Ranting on Rutgers

 

Fuck you, Navy.

 These are the words of the Rutgers University student fans to their opponent this past Friday.On Tuesday, September 11th, Mark Di Ionno wrote a story for the {where} Star Ledger about the thin-skin complaints of Navy fans, family and staff.On Wednesday, September 12th, SI.com’s Stewart Mandel reiterated Di Ionno’s complaints, and went on to blame the “classless” behavior on Rutgers’ newly acquired status as a winner and a potential conference powerhouse. He reasoned that Rutgers had some growing up to do on the being a winner front, and this behavior was somehow directly related to folks actually, for the first time in generations, expecting Rutgers to win games.I really like Mandel. I usually find him lucid, reasoned, and right. But, here, he’s woefully, inconceivably wrong. Pick Michigan to win by 70 over Oregon wrong. Here’s where he gets it most wrong: 

My guess is a lot of these kids grew up going to nearby Eagles, Jets or Giants games, where booing and obscenity is par for the course. That’s not cool in college football, however, where the participants are not multimillion-dollar professionals. 

I have to believe that there’s a generational divide at work here, and one that I would expect Mandel to be at least moderately accepting of, if not apologetic for. In the last forty years, our humor has grown more crass. Our violence has become bloodier. Our college sports have become more professional. And our yearning for meaningless titles has become unbounded. And as it has become more acceptable to behave like a moron at one level, it has become more acceptable to behave like a moron at any level.We disparage the baseball parents who hoot and holler at the umpires on local television, and we rightly adjudicate the hockey dads who try to kill each other after matches. But, have we done anything but lust for a number one ranking for our children, our towns, our universities, our professional teams, our country? Even our religion? 

Fuck you, Mandel.

 No.Sports generally have become a place in which our everyday lack of social graces has become manifest, and accepted. It is the one place in our everyday lives where truly making asses of ourselves has come to be celebrated.This is no less true in college football than anywhere else, and it’s completely ridiculous to suggest that because college athletes aren’t being paid, especially college football and basketball players, they can’t be booed. Is it cold and heartless? Hell, I’m not even sure of that. It’s rude. But, it’s rude to cut someone off when you’re driving, and I don’t see any more or less of that depending on who’s driving and riding on the highway.I don’t know about Mandel, but when I attend a sporting event, I pay my way. And while there are acceptable levels of bad behavior while attending a sporting event, booing and chanting obscenities, in my opinion, is very much my right. Clearly, I can’t go overboard. Crossing the line with racial or religious epithets (Fuck you, {nigger/jew}), making beyond the pale threats (I’m going to rape your mother’s dog while my friends murder your children by hanging them from their genitals), throwing anything (even popcorn or peanuts) should get me expelled from the game. I know this because by paying the fee for the ticket, I’ve signed a contract of acceptable behavior. I know this because these things feel wrong, in the moment and afterward. (Though pegging that Yankees fan three rows in front of me with a big wad of chewed up peanuts would feel pretty good for a few seconds.)Screaming “fuck” at the top of my lungs doesn’t strike me as offensive. Some of the reason for that, I recognize, is that I’ve lived most of my life using the word in pretty much whatever mode of communication I wished to. Today, “fuck” isn’t so much an obscenity as it is a curse. The weight of the word “fuck” is very much down there with the word “damn,” give or take a couple channels on the television dial. Sure, it sounds a little harsher, but only because our ears have become so sensitized to the word “damn” that we’ve had to adopt a new sense of offensive.And that’s part of the problem. We are more crass. We are worse when drunk. And, in a crowd, we’ve completely lost control.It may be stupid. It might even be an excuse. But, there’s no denying that it’s a fact of sports in our lives. Until we get over the obsession with being number one, and the fascination with demeaning everyone who isn’t on par with us, this is the kind of downward spiral sports fans are on. Everywhere. It’s nothing to do with Rutgers. At all.And there’s no line, written or unwritten, to keep this type of behavior from traversing all of our sporting events, in time. If it offends your sensibilities, feel free to try to change the behavior. (Reversing this national trend, especially in a segment of the nation where this type of behavior is fairly average and everyday, is quixotic. Almost as quixotic as fighting the inevitable college football playoff system.) You’re better off, though, either refusing to attend, growing thicker skin, or accepting a certain amount of asinine behavior.If you think I shouldn’t have been shouting at the kid who ran down the sidelines during an eighth grade football team after he had been tackled and kept from scoring on my team, well… you are a better person than I. Or I care more than you do. Or something. 

