stage adaptation of Yus My Dear.
The US reviews of Green Street read like anthropological essays -
discussions of a curious and disturbing phenomenon so utterly alien to the
American way of life that it can only be understood as a quirky custom
pursued by distant barbarians.
Typical of this world-view is an article by Mickey Charles on
sportsnetwork.com. He starts with an overview of US sports rowdiness: "There are
riots in the streets after a championship comes to town in any sport.
Looting, burning cars, terrorising women and ripping their clothes off
as part of the ceremony seems to have reached obscene levels ..."
But he then concludes that this is no big deal compared to the
psycho-antics of those crazy Europeans. "In England ... the fans rushing on to
the field don't want to embrace the players. They are carrying knotted
ropes used historically for lynching, rocks, beer bottles poised to be
thrown and whatever else is not nailed down. Frenzied followers of one
team chase down those of the opponents, not to congratulate for a good
effort, but to dismember."
The ill-informed double standard would be breathtaking if it weren't so
commonplace. OK, so US sports has no equivalent of the Lazio Ultras or
the ICF. But try wearing a Dallas jersey into the Eagles' "Nest of
Death". Actually, don't. In 1997, Veterans stadium - the Eagles' old
stomping ground - had a fully functional court inserted into its basement
after a game against San Francisco saw an estimated 60 fights. The judge,
who actually heard cases during the game, was seldom less than fully
employed.
Things haven't been improved by the Eagles' move to their new stadium.
Last year's NFC Divisional play-off game against the Minnesota Vikings
saw an immense number of scraps. Vikings fan Joe Liwienski had earlier
attended the much publicised "basketbrawl' game in Michigan, where
Indiana Pacers basketball players shamefully rucked with Detroit Pistons
fans in the stands. "This was 10 times worse," he said.
"The European hooligan thing is really overdone by the US media - it's
much worse here," admits Philly sports fan Al Petrillo. "Eagles games
are out of control. It's like a rite of passage, you get shtein-faced
drunk and out of control. The FU's start flying and then the fists start
flying. There was this guy, an old guy in taterskins attire, maybe in his
sixties. They roughed him up, broke his leg and sent him back to
Washington."
Petrillo has also worked security at Philadelphia Flyers ice hockey
games where, he claims, violence is just as rife. "Especially in the
play-offs. There's fights at every game. There was this guy in a [New
Jersey] Devils jersey, just sat there minding his own business. A Flyers fan
walked past him then just turned around and just beat the piss out of
him."
A fan of English soccer, Petrillo has attended games at Highbury and
Stamford Bridge. "I didn't see anything, not a thing - zero fistfights. I
even saw the coach with the opposition team arrive - nothing, no
banging on the sides, nothing. In the streets before, during, after the game
- I felt completely 100% safe and secure."
Quote
Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, the clash with hated rivals Dallas is
hyped in the local press - but no mention is made of hooliganism. Which
is odd if only because of this tie's history. In 1981, the Eagles
faithful bombarded the visiting Dallas team with snowballs - some of which
allegedly contained batteries. Ex-Philadelphia mayor and current
Pennsylvania State governor (and fanatical Eagles fan) Ed Rendell is widely
believed to have thrown the (battery-free) snowball that smacked the
Dallas coach in the head - a story that Rendell has always denied but which
has done nothing to damage his electability. In 1968, Eagles fans even
pelted Santa Claus with snowballs - an incident that is invariably
quoted when out-of-towners try to paint Philadelphia as the NFL's
equivalent of Millwall. Which, of course, they frequently do.
"The stadium is beyond civilisation," a Vikings fan told a local paper,
before going on to compare the Eagles fans to the werewolves in the
movie Wolfen. The Atlanta Falcons coach advised fans to dress only in
green, otherwise "they'll get the shtein beat out of them. They might be
throwing batteries at us. They might be dumping dog shtein on us," he told
reporters. "It's going to be awesome".
"I have never seen a more classless, vulgar, belligerent group of
jack-asses in my entire life," wrote Dolphins fan Brian Fien after 20,000
"screaming green morons" visited Miami. The reputation of the Eagles fans
is so bad that, when they failed to boo a little blind boy with
cerebral palsy when he faltered while singing the national anthem during a
brutal snowstorm, they were congratulated by ESPN.com.
