Blinkered America is already among the thugs

They like to glamorise European soccer hooligans, but nobody in US sports seems to realise that they've got a homegrown problem of their own, argues Steven Wells

Wednesday December 7, 2005
Guardian Unlimited

The original premise for this article was to wander around Philadelphia on the day that the hated Dallas Cowboys gridiron team came to town, verbally assaulting Texans. "Who are ya?" and "Where's ya top boyz, zen?" I'd yell until my antics were noticed by Eagles hooligans who would initiate me into their "crew" - and thus start me on a journey of violence, homo-erotic male bonding and - ultimately - self-discovery. A bit like Bill Buford's Among the Thugs or that film Green Street. Only in reverse.

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It didn't work out like that - not least because nobody walks around Philadelphia wearing Dallas colours. Ever. Nobody, not even a Texan, would be that insane. And that might in turn explain why I couldn't find a single hooligan - not just in Philadelphia but anywhere in the United States of America.

That's the wonder of American sports. There are fistfights, showers of beer (and faeces, canned dog food and coins), portable toilets kicked over with opposition fans inside them, knifings, deafening verbal abuse, full-scale riots, cars set alight, disabled fans stripped and their clothing destroyed, players puking because they've breathed in the pepper spray used by police to dissuade two sets of fans from kicking the sweet bejesus out of each other - and not a single hooligan in sight. Amazing when you think about it.

But first, here's a few brief extracts from America's ongoing and ever growing fascination with "soccer" hooliganism.

"We all know that in Europe you're not really considered a sports fan until you've been crushed to death against a chain-link fence," chuckles US TV satirist Steven Colbert.

"I just came from a soccer game, We got destroyed," says a beat-up looking dude in the Metro newspaper strip Girls & Sports.
"That must have been a pretty physical game," says a friend.
"Actually," says the severely bruised dude, "I was in the stands." Ba-dum-tish! (That same issue carried a 60-word article about how the city of Boston paid $5.1m to the parents of a female student killed by police during the riot that followed the Red Sox winning baseball's World Series in 2004.)

In August I saw Chelsea play Milan in Giants Stadium, New Jersey. As is usual when the soccer superpowers come to town, the atmosphere was carnivalesque. There were Chelsea and Milan, Poland, Portugal and England shirts with nobody so much as exchanging a dirty look.

Compare that to an incident at a 1980s Philadelphia Eagles game (as recounted in Jere Longman's new book about the Eagles, If Football's A Religion, Why Don't We Have A Prayer?). Two Philadelphia fans assist a fan in a wheelchair to the top of a steep ramp. They notice that he's wearing a Dallas shirt, so they turn him round and say: "Take off the jersey or you're going for a ride." The terrified Cowboy strips off his shirt - and the Eagles fans rip it to shreds.

Meanwhile, back at Giants Stadium, things do indeed turn nasty, but it's nothing to do with soccer. On the concourse, a tiny New York Giants gridiron fan spots a giant in a Phialdelphia Eagles shirt and goes nuts. "Eagles suck! How many Super Bowls you won? Huh, huh?" he yaps, spraying beer-spit everywhere, standing on tip-toes and prodding the big guy hard in the chest. The soccer fans part on either side of the increasingly violent bickering.

There's not much soul-searching about sports hooliganism within the US - and what little there is tends to focus on the behaviour of African-American basketball players rather than predominantly white football fans. For no matter how many college games end in drunken mob violence (as many do), no matter how many American city centres see running battles between sports fans and riot police, the US sports media continues to present hooliganism as something utterly un-American. (This blinkered provincialism has parallels with the 1996 decision by the US State Department to "red flag" parts of south London as no-go areas for American tourists, claiming that Millwall was as dangerous as Guatemala - which, at the time, was overrun by right-wing death squads.)

When it comes to hooliganism, the US media really is the pot calling the kettle black. Riots at US sports events occur far more frequently than they do in the UK. And yet, in American popular culture, the "hooligan" is almost without exception portrayed as a soccer fan (and nearly always as English).

Which might explain the success in the US of the movie Green Street. This, as I'm sure you know, is the story of how American Frodo Baggins is taught how to beat up idiots by a Brad Pitt lookalike West Ham hoolie with the worst cockney accent since Sir John Gielgud played Arthur Mullard in the Young Vic's disastrous 1991 stage adaptation of Yus My Dear. The US reviews of Green Street read like anthropological essays - discussions of a curious and disturbing phenomenon so utterly alien to the American way of life that it can only be understood as a quirky custom pursued by distant barbarians.

Typical of this world-view is an article by Mickey Charles on sportsnetwork.com. He starts with an overview of US sports rowdiness: "There are riots in the streets after a championship comes to town in any sport. Looting, burning cars, terrorising women and ripping their clothes off as part of the ceremony seems to have reached obscene levels ..."

But he then concludes that this is no big deal compared to the psycho-antics of those crazy Europeans. "In England ... the fans rushing on to the field don't want to embrace the players. They are carrying knotted ropes used historically for lynching, rocks, beer bottles poised to be thrown and whatever else is not nailed down. Frenzied followers of one team chase down those of the opponents, not to congratulate for a good effort, but to dismember."

The ill-informed double standard would be breathtaking if it weren't so commonplace. OK, so US sports has no equivalent of the Lazio Ultras or the ICF. But try wearing a Dallas jersey into the Eagles' "Nest of Death". Actually, don't. In 1997, Veterans stadium - the Eagles' old stomping ground - had a fully functional court inserted into its basement after a game against San Francisco saw an estimated 60 fights. The judge, who actually heard cases during the game, was seldom less than fully employed.

