With Fans Like These

There’s nothing to me like sitting back and watching a good sporting event, be it a football game, basketball game, the Olympics, one of the Triple Crown races, the baseball playoffs, or other events. It’s fun to watch how the different sports are played. But to really get into them, I need to be rooting for somebody to win (and against their opponents). Naturally, being from the state of Florida, I tend to root for teams that represent my state. If I lived in, say, New York, I’d be pulling for teams from that area. And within Florida, I support the University of Florida because I’m a UF alumnus and I happen to live here in Gainesville (where it’s located). It’s a good feeling when my teams win and it’s a bad feeling when they lose. But the effect, however I look at it, is short-lived and I go on afterward with other things in my life. That doesn’t seem to be the way some others handle sports, though.

Back in the early 1980s, the Florida Gator football team was making a comeback to prominence under Coach Charley Pell. One year, they were getting toward the end of the season and had a home game scheduled against cross-state rival the University of Miami, who were also doing well under their coach Howard Schnellenberger. Before the game, most fans here thought that UF was the slightly better team, but as the game wore on, the Hurricanes began to pull away from the Gators. Toward the end of the game, Miami had built up a 28-7 lead over Florida. Some Gator fans in the stands apparently thought that their opponents were “bad people” for beating their team, so they began throwing objects, including glass bottles, at the Miami bench. This so infuriated the Miami coach that, at the very end of the game when Florida fumbled the ball deep in their own territory, he had his team kick a field goal, just to run the score up on them. Afterwards, most of the outrage expressed in Gainesville was not about the fans’ behavior, but about the last-second field goal! I just don’t get it. Why do people get carried away so much like this? When the U.S. played soccer against Mexico in Mexico, the fans there behaved horribly against the Americans. And in 1971, an actual war broke out between El Salvador and Honduras because of rioting associated with a soccer game between those two countries. But the worst example of people getting carried away with their teams in sports has to be the Olympic Games, not only in how fans behave, but also how the teams are covered in television. How many times have you heard the phrase "America’s hopes in such-and-such an event are---" in the course of the Olympics? It’s almost embarrassing to me how the American fans at Olympics, whenever the U.S. is hosting them, whoop and holler whenever their team is doing well. Why not applaud excellence, regardless what part of the world it’s coming from? Whether my country of 300 million wins a medal in ski jumping or not, what difference should that make for me? The nationalism in this respect borders on jingoism, as far as I’m concerned. And it’s not just the fans. If you are from—say Norway, or Japan, and you win the Gold medal in something, then you are a celebrity in those countries. But in the U.S., no one knows or cares who you are. However, if an American pulls in the Gold, then rest assured that there are all sorts of lucrative endorsements and advertising deals in the works because that athlete showed that the U.S. better than all the other countries, at least for that event. Coverage of different events tends to be skewed toward areas where the U.S. is in the running for a medal. And I’ve actually watched coverage of events that virtually ignored the foreign leaders and instead concentrated on the Americans who were back in the pack. Aside from that, the American athletes are always given more human interest coverage in special interviews and “life stories”, although in recent years, they’ve tried to include some athletes from other nations as well.

Once, many years ago, I was at my local YMCA, which had an elementary martial arts class for little children. I was watching while the kids were paired off against each other to perform their exercises. There was a small, competitive girl there who was matched with a boy who had little experience. As they did their little mock fight-exercise, I heard a frenzied woman, apparently the girl’s mother, yell out, “Kill him!” To me, that says it all. If this is the direction that sports is taking us, then I’d rather foreswear it all and just stick to other interests. Yes, maybe I’ll just go down about five spots on my TV dial from ESPN to Home Shopping Network, where everybody’s a winner and they don’t care where you’re from (as long as you have money to spend on their merchandise)!