Without sports fanatics there would not be big time college and professional sports. The NFL is a $12 billion dollar industry, Major League Baseball earns more than $7 billion each year and the NBA does about $4 billion. This does not even count what is spent on illegal gambling, fantasy leagues, and sports outside the big three like the NCAA, NASCAR and the NHL.
It’s been a tough 12 months for Bay Area fans. From the Brian Stow incident at Dodger Stadium in the opener against the Giants in March to the mayhem at the Raiders-49ers preseason game, to run ins between Sharks fans and visitors from Canada, to the incidents with visiting fans at 49ers playoff games that led Jed York to issue a no-tolerance open letter and increase security at Candlestick Park, over-the-top behavior from and towards fans has been in the news far too often. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Jan. 24 that twice as many ejections occurred in the wake of the overtime loss to the football Giants as did in the game the week before against New Orleans. Officials say the increase was probably due to the 3:30 p.m. game time which gave fans an extra few hours to lube up before kickoff. Undercover officers dressed as New York fans pointed out miscreants to uniformed police who subsequently led those fans out of the stands.
This season’s NFL playoffs seemed to have created a series of new lows in terms of fan behavior. Besides the well-documented harassment of opposing teams’ fans, 49ers punt returner Kyle Williams has been the subject of multiple death threats after his fumble in overtime set up the game winning field goal for the Giants, giving New York a trip to the Super Bowl.
So is this what we’ve come to? Death threats to athletes who come up short when giving their all, intimidating outnumbered visiting fans, and using the tickets we buy as a license to wreak havoc as we please while undercover cops pick off the unruly?
Fans in our sophisticated community should be better than that. We think fans, especially in our community, can care deeply about the outcome of a game and then let it go if and when the result doesn’t isn’t what we would like. When we’re the visiting fans we can go to a game and not rub it in when the home team fails. This only entices the majority to retaliate when the tide turns. We also think local fans can resist the urge to bully the outnumbered supporters of the visiting team and instead strive to make our stadiums and ballparks comfortable for everyone with a ticket, regardless of how some announcers might encourage their followers to behave.
Mostly, though, we implore sports fanatics everywhere to hold the athletes blameless. They’re almost always doing everything they can to win. In the late 1980s the Rams beat the Giants in an overtime playoff game in the Meadowlands. New York Quarterback Phil Simms had a rough game, and in his press conference afterwards he explained, “I have the ball a lot, and sometimes things go wrong.”
Can’t we accept that it’s usually just as simple as that?
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