Fuck you, Di Ionno

 Where Mandel is wrong in telling us that college athletes shouldn’t have to put up with the stress of being booed or cursed, Di Ionno is wrong in telling us that the service academy football squads should be afforded some special status on the football field simply because their players may or may not leave the nation to oversee a combat zone. 

But you’d hope our Jersey kids would be smart enough to make an exception for the service academies, especially the weekend before the anniversary of Sept. 11, their generation’s own Day of Infamy. You’d hope they’d be sensitive enough to realize that some of those Midshipmen may soon be among the young American men and women fighting and bleeding and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

And he quotes some doofus verbalizing this sentiment: 

“This is how you treat people who may die for this country?” said Bill Squires, an Annapolis graduate (Class of’75) who was on the sidelines for the Friday night game in Piscataway and was shocked by the obscene chants directed at the Navy players and fans throughout the game. “It was the most classless thing I’ve seen.” 

If this was truly the most classless thing this guy, Squires, has ever seen, I wonder if he’s ever watched a football game on TV. Far more classless is the chest-beating and tribal dancing that follows a touchdown or sack, nevermind the level. Professional, semi-pro, college and high school alike, the celebration routines run classless through its paces much more thoroughly than shouting “Fuck you, Navy.”But, there’s another part of their sentiment that really gets my goat. More than being offended by the words used, they seem to think Navy (and Army and Air Force) is a special opponent. Undermanned, undersized, and underpaid, Navy is just another football squad. What happens to the members of the football team after they leave the field is so very much not a concern to Navy’s opponents that it is irrelevant.That’s right. Irrelevant. Today, they’re playing football. If they’re lucky, they’ll blow out a knee and never play football again. Their military future will be behind a desk. But, wait! These are Navy midshipmen. With the exception of getting to spend time on a boat, which has its own inherent risks, these Naval and Marines officers-in-training are almost certain never to be under fire in a combat zone.Graduates of the academies attend these academies to learn the theories of combat, the history of ammunition, the strategies of Global Thermonuclear War. They move pieces around on a map of the world, like a chessboard, and then, when they’ve obtained appropriate clearance, order real men, men who sit in the stands and root for Rutgers, men who sit in the stands and root for Nebraska, for Oklahoma, for the New York Yankees, the Cleveland Indians, the Columbus BlueJackets, men who chant “Yankees suck!” at Red Sox games, men who couldn’t read as well as those attending the service academies, men who couldn’t afford to go to college, men whose whole lives revolved around the idea of throwing a perfect game in the World Series for the LA Dodgers up until they tore their rotator cuff in high school, into combat zones where they may die.Who rallies around, asks for special treatment, for these men? If these men and women are lucky, they’ll come home to root for their home teams as vociferously as they did before they shipped off to war, saw real blood, walked through real guts, felt body parts spatter against their clothes and faces and hands. Before they watched guys they had become brotherly toward disintegrate before their very eyes.Spare me your whining, oh, military veterans, when the greatest, most classless crime you know is the chanting of “Fuck you, Navy” by drunken Rutgers fans.Perhaps the most ridiculous part of this commentary is the idea that this former Annapolis grad complains about the classlessness of Rutgers football fans, when, ideally, he saw people spitting at Vietnam returnees and heard the chants of “babykiller” at these same folks. He must have been absolutely shocked and surprised to hear the vice president, then, use the word “fuck” in the open chambers of the Senate. 

Fuck you, Rutgers

 So, all of this is hyperbole and oversensitive belly-aching by people who think we, as a nation, don’t support our troops. That’s what it really boils down to. Some oversentimentalized response to the nation’s almost desperate desire to not be at war.Military officers-in-training, and their ilk, are upset that Rutgers fans would deign to treat them like any other opponent. Oh, the humanity! It leaps off the page, doesn’t it: You can catcall West Virginia all you like, but look! These guys might just one day wear stripes on their faggoty white uniforms!But, it’s nothing to do with war, Navy or respect. It’s about football. And football is about invective, injury and insolence, to a certain degree, anyway. Kind of like war, I guess.On the other hand, if it’ll make them feel better, maybe they should just let loose with some “fuck you”s of their own.And, if not, well, that’s okay. I plan on sending several dozen “fuck you”s to Rutgers when WVU marches onto their field.