Remember Why You're Supposed To Be There

I went to a football game in Buffalo a few years ago to see the hometown Bills take on the Cincinnati Bengals. We had to wade through a sea of beer cans that came up to our shins in order to enter the stadium (cheap beer too, blech!) As we sat down, we were serenaded by some drunk Bengals fans and drunk Bills fans screaming obscenities at each other.

All part of the game atmosphere, right?

Then things got out of hand. In the third quarter the group of Bengals and Bills fans had apparently seen enough of the game on the field and decided to stage their own brawl. It was funny to watch at first as yellow jacketed security guards swooped in from all sides to expel the problem makers whose insults had graduated from "your team sucks" to "your mother is a retarded whore with a venereal disease." After the fifth or sixth fight, however, I began thinking to myself "I paid good money for these seats and I want to watch the damn game." It was hard to do with piles of humanity screaming and battling next to me.

I've heard of similar such cases from friends at games all around this great sports land of ours.

We've all seen this guy or girl walking (or stumbling) into the stadium, so toasted that there's no way he'll actually recall any of what he paid to see:



Now you may not have seen someone quite THAT drunk at a stadium since security will probably toss them, but you get my point.

Then there's the classy display of fighting at a sporting event. Someone videoed two women fighting at the Texas/OU football game this weekend:



Some guys might find the fight a turn-on since the women who do that are often the types that will get drunk and have sex in a public place. Who knows how it started, an overheard scuttlebutt, some kind of passing insult, maybe one stole toilet paper from the other. Whatever happened, it had nothing to do with the game.

Hey, stuff happens when you cram 80,000 people into one space as they watch an emotional roller coaster of a game. Yet, most seem to handle it fairly well. As for the others, I guess I learned all I needed to about them from a Simpsons episode: