I’ve been watching the typical Sports Talk programs on ESPN today and the local new coverage of last night’s incident at the Bulls game in which Antonio Davis went into the stands. There’s been a mitigating circumstance reported today.
I don’t want to discuss that incident specifically, but I’m sure you can imagine that the media commentary on this subject called up memories of the Malice at the Palace in which Artest and Co. had a brawl in the stands. The overall theme of the media’s shouts was that fans are out of hand. Fans today are ruining sports and that this is a modern invention. That ticket prices are so high that fans have a sense of entitlement which causes this behavior.
Clearly this is a bunch of speculation and pop psychology, but I want to hear opinions on how much truth there is in it.
My personal thoughts are that this is patent BULLSHIT. Fans have always been and always will be rabid and overzealous. Alcohol has always been a large part of the experience and the business model. Tickets have always been expensive relative to the average salary and there’s always been incidents in the stands. I don’t want to debate the morality and rationality of any of this, but I want opinions from older Dopers if things have actually gotten worse.
I think this entire concept is manufactured by the media and a effect of older people looking at the past with rose colored glasses. The dominant sports media is generally made up of baby boomers who still talk glowingly about Mickey Mantle, Jim Brown, John Wooden, Vince Lombardi and Red Auerbach. They have spent the bulk of their adult lives attending sporting events in which they sat in the press box and/or courtside media sections away from the general population. They have no idea what the environment was like within the stands then or now.
I’ve been going to sporting events for about 18 years and while there certainly are plenty of obnoxious fans and inappropriate heckling (though they are the vast minority of fans) I do not think the proportion has increased or gotten worse. I’ve listened to interviews with Art Donovan who tells stories of drinking and brawling with fans in bars and of players flirting with women during games. Disco Demolition night and Nickel Beer night happened decades ago. Oakland games have been a zoo in the fans for as long as I’ve been watching football. The Wrigley bleachers are much more mainstream today than when the bleacher bum was first defined. Hockey games have a long history of controlled chaos in their stands.
What do you guys think? Is there anything to the argument that fans are getting worse? Or do you agree that the media are just paying more attention to it, being holier than thou and preachy? Is it actually just that the saturation of cameras have caught more things on camera than they did a decade ago?
The only comment I might have is there might be a few more fans who will only attend one game during a season. With the increase in ticket prices, concessions, parking, and everything else, some people might splurge only once a year. Therefore, they may decide to drink more than normal. If they’re gonna buy $8.00 beers, may as well get a few of them 'cause they won’t be back that year.
Possible, but let me posit a couple of counter-points.
Games may not actually be more expensive than they were “back in the day”. I have no statistics to back this up, but it seems that while ticket, concession, and parking prices have all increased they haven’t outpaced the costs of inflation on similar items. People always quote how much games and beers and hot dogs cost compared to 25 years ago, but look at how much more beer at a bar costs, how much more a movie ticket costs, how much more a car costs. It’s a popular complaint, but I’'m not convinced that sports events are actually any more prohibitively expensive (and therefore raising fan expectations) than they were years ago.
Also, supposing that high prices are indeed a factor, wouldn’t it make sense that people would have drank more when beers were cheaper? I think that makes more sense than the “its a sepcial occasion, I’m going nuts” logic. I suppose some people think that way, but at least as many drink less because thats all they can afford. At most it’s a wash.
The average Major League Baseball ticket in 1991 cost $12.57 in 2002 dollars. In 2002, it cost $17.85. Almost all the increase has taken place since the 1998 season, and has taken palce alongside rising attendance.
$17.85 really doesn’t strike me as being a lot of money for what you’re getting, and in most of the ballparks you can get tickets cheaper than that.
If there is trouble, that’s usually who starts it. At Eagles games, the season ticket holders take the risk of losing their ticket, their seat license and going to the back of a 50,000-name long waiting list if they get in trouble. There just aren’t that many people who want to lose that kind of an investment. Frankly, Eagles games have become so suburban and whitebread that you wouldn’t recognize the crowd.
But there are the amateurs who buy from the scalpers or get tix off their friends towards the end of the season when games are meaningless. They come out and decide that they need to make the most of their experience. That somehow includes getting completely pickled, cussing at opposing fans, and starting fights.
There is no way there is more crowd violence. The incidents with Artest and Davis occurred because those two guys are knuckleheads. There are also more cameras in the stands which now see more misbehavior in the past. In the end the dopes in the media need to do more than just giving sports scores so they can think they are real journalists.
Not sure if you’re agreeing or disagreeing with the premise, but I wanted to express that while prices have out paced the “official” inflation rate so has just about every other entertainment product. This article points out that certain product categories see greater inflation than others. So saying that tickets cost more in adjusted dollars can be misleading since adjusted dollars are applied to all products equally. Movie tickets are up 19% since 1999. Entertainment as a whole has gotten more expensive so I’m not sure that it’s totally rational to pretend that fans in just sports are having a reaction to it. In any case that’s a totally other thread.
Also, GOOD seats have gone up more in price. I know that most sports/teams keep the crap seats cheap. If I’m going to one game this season, I don’t want to sit in nosebleed. I’d rather watch it on tv.