"We thrive on the fact that everybody can't stand us," Eagles fan Shaun
Young told Jere Longman. "We're a bunch of filthy, dirty, nasty,
drinking bums. In a sense we take pride in that. We don't want you here. We
want you to be afraid to come."
Rich Burg, press officer for the Philadelphia Eagles was very concerned
by this article. He refused Guardian Unlimited access to the game
against the Dallas Cowboys ("we do not provide credentials for media to
access our fans inside the stadium") and suggested that we write the
article from the car park.
Sour grapes? Maybe. But at an Eagles game in 2002, reporters were
dragged out of the stands by security for daring to talk to the fans. Which
all suggests that the Eagles press office might be ashamed of fans like
Shaun - the guys who pay their wages. Not that they should be. Shaun's
not a hooligan. And neither are (most of) his fellow Eagles fanatics.
But then neither are most English "soccer" fans. Honest.
Of course, that depends on how you define "hooligan". But sadly there's
no national debate about hooliganism in the US press. There's no
discussion about the wisdom of selling alcohol inside stadiums or of letting
home and away fans sit together. Nobody in US sports seems to even
realise that they've got a long-term, deeply rooted and entirely homegrown
hooligan problem.
Whenever American football fans riot or ice hockey fans beat the hell
out of one another, whenever the supporters of basketball or baseball
teams go on a cop-taunting, car-torching, window-smashing victory spree,
the violence is invariably treated as a local disturbance or an
historical anomaly. And whenever college football fans engage in riotous
behaviour that would be considered a national scandal if it happened in
Britain (as they frequently do), no one seems terribly inclined to call it
hooliganism.
Meanwhile lazy US satirists compare rioting French Islamic youth to
soccer hooligans, Bucky the monkey-hating cat in the nationally syndicated
Get Fuzzy strip raises a chuckle by dressing up as a Hartlepool FC
"English hooligan", and the Simpsons scriptwriters seem unable to mention
soccer without inserting a gag about how the sport turns its supporters
into mindless thugs.
The truth is that both Bill Buford and Frodo Baggins could have stayed
at home to get their slumming hoolie kicks.
Meantime, I think it's time for the pot to shut the farg up.
i was starting to read that in a british accent, but gave up.
Quote"We thrive on the fact that everybody can't stand us," Eagles fan Shaun Young told Jere Longman. "We're a bunch of filthy, dirty, nasty, drinking bums. In a sense we take pride in that. We don't want you here. We want you to be afraid to come."
Please tell me that's not Shoulderpad Shaun. I'd like to punch him.
Quote from: Diomedes on December 09, 2005, 09:35:42 AM
Quote"We thrive on the fact that everybody can't stand us," Eagles fan Shaun Young told Jere Longman. "We're a bunch of filthy, dirty, nasty, drinking bums. In a sense we take pride in that. We don't want you here. We want you to be afraid to come."
Please tell me that's not Shoulderpad Shaun. I'd like to punch him.
It is indeed Shoulderpad Shaun.
And he doesn't even drink!
Quote from: Wingspan on December 09, 2005, 09:18:31 AM
i was starting to read that in a british accent, but gave up.
So was I. :-D
And the Rendell snowball incident was in 1989. Someone throw that bloke an elbow to the teeth!
not sure what the guys point is. We, as Eagle fans, get called scumbags and Aholes or whatever else other teams fans and media wants to say. The Europe soccer fans are called hooligans. big whoop. We both have a bad rep. yay.
Quote from: PhillyPhreak54 on December 09, 2005, 09:47:59 AM
It is indeed Shoulderpad Shaun.
And he doesn't even drink!
Does he have a fargin' agent or something? How did he become the guy everyone wants to talkt to about Eagles fans? I can't stand that motherfarger.
(http://familyguy.neoseeker.com/images/uploads/nigel_pinchley_mini.png)
"You bloody American football fans are the real hooligans, I say!!"
