The Universe of Discourse

Philadelphia sports fans behaving badly

Philadelphia sports fans have a bad reputation. For example, we are famous for booing Santa Claus and hitting him with snowballs. I wasn't around for that; it happened in 1968. When the Santa died in 2015, he got an obituary in the Phildelphia Inquirer:

Frank Olivo, the Santa Claus who got pelted with snowballs at the Eagles game that winter day in 1968, died Thursday, April 30…

The most famous story of this type is about Ed Rendell (after he was Philadelphia District Attorney, but before he was Mayor) betting a Eagles fan that they could not throw snowballs all the way from their upper-deck seat onto the field. This was originally reported in 1989 by Steve Lopez in the Inquirer.

(Lopez's story is a blast. He called up Rendell, who denied the claim, and referred Lopez to a friend who had been there with him. Lopez left a message for the friend. Then Rendell called back to confess. Later Rendell's friend called back to deny the story. Lopez wrote:

Was former D.A. Ed Rendell's worst mistake to (A) bet a drunken hooligan he couldn't reach the field, (B) lie about it, (C) confess, or (D) take his friend down with him?

My vote is C. Too honest. Why do you think he can't win an election?

A few years later Rendell was elected Mayor of Philadelphia, and later, Governor of Pennsylvania. Anyway, I digress.)

I don't attend football games, and baseball games are not held in snowy weather, so we have to find other things to throw on the field. I am too young to remember Bat Day, where each attending ticket-holder was presented with a miniature souvenir baseball bat; that was eliminated long ago because too many bats were thrown at the visiting players. (I do remember when those bats stopped being sold at the concession stands, for the same reason.) Over the years, all the larger and harder premiums were eliminated, one by one, but we are an adaptable people and once, to protest a bad call by the umpire, we delayed the game by wadding up our free promotional sport socks and throwing them onto the field. That was the end of Sock Day.

On one memorable occasion, two very fat gentlemen down by the third-base line ran out of patience during an excessively long rain delay and climbed over the fence, ran out and belly-flopped onto the infield, sliding on the wet tarpaulin all the way to the first-base side. Confronted there by security, they evaded capture by turning around and sliding back. These heroes were eventually run down, but only after livening up what had been a very trying evening.

The main point of this note is to shore up a less well-known story of this type. I have seen it reported that Phillies fans once booed Miss Pennsylvania, and I have also seen people suggest that this never really happened. On my honor, it did happen. We not only booed Miss Pennsylvania, we booed her for singing the national anthem. I was at that game, in 1993. The Star-Spangled Banner has a lot of problems that the singer must solve one way or another, and there are a lot of ways to interpret it. But it has a melody, and the singer's interpretation is not permitted to stray so far from the standard that they are singing a different song that happens to have the same words. I booed too, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

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