Things haven't been improved by the Eagles' move to their new stadium. Last year's NFC Divisional play-off game against the Minnesota Vikings saw an immense number of scraps. Vikings fan Joe Liwienski had earlier attended the much publicised "basketbrawl' game in Michigan, where Indiana Pacers basketball players shamefully rucked with Detroit Pistons fans in the stands. "This was 10 times worse," he said.

"The European hooligan thing is really overdone by the US media - it's much worse here," admits Philly sports fan Al Petrillo. "Eagles games are out of control. It's like a rite of passage, you get shit-faced drunk and out of control. The FU's start flying and then the fists start flying. There was this guy, an old guy in Redskins attire, maybe in his sixties. They roughed him up, broke his leg and sent him back to Washington."

Petrillo has also worked security at Philadelphia Flyers ice hockey games where, he claims, violence is just as rife. "Especially in the play-offs. There's fights at every game. There was this guy in a [New Jersey] Devils jersey, just sat there minding his own business. A Flyers fan walked past him then just turned around and just beat the piss out of him."

A fan of English soccer, Petrillo has attended games at Highbury and Stamford Bridge. "I didn't see anything, not a thing - zero fistfights. I even saw the coach with the opposition team arrive - nothing, no banging on the sides, nothing. In the streets before, during, after the game - I felt completely 100% safe and secure."

Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, the clash with hated rivals Dallas is hyped in the local press - but no mention is made of hooliganism. Which is odd if only because of this tie's history. In 1981, the Eagles faithful bombarded the visiting Dallas team with snowballs - some of which allegedly contained batteries. Ex-Philadelphia mayor and current Pennsylvania State governor (and fanatical Eagles fan) Ed Rendell is widely believed to have thrown the (battery-free) snowball that smacked the Dallas coach in the head - a story that Rendell has always denied but which has done nothing to damage his electability. In 1968, Eagles fans even pelted Santa Claus with snowballs - an incident that is invariably quoted when out-of-towners try to paint Philadelphia as the NFL's equivalent of Millwall. Which, of course, they frequently do.

"The stadium is beyond civilisation," a Vikings fan told a local paper, before going on to compare the Eagles fans to the werewolves in the movie Wolfen. The Atlanta Falcons coach advised fans to dress only in green, otherwise "they'll get the shit beat out of them. They might be throwing batteries at us. They might be dumping dog shit on us," he told reporters. "It's going to be awesome".

"I have never seen a more classless, vulgar, belligerent group of jack-asses in my entire life," wrote Dolphins fan Brian Fien after 20,000 "screaming green morons" visited Miami. The reputation of the Eagles fans is so bad that, when they failed to boo a little blind boy with cerebral palsy when he faltered while singing the national anthem during a brutal snowstorm, they were congratulated by ESPN.com.

"We thrive on the fact that everybody can't stand us," Eagles fan Shaun Young told Jere Longman. "We're a bunch of filthy, dirty, nasty, drinking bums. In a sense we take pride in that. We don't want you here. We want you to be afraid to come."

Rich Burg, press officer for the Philadelphia Eagles was very concerned by this article. He refused Guardian Unlimited access to the game against the Dallas Cowboys ("we do not provide credentials for media to access our fans inside the stadium") and suggested that we write the article from the car park.

Sour grapes? Maybe. But at an Eagles game in 2002, reporters were dragged out of the stands by security for daring to talk to the fans. Which all suggests that the Eagles press office might be ashamed of fans like Shaun - the guys who pay their wages. Not that they should be. Shaun's not a hooligan. And neither are (most of) his fellow Eagles fanatics. But then neither are most English "soccer" fans. Honest.

Of course, that depends on how you define "hooligan". But sadly there's no national debate about hooliganism in the US press. There's no discussion about the wisdom of selling alcohol inside stadiums or of letting home and away fans sit together. Nobody in US sports seems to even realise that they've got a long-term, deeply rooted and entirely homegrown hooligan problem.

Whenever American football fans riot or ice hockey fans beat the hell out of one another, whenever the supporters of basketball or baseball teams go on a cop-taunting, car-torching, window-smashing victory spree, the violence is invariably treated as a local disturbance or an historical anomaly. And whenever college football fans engage in riotous behaviour that would be considered a national scandal if it happened in Britain (as they frequently do), no one seems terribly inclined to call it hooliganism.

Meanwhile lazy US satirists compare rioting French Islamic youth to soccer hooligans, Bucky the monkey-hating cat in the nationally syndicated Get Fuzzy strip raises a chuckle by dressing up as a Hartlepool FC "English hooligan", and the Simpsons scriptwriters seem unable to mention soccer without inserting a gag about how the sport turns its supporters into mindless thugs.

The truth is that both Bill Buford and Frodo Baggins could have stayed at home to get their slumming hoolie kicks.

Meantime, I think it's time for the pot to shut the fuck up.

Funny how they used Philly for 95% of the examples

Funny how they used Philly for 95% of the examples

you can kinda tell after the first paragraph that they guy has it out for philly, which is why i stopped reading. the image kinda gets old, but whatever, everyone who thinks philly fans are out of control either dont live here or have a problem w/ the teams.

exactly....they're all bark and no bite.

Until philly fans come up with their own version of the millwall brick, this article's full of shit.

That's such a bullshit stereotype. Millwall fans are as good as gold nowadays. You've been watching Eurotrip too many times.

whats the millwall brick?

i've never seen that film. i've also never seen a philly sports fan (or any american sports fan, come to think of it) fashion a club out of a newspaper.

But then again I've never seen any English football fan bring a gun to the game either.

did the article say people in philly bring guns to games? i refuse to read it

This blinkered provincialism has parallels with the 1996 decision by the US State Department to "red flag" parts of south London as no-go areas for American tourists, claiming that Millwall was as dangerous as Guatemala - which, at the time, was overrun by right-wing death squads.