When did America start having emotional meltdowns over sports? A pair of recent events during the run-up to the Super Bowl highlight a disturbing trend among sports fans.
Most recently, as Peter King writes at Sports Illustrated, fans of the San Francisco 49ers aren’t handling Sunday’s defeat in the NFC Championship game very well:
Nice crowd the 49ers have on Twitter. One of their “fans” tweeted to Williams (@KyleWilliams_10): “Jim Harbaugh, please give @KyleWilliams_10 the game ball. And make sure it explodes when he gets in his car.”
It’s only sports, people. Only sports. Around here, the fog will come up tomorrow.
I know Jim Harbaugh has tried to transform his formerly finesse-oriented team into tough blue collar-style bruisers, but who knew he’d also turn San Francisco’s formerly wine and sushi-enjoying crowd into snarling Oakland Raiders-style fans?
Similarly, assuming it’s not play-acting to deliberately create a viral video (and it wouldn’t be the first time, if that turns out to be the case), this clip is a fascinating look at the mindset of a crazed sports fan, crestfallen that the Green Bay Packers lost in the playoffs:
Vince Lombardi built the Packers of the 1960s into a tough, Spartan football team, and the Packers fans of that era were similarly flinty and cool. (Pardon the frozen tundra-inspired pun.) Looking down from NFL Valhalla, what would Lombardi think of the above video?
I love the magical thinking implicit in blaming her sparkly nail polish (!) for the Packers’ loss. The solipsistic belief that she alone displeased the Football Gods so badly they caused the Pack to lose to the Giants on January 15th.
Then there’s the polypropylene cheesehead and Packers jersey she’s wearing. Hulu, the streaming video site, has a section devoted to the NFL, where you can watch NFL Film’s Lost Treasures series, which looks back at the founding of the league’s film division in the early to mid-1960s. Watching those episodes, you’ll quickly notice that prior to the 1970s, there was little in the way of NFL merchandise for adults to wear. If you watch newsreel footage of the 1957 NFL championship, when the Baltimore Colts beat the New York Giants at the legendary Polo Grounds, the majority of men in the stands wore sober business suits, top coats, and fedoras. This past Christmas, I watched an NFL Channel presentation on “The Longest Game Ever Played,” the double-overtime playoff battle between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs, the last game played in Municipal Stadium, the predecessor to Arrowhead Stadium, the Chiefs’ current home. As late as Christmas Day, 1971 there were still several men wearing suits, ties, and fedoras to games.
Categories: Health and Fitness, Pop Culture of the Past, Sports
Nice analysis, Mr. Driscoll.
Ayn Rand:
“An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.”
The woman in the video was obviously drunk, but as you imply, somehow she captures the spirit of our times. Emotions are given a higher standard of value than cognition. Reason and thinking are antecedents to self-esteem, self efficacy, productive behavior and independence. All seem to be out of style compared to the previous generations.
Fake. Her eyes are dry, no snot bubbles in sight.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that her reaction may have been chemically enhanced. At least, I hope it is. I also hope she sobered up the next day and said, “You did what with the video?”
Ah, a Wisconsin voter.
Go to any post Denver Bronco game discussion on ESPN.com if you want to see unbridled vitriol and irrational gushing run amok.
I think you get to the issue when you say “fans dressed for Sunday games as if they had just come from church”. The jersey-wearing, rhinestone-festooned cheeseheads are going to church. Whether it’s the NFL, college football or any other sport, the rabid fans have nothing of greater meaning in their extraordinarily shallow lives. They put their “heart and soul” into “their team” because nothing else matters to them; not their family, not their jobs, their future, religion, or the country. We are Rome and sports are the Circuses.
…who knew he’d also turn San Francisco’s formerly wine and sushi-enjoying crowd into snarling Oakland Raiders-style fans?
I’d argue the sushi crowd isn’t that far away, all the time, from the snarler and is capable of a kind and level of viciousness surpassing the snarler.
And that green jersey/green fingernails is emblematic of her time, where everything is turned into an extension of me.
Well now, at least, I know why the Packers lost.
Being a long time Packer fan, in a family of Packer fans, even having in-laws that are Packer fans, I must confess that for at least two generations we go into mourning with each Packer loss. This last loss was especially bitter and inexplicable. So from Tampa to Seattle, North Carolina through the frozen tundra of Wisconsin & the golden state of California, even over to Afghanistan via armed forces television for most of the season, our grief is total.
It is only a game, WE GUESS. Plus there is always NEXT SEASON!
Nah. The Raiders fans who aren’t in a permanent stupor (slim pickings, to be sure) just climbed aboard the Niner bandwagon. Any ship in port, right?
First, thanks for the info on the “Lost Treasures”.
Second, this article is silly. I admit it, I am emotionally involved in the 49ers and was (and two days later) quite annoyed at the loss this Sunday. So what?
Does the author really believe that the person posting their “tears” on facebook is a fair representative of Packer fans? If the author does believe that, what a maroon.
Yeah, we are all “Moroon’s” what ever that is. Some of us have such fun making fun of ourselves. Those of you that take this article as anything more than a parody of our silliness are taking EVERYTHING much too seriously.
Claudia.
“maroon”, dear one, is a cultural reference to the late 40′s through the 50′s, a term used by one of the Warner Brother’s stable of Hollywood actors in short animated films under the Looney Tunes brand.
Yes, Claudia. Bugs Bunny. Spoken in reference to Elmer Fudd, usually after Elmer self inflicted another shotgun wound while attempting foul rabbit murder.
Sometimes, Bugs even said “ultra maroon”, a poorly disguised reference to bad eye shadow and gross stupidity that most right thinking, evolved humans find very offensive today.
And Porky Pig? Oh, the horror!
Change a few words and this could be a discussion of politicians and their supporters.
Maybe I’m old, but I find emotional incontinence even more offensive than the bodily variety.
What you see in football fanaticism is nothing new.
In Rome, chariot racing factions engendered similar reactions among the spectators. Rival Roman racing faction “fans” were not above actually killing each other in disputes over which of the four factions was the grandest.
The next step in America, according to Juvenal (1st Century AD) will be the movement to “give away significant rights in exchange for material pleasures”, or his famous “bread and circuses” line.
Oh, wait. We already did that.
To me it’s not a question of taking everything too seriously, but having nothing serious to take seriously. A football team losing looks pretty grim compared to posting pix of your cat yawning, a steak in a frying pan or an iPhone app that doesn’t work properly. I used to have a job a few years ago where a half dozen 30 year old guys sat during break playing war video games on portable video players with strangers on the net. We are a nation of kiddies with the values and emotions of kiddies. How many zombie films do we produce a year which are less creative than Tom chasing Jerry? I’ll stack up the creativity of any vintage Tom & Jerry cartoon to any zombie movie ever made. We are not dumber than we used to be but more ignorant because it was never brightness that made America a success but the way we thought, the way we approached things. Straightforward and no nonsense has been replaced by endless mitigation and excuses and so everyone is a king who can’t find his sceptre.
Dessert is now a main meal and a soda pop not a treat but consumed in place of water or milk. I’m surprise we don’t all eat chocolate cake for breakfast. We vacation all year and treat a vacation like it’s digging the Suez Canal. If one had a goal on life to never own an iPhone or play a video game in favor of going outside and howling at the moon, life might actually be more real which is saying something.