Quote from: Diomedes on December 09, 2005, 09:59:17 AM
Quote from: PhillyPhreak54 on December 09, 2005, 09:47:59 AM
It is indeed Shoulderpad Shaun.
And he doesn't even drink!
Does he have a fargin' agent or something? How did he become the guy everyone wants to talkt to about Eagles fans? I can't stand that motherfarger.
Don't know about the agent but he has an endorsement deal. SEPTA pays him to wear a patch on his jersey. And he's on the radio all the time being pimped as the "voice of the Eagles fans".
My opinion? Some British soccer fan writer got her panties in a bunch. :D
Quote from: Diomedes on December 09, 2005, 09:35:42 AMPlease tell me that's not Shoulderpad Shaun. I'd like to punch him.
of course, haven't you learned yet that he represents the voice of the fans?
this article re-defines the phrase 'having an agenda'
I can't think of a single person I know who could give a shtein about English soccer or their hooligan fans.
Whatever, though. America-bashing is always good for a laugh.
Quote from: PhillyPhreak54 on December 09, 2005, 10:01:28 AM
Quote from: Diomedes on December 09, 2005, 09:59:17 AM
Quote from: PhillyPhreak54 on December 09, 2005, 09:47:59 AM
It is indeed Shoulderpad Shaun.
And he doesn't even drink!
Does he have a fargin' agent or something? How did he become the guy everyone wants to talkt to about Eagles fans? I can't stand that motherfarger.
Don't know about the agent but he has an endorsement deal. SEPTA pays him to wear a patch on his jersey. And he's on the radio all the time being pimped as the "voice of the Eagles fans".
I would LOVE to take a hammer to that farger's head... and then piss in the hole I made.
The difference becomes whenever American fans travel overseas, you don't see them making headlines for starting fights in town centers, as in France in 1998 or Euro 2000, amd you don't hear of American fans getting stabbed as in happened in Turkey. British fans have a horrible rep, and deservedly so. Whenever they travel overseas, headlines follow them.
I think somebody was stabbed at a recent Jets game. Ideally, it would have been shoulderpad Shawn.
I quit reading when I saw glamourized was spelled glamorised. Silly Brits.
that's funny. i quit reading when i realized it took two whole posts to get the article on the board.
That article is a joke. A few years back, on a trip to England, the wife and I took in a Tottenham Spurs-West Ham United game at White Hart Lane (Tottenham's home stadium). We went with a couple of buddies and their wives. The whole time the wives were talking about non-football topics and commenting how cute West Ham's uniforms were (they look like referee uniforms). Needless to say, within minutes all of the fans around us were throwing crap at us and scolding us for not singing along. Security noticed, came over and gave us a talking to about not acting the way a Spurs fan would, and telling us that we are risking getting our asses kicked because our wives were distracting.
I can see this happening at an Eagles game but the fans were far more insane at White Hart Lane than at the Linc IMO.
Quote from: bobbyinlondon on December 09, 2005, 11:16:27 AM
The difference becomes whenever American fans travel overseas, you don't see them making headlines for starting fights in town centers, as in France in 1998 or Euro 2000, amd you don't hear of American fans getting stabbed as in happened in Turkey. British fans have a horrible rep, and deservedly so. Whenever they travel overseas, headlines follow them.
Except that in Euro 2000 the problem were the locals (in Brussels) and the Turkish fans were just as bad, if not worse. In fact, in recent times, some sections of the southern fans (Italians, Turks, Moroccans and the like) were just as bad, if not worse then the English, Dutch or German "fans" of the late 80's. Not to mention the fact that the pres at times played a very dubious role, up to the point of triggering riots in order to create "news."
Second, IIRC there were battery-snowballs in Denver, a shot 49-er fan in Dallas and the like. Though the author does make a point which certainly has some validity (American or American media hypocrisy concerning US vs non-US hooliganism) he falls again for the trap oof only going for Philly (and falling for the incompetence/biases of the American media he is complaining about).
I have sent the author of the article some comments..... though to a degree I do agree with his basic premise
I actually maintained a fake british accent in my mind thruout. ;)
We never dump dog shtein on rivals..we may have to play um but we don't have to feed um ;)