Philadelphia fans get a bad rep.
If you were to ask people what they think of when they think of Philly Fandom, the answer on the tip of their tongues is more often than not Eagles fans hurling snowballs at Santa Claus. Last night came dangerously close to topping that.
In case you missed it, last night was a testy Game 3 at the Wells Fargo Center between the Washington Capitals and Philadelphia Flyers. The Caps won 6-1 to take a commanding 3-0 lead in the series.
In the second period after Ryan White hit Brooks Orpik high into the boards, forcing him out of the contest. The hit seemed fine at first, but further replay shows White made direct contact with Orpik’s head. Orpik has had two concussions in his career. He had to be helped off the ice and did not take any strides in the process.
Then, with the Flyers down 4-1 in the third, Pierre-Edouard Bellemare rocketed Dmitry Orlov into the boards. Orlov was down for the count, and a line brawl ensued.
Bellemare with the BS hit on Orly pic.twitter.com/mh4nsX6UPX
— Ian Oland (@ianoland) April 19, 2016
Bellemare was given a game misconduct for the hit. Orlov was tended to on the bench.
That’s when things got ugly.
Flyers fans had been given memorial wristbands prior to the game in honor of their recently deceased owner Ed Snider, who lost a battle with cancer. It’s a nice sentiment with a sort of unifying rally-cry type feel to it.
A Flyers fan pelted Orlov with a bracelet after he was boarded pic.twitter.com/XkPYmwgJtz
— Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn) April 19, 2016
Or it’s a nice projectile to hurl at the guy whose neck almost got broken.
Dirty hits happen in hockey. It’s sad, but it is still a workplace hazard. Fights happen. They are happening at the lowest rate since 1967-68, but they still happen. These are things that can be handled by the officiating crew and by the league’s disciplinary committee. Repercussions do eventually happen.
Fan reaction is where things get really barbaric. After Orpik crumpled to the ice like his bones were made of jelly, the Wells Fargo Center echoed with “Let’s Go Flyers” chants and a nice smattering of boos as he was helped down the tunnel. After Bellemare’s hit, fans barraged the ice with their memorial wristbands, one of which hit Orlov on the bench as shown above.
It got so bad that public address announcer Lou Nolan gave a very curt announcement to the fans in attendance, urging them to “show some class.”
Fans did not let up. They continued to boo and hurl wristbands. The Flyers were hit with a two minute bench minor for delay of game. Nolan got back on the mic.
“Okay, those of you who have been throwing [the wristbands], you’ve done it now,” he said over the mic. “Two minute bench minor to the Flyers for delay of game.”
The crowd erupted in cheers.
“Way to go,” Nolan added.
Wayne Simmonds, to his credit, did try and plead with the fans to stop. He could be seen on the bench mouthing “f—-ing embarrassing.” After the game, he said that the incident “can’t happen.” Washington head coach Barry Trotz rightfully labeled it as “bad for the game,” indicating that the game was nationally televised.
Then the cameras were trained on Ryan White. White had already been ejected from the game by the time the wristband incident took place. Seeing as he was not even involved, this was a PR layup for White. He had an opportunity to tow the company line by encouraging passion but renouncing violent protest. I’m sure he…
Ryan White on fans' wristband toss: Whatever, I love Philly fans, I’d be doing it too. https://t.co/dF8NOODtGG pic.twitter.com/o0KeSJQrVm
— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) April 19, 2016
Nnnnnnope. He gives a coy chuckle then wholeheartedly endorses it. “I’d be doing it too,” he says.
There is no other word than disgraceful for what happened last night. What is fascinating to people when they look at Philadelphia sports fans is not so much their propensity to get into these ugly altercations, it’s the sick thrill they find in them.
From Ryan Gilbert, writer for Broad Street Hockey at SB Nation and Sons of Penn:
Philadelphia fans take pride in being assholes. I don't know if I can defend that.
