The Arena by Rafi Kohan

Author:Rafi Kohan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

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* It has basically become an annual tradition for the Raiders to threaten to leave Oakland unless they receive public subsidies for a new stadium, in spite of the fact that taxpayers are still paying the debt service on renovations made to the Coliseum in the 1990s, when the team returned to the Bay Area from Los Angeles. Last year the talk was about moving to San Antonio. This year it’s about L.A. Next year it will be Las Vegas (which proves to be more than an idle threat). As a local sportswriter put it, “You’ll never see a more abused set of fans.” See Ken Belson, “In Oakland, Some Raiders Fans Fear the Meaning of ‘Last Home Game,’ ” New York Times, December 25, 2015.

† As the charges go, Philly fans have hurled batteries at athletes, cheered player injuries, and instigated so many in-game fights that the team once set up a courtroom (known as Eagles Court) inside old Veterans Stadium to process the ruffians as they passed through. In more recent years, local supporters have made headlines for wrestling home run balls away from elderly women, forcibly vomiting on small children, and stealing the prosthetic leg of a Vietnam veteran who performs outside of games. Of course, the most infamous incident in the history of Philly sports fan behavior—an event so cartoonish that it basically launched the whole these-people-are-animals narrative—occurred in 1968, during halftime of an Eagles game, when a nineteen-year-old kid appeared in a Santa Claus costume and the whole stadium proceeded to pelt him with snowballs. Philly fans get admittedly defensive when presented with this litany of misconduct, sick of hearing the same old storylines dredged up anytime some local idiot does anything wrong—incidents that they insist would fly under the radar in another city. As one fan tells me, when I attend an Eagles-Giants game, “Philly gets a bad rap. I think we do. And that is why we are sensitive when people say we are pieces of shit.”

‡ This last tidbit comes from Michael Roberts’s Fans! How We Go Crazy Over Sports (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Book Co., 1976).

§ The Onion published a 2014 article entitled, “NFL Announces New Zero-Tolerance Policy on Videotaped Domestic Violence.”

¶ In April 2016, a jury found that those fans had been “unlawfully killed” due to police mistakes.

# The NFL introduced metal-detecting wands at stadiums across the league in 2011, on the heels of the Taser incident at MetLife Stadium. Prior to that, they did pat-downs.

** In January 2017, after failing to secure a new stadium deal in San Diego, the Chargers announced that the team would be moving to L.A.

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