Are Sports and Rowdy Fans Linked? Essay

Are Sports and Rowdy Fans Linked? Have you ever been to a sporting event where the fans have gotten rowdy? What about a play or show? Once I went to a Seattle Seahawks game in Seattle, Washington and three fans got kicked out because they got in a fight on which team was better. Did you hear that Atlanta Braves fans threw cans and anything they could find onto the field after umpires called an infield fly rule on a pop-up that was well into left-center field on October 5, 2012. What can we do to stop all this bad behavior? Rowdy fans are even in the theater so you can't make the generalization that it only happens at sporting events. Jerry Lopez talks about how a few years ago, during an academic conference, he sat through a production of “The Taming of the Shrew.’’ Sexist, racist, unapologetically irreverent of Shakespeare’s text, this production dared you to tolerate it. At the intermission, nearly all of his colleagues walked out. Modern theatrical audiences could be role models for angry, impatient, noisy sports fans: early departure is about as close as they get to bad behavior. If you think sport fans are more obnoxious now than in the past I partly agree with you. There are more jerks in the stands, but wouldn't you say there are more jerks everywhere? Nate Jackson played six seasons for the Denver Broncos and is writing a book about life in the National Football League for an average player. He states that fan belligerence has gotten worse for a few reasons: Television production inflates the sense of importance for each sporting contest and objectifies the athlete, and the disconnect between fan and athlete widens until the athletes are little more than cyborgs built and trained to entertain them. But to change this would be difficult. The player and the fan live in different worlds. When a player tries to speak up, or voice a complaint, or act on his own best interests, he is told to shut up and play. So he does and the fans go back to their "simple" lives. Katie Baker, a staff writer for Grantland, claims that it was an ugly scene when the bottles and cans flew in Atlanta, but it was barely a blip in the world of sports, where things have long been known to get far worse. She thinks fans today are the same as they ever were: an utterly hopeless and infinitely hopeful lot. There have been thousands upon thousands of opportunities for fans to behave very badly (so many missed calls and blown saves and dropped balls) and yet for the most part, they do nothing. The incidents we remember, whether outlandish or mundane, are the exception and not the rule. Alan Goldberger, a partner at the law firm Brown, Moskowitz & Kallen in Millburn, N.J., and a former sports official says, "Earlier this year, a major college basketball game was attended by 17,547 spectators -- and disrupted by two. Seated directly behind the scorer’s table were two gentlemen well known to their fellow fans as

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