— Ryan Gilbert (@RGilbertSOP) April 19, 2016
That is what seemingly distinguishes the stereotypical Philly fans from everyone else. They revel in anarchy and defend it tooth and nail because it’s their “persona.” Can’t mess with the Broad Street Bullies, man. That’s our thing. We are what we are.
I don’t bring this up to pick on Philadelphia. Some of the most intelligent and humorous minds in hockey exist in the Flyers’ blogosphere. They are not all knuckle-dragging wristband throwers.
I bring this up because this is actually not even the first ugly incident of fans hurling things on the ice this week.
Brian Boyle had a beer dumped on him at Joe Louis Arena two nights ago as the Red Wings played the Lightning in Game 3.
The issue of fans being overly confrontational and mob-like is not indicative of one singular fan group. It is not just Flyer fans that hurl objects on the field of play. Nor is it all Flyer fans. That’s the important thing to keep in mind before you go rushing off to tell everyone how horrible Philly is- chances are, your city ain’t that perfect either.
That’s not an excuse. Quite the opposite. It’s an indictment. And we ought to talk about it.
It’s grotesque and wrong. The only way we, as fans, can better ourselves is to acknowledge there is a problem. We need to look at ourselves and what we are cheering; or what we are booing and why.
Booing an injury is happens all of the time. And it is deplorable. When Henrik Lundqvist took a stick to the eye and was down on all fours, flailing his legs in agony, the Consol Energy Center in Pittsburgh rained boos down on him because he was Henrik Lundqvist and obviously he was being a big baby again.
When Ben Roethlisberger was knocked out of a playoff game in Cincinnati this past January, he was jeered and pelted with trash as he was carted off the field.
Fans even boo their own if they are so inclined. Matt Cassel’s head injury suffered during a Kansas City Chiefs home game was met with sarcastic applause.
All fans are capable of this. All fans have the potential to be ugly.
I know this because I live in New York. I have engaged myself with a fanbase that still thinks chanting “Beat your wife, Potvin, beat your wife” is genuinely funny. The last time I went to Madison Square Garden, I sat next to a kid who could not have been older than 8 who would not stop screaming “Potvin sucks!” the entire game. His proud mother, enormous domestic beer in hand, patted him on the head and told him, “You’ve got to wait for someone to whistle, honey. Then you shout it.”
If I had to guess, I would say that kid is going to grow up to be a wristband-throwing lunatic who screams “SHOOOT” and heckles opposing players when they lay on the ground after a nasty hit because “Isles suck!!!” I desperately hope that when (if) he matures, he gets his self-awareness in check before I’m proven right.
Every single fanbase, whether it be a mega-market like New York or Los Angeles or the smallest of cities to play in, is capable of devolving into this sort of behavior. It can be something major, like fan violence outside of Dodger Stadium resulting in the brutal beating of a mother and a son. It can be something as trivial as Devils fans demanding the team keep a goal song that accommodates their lustful desire to inform the other team that they do, in fact, suck.
These two acts are not equal in their detestability. I’m merely proffering that knowing and controlling what you do and say is vitally important as a fan to ensure that these incidents decrease in frequency. Saying “[insert team/player/referee here] sucks!” is unoriginal but ultimately tolerable, I guess. Utilizing “[insert team/player/referee here] sucks!” as a justification to do stupid stuff like hurl things, verbally berate or physically assault someone is not. How one chooses to root or jeer is a reflection of their character, whether one realizes it or not.
If your city’s identity is brutish and based on some archaic 50-year-old notion that you are entitled to be a bully because that’s “what you do,” then perhaps it’s time to rethink your image, or at least modernize it. You can have a tough mentality and be a handful physically while maintaining your sense of dignity and class.
If you catch yourself booing another player who is down on the ground and clearly hurt, stop and look at yourself. Look at the people around you. You do not get a pass to wish crippling harm on another person and rejoice when it happens because they wear a different color sweater or jersey or shirt. And if you think they are dogging it, you still should not do it because you’re not a doctor. Embellishing for a penalty and stopping play for an injury are totally different.
