Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Philly sports fans better than any cheap stereotype
PHILADELPHIA » The Eagles reached the Super Bowl, thumping the Minnesota Vikings by 31 points, with 69,000 decent people celebrating with appropriate taste and dignity.
Four subway stops away from the stadium, four of them, some fan in an Eagles jersey was filmed staggering after a moving subway train, ricocheting off a pole and being fortunate not to fall on the tracks. Which scene went viral? Which scene always goes viral, when it comes to Philadelphia and its sports fans?
Runaway trains. There are more than one kind.
So, it is happening, and on cue. It began happening before the NFC final, when sportscasters in Minnesota felt it necessary to warn Vikings fans to brace for conflict were they to venture toward Lincoln Financial Field. It wouldn’t matter that in any stadium, in any city, and more to the point anywhere beer is peddled, there could be some rough feelings. They had their story, and they would not relent. Such, then, will be the script, recited with every proper inflection of outrage, once a day, every day, until the Eagles and Patriots collide in Minneapolis.
Philadelphia fans: They annoy.
It’s an easy story. And it will be told by the same outlets lazy enough to go to the Super Bowl Media Day and report not on the quarterbacks but on the realitystar roaming around the place wearing nothing but underpants. Philadelphia is in the Super Bowl, and here come those fans. And maybe it wasn’t mentioned before, but more than five decades ago they threw snowballs around Franklin Field around Christmastime. Quick: Make that the story.
If it were any other large group of people, such cut-corners, lazy characterizations would be exposed as inaccurate profiling. Philadelphia fans, though? No, for them, the caricature will do. And so, there will be a tornado of re-tweeted photos of an Eagles fan who re-
ceived a bloody nose after a parking lot confrontation with the police. But what about the fact that without the passion of the Eagles and their fans and their spirit of neighborliness there would not be more than 340 Ronald McDonald Houses throughout the world, where families can stay for free while sick children receive medical care? How about retweeting that once in a while?
“That is their Super Bowl,” said Jimmy Murray, the Birds’ general manager when the idea sprung out of the Eagles’ Fly for Leukemia. “We won that one.”
Philadelphia fans are passionate. They like to think they are more passionate than most. That could be overstated, too. Inaccurate stereotypes work both ways. But they are not any more or less prone to lawlessness than any other fans. It was at a San Francisco 49ers game this season that somebody flew drones over the stadium to drop anti-media leaflets, at whatever possible danger to innocent people. A 2016 Washington Post report said that there were more arrests in San Diego’s stadium than any other in the NFL. New York, Pittsburgh and Oakland also had higher numbers of arrests at NFL games than Philadelphia, according to the report.
But Philadelphia? That just makes for the better story.
Some of the criticism is deserved. There was a video from the parking lot Sunday of what appeared to be cans, empty or otherwise, being tossed toward fans in replica Vikings jerseys. And the tendency for tailgating Eagles fans to heckle visiting fans is unnecessary. So Philadelphia fans need some policing, too. Yet why are they always the ones who always seem to be reminded of that? And they will be reminded of that, night after night, for the next two weeks.
Eric Lindros was honored last week by the Flyers, who retired his number 88. He was the one who had insults and other things tossed his way, not when he played in Philadelphia, but when he was on the road. And as he thanked the fans for their support, he was quick to remember not his own accomplishments, but theirs. “The time you gave Mario Lemieux a standing ovation,” he said, remembering the Penguins’ superstar’s first NHL game after having won a battle with cancer, “I will never forget that.”
That won’t be mentioned this week. But the time some fans cheered when creepy Michael Irvin appeared to be knocked out by a hit from an Eagle? That will be mentioned. Because it is right there in the script.
Whether it is a movie about a fictional fighter, or a popular sandwich, or the Franklin Field thing, Philadelphia somehow fits snugly into an image. Somehow, that image does not include thousands of Flyers fans, year after year, spilling into the Wells Fargo Center not for a game, but for a carnival to help the players’ wives raise money to fight disease.
“They’re just neighborhood people, and you can see what they are in their hearts,” Jimmy Murray said. “Don’t apologize for that.”
No matter what else goes viral, no Philadelphia fan should.
Contact Jack McCaffery @jmccaffery@21stcenturymedia.com; follow him on Twitter @ JackMcCaffery