If you catch yourself taunting an opposing player, think about how you’re taunting them. Saying they suck is juvenile but again, probably not all that damaging. Using extremely personal information is dangerous. Guys like Reggie Miller or Mike Rupp will regale people with stories of all the trash talk they used in games. Players know how to push buttons to win. Fans know how to turn into a mob. When my father went to a Duke-Maryland basketball game on the University of Maryland’s campus, he came back with a story of a small group amongst the Terps’ student section heckling Blue Devil guard Andre Dawkins by chanting the name of his recently deceased sister during warmups. It happened in an instant. But it happened, and it happened loud enough for several players to hear what they said to corroborate the story.
Fans will resort to revolting things. They will riot if they don’t get their way like the Vancouver riots of 1994 and 2011. They will severely beat you if you wear the wrong jersey. They will respond to things not going their way to flipping the bird and screaming obscenities.
In the interest of full disclosure, I find the above image hilarious. Yes, the circumstances presented without context are funny because a visiting player on a rival team is getting flipped the bird after scoring. Classic Philly, amirite? Chances are this dude giving the finger was losing his mind cheering when Carcillo beat the stuffing out of Marian Gaborik just four years earlier.
How times change.
And that’s the irony. This is free agency culture. The guy you flip off and swear at could be wearing your sweater in a month, like in the case of Dan Carcillo.
The Broad Street Bullies era is a silly thing to cling to because it’s a salary-capped-free-agency era now. In the 1970s, Zac Rinaldo, Wayne Simmonds, Scott Hartnell and company would be able to stick together as long as they want and that would be the teams’ identity if they were so inclined. Milan Lucic would have stayed in Boston to keep causing havoc with Brad Marchand and Zdeno Chara. But players move on now. Teams change their identities and their personnel in the blink of an eye. And the players who are bouncing from team to team the most nowadays are the fighters, like Brandon Prust, Dan Carcillo, John Scott, Zac Rinaldo, etc.
The crest means a lot for your history, but it does not pre-determine your style of play anymore.
So yes, Ryan White lauding Philly fans for tossing their wristbands is classic Philly. But the sooner we as sports fans realize that this happens everywhere and it isn’t tolerable, regardless of where we are, the sooner we can get it out of the game.
The sad thing is that most negative stories about fans are about the minority. People make generalizations on entire fanbases that are centered around brief encounters with one-to-a-handful of fans who probably are not that great of fans anyway.
It was not long ago that Greg Wyshynski brought attention to a story about some fan disturbances in the Prudential Center. Essentially, a man went to a Devils-Wild game in a Minnesota Zach Parise jersey. The man took to Reddit to complain that the Diablos, the fan supporter section in 122, harassed him and insulted him all night long. A woman then responded to this post with a totally different version, saying that the man was belligerently drunk and abrasive and otherwise acting despicably. The Diablos denied any involvement, which would make sense given the woman noted the man sat a section over from them in 123.
Now, the Wild fan’s version of things is by now proven to be false. It just shows that there are crazies out there who will purposefully seek out conflict, distort reality to make it seem like they were under attack, then pin blame on another group. The team names are totally interchangeable in the story. Dude shows up to a Panthers game in a Lightning jersey, stirs up trouble, then takes to the interwebs to tell everyone how terrible it is to be a visitor at BB&T Center.
All this is to say that all teams have bad apples in their crowd. If you want proof, just scour Twitter. It won’t take you long. Fans of literally every team are irrational homers that are quick with an insult or a threat.
So when you say, “Man, I really hate [team] fans” because of some incident or a couple fans on the internet, understand they are the bad apples on the tree. And your team has quite a few of their own. How you cheer represents you as a person. You are not given a license to be uproariously violent just because you are at a sporting event. If one is taught it is acceptable in that environment, like that kid at the Garden, one can apply it to other situations too.
Get passionate. Get loud. Have fun. But for god’s sake, be smart and be cognizant of who you are.
Hockey is a community. Play nice.
