The closest I ever came was at a Cardinals game at Busch Stadium c. 2007. The Cards weren’t playing the Cubs (their biggest rivals, for those who don’t know). Being a Cubs fan, I wore my Cubs shirt anyway. During the game I got some side-eye and some gentle ribbing, but that was the end of it. After the game, though, I was on this side of the tracks waiting for the westbound commuter train to take me back to where I’d parked, and a drunken Cards fan was on that side, waiting to go the other direction. He took quite a bit of umbrage with my sartorial choices and was letting me know, and saying he should kick my ass and all that. Had there not been about a ten-foot gap between us, which included two steep 3-foot stone walls, electric rail tracks, and the possiblity of a commuter train running him over, I think he’d have probably started swinging.
How about you? Ever been stabbed or punched or whatever by a rival fan? Ever been caught up in a riot at a game? Ever thrown batteries at an opposing pitcher?
No, the closest I came was when I moved into my house next to the Milwall stadium in Bermondsey in East London (this was 2003 so after the dark days of British football holiganism but still had a infamous reputation). I grabbed a pint at the local with my new housemate. He mentioned that because the Milwall ground was round the corner you have to be a bit careful, especially on game days. I joked that I won’t wear my Reading top out much then, and he got visibly nervous and looked around, then whispered “don’t even joke about that in this place!”.
I never actually had an problems in the few months I lived there, it was a rough bit of London (not gentrified like it is now) but never saw any fights (unlike Reno Nevada which I moved to just afterwards though they were not sports related AFAIK)
Are/were Milwall supporters known for being particularly lawsless? I read somewhere else where the writer was in a pub, and a couple of Milwall supporters came in (evidence by their shirts, I guess), and the air was immediately sucked out of the room. The writer’s companion made them head for the exits immediately.
Yes absolutely they have a particularly terrible reputation. As I said this was after the dark days of English football holiganism (which reached their nadir in the 1980s) I wouldn’t have been concerned in a pub next to most football grounds, but next to the Milwall ground I was.
I went to a Rome vs Moscow football (soccer) match in Moscow. The foreigner section was ringed by riot police. A Russian guy came in to the section wearing a Rome team scarf, sat down and smashed his beer bottle over the head of an Italian guy watching the game with his kids. The police beat the shit out of the attacker, threw him down the stadium steps to another group of cops who beat the shit out of him some more and dragged him away.
Does overexuberant celebration (what some would call rioting) count? I was in the Mission District, San Francisco in 2014 for the Giants World Series win. One of a few times I’ve been in a crowd dispersed by riot cops, but the only time it was sports-related. I was never personally in any danger, though. And to be clear, my celebrations were not overly exuberant, or particularly exuberant. I don’t even like baseball that much. Watching the celebrations get out of hand was fascinating, though.
Ohio States victory over Michigan at OSU in 1984 was expected, so the cops surrounded the goal post with cops on horseback to deter the crowd from tearing down the goals.
So we went to High Street and got hammered, during which my roommate got a crowd of Buckeye fans riled up enough to march back down to the stadium to take down both goal post.
That and the traditional burning of a blue car with a yellow M painted on the side also took place afterwards. Fun times!
I just watched the episode of Welcome to Wrexham where they played at Milwall. The show mentioned the club’s fans’ reputation for being particularly rambunctious.
I lived not far from the pier in Huntington Beach during the 1990s. The OP Pro surf contest came to town every year and inevitably led to drunken mobs in the evening marauding the neighborhood and engaging in wonton vandalism. I think it was 1992 when I went outside after hearing gunshots and discovered a couple armed neighbors standing guard over several upturned cars. My work truck only suffered a broken mirror. After that, I left town for that weekend every year. None of this actually had anything to do with surfing, but rather the concentration of young, white, privileged knuckleheads that Orange County has long been notorious for producing.
Not sports violence, so perhaps a bit off topic. But I was once playing in a band at a bar where the audience erupted into something like a classic Hollywood bar brawl. Punches flying, people throwing chairs at each other etc. The funny thing is you could sort of smell it brewing for something like an hour beforehand.
Needless to say I and the rest of the band got out of the way pronto. After the cops had arrived and sorted everything out, we considered opening the next set with “Saturday Night’s all Right for Fighting” but decided that might be in rather poor taste…
Perhaps 15 years ago I was playing football (soccer) for my Sunday League side, at our home venue which was a sports centre with 2 pitches side by side. Towards the end of the match it was apparent that something had kicked off (pun intended) on the next pitch over, with lots of shouting, shoving and I dare say a few punches thrown. One player was prone on the ground clutching their leg.
Long story short, it turned out he had been the victim of a particularly vicious tackle which more or less sliced his leg open, both sides went at it and a proper fight broke out. A few days later our manager sent a message round saying the police had been in touch and were asking for statements off us if we’d seen anything. Apparently one or two players, on the same side as the injured player, had been quite badly assaulted and the police were looking to build a case for charges to be made.
That was about as ‘exciting’ as it ever got. ‘Fights’ in Sunday League tend to be all mouth and not much follow through, thankfully.
No, rather slow, I think. It seemed as if there were two factions of very drunk young men in the club. No idea what the dispute was, but it simmered for a while and then boiled over. Only time I’ve ever witnessed a serious multi-person brawl. Not something I want to see again. There were some quite significant injuries, I believe.
I saw a scuffle a few years back at my local football stadium. The security guys broke it up pretty quickly, telling the guys to go opposite directions. But one guy couldn’t just let it go.
So he pulled out his wallet, pulled out a handful of business cards, and threw them at the other guy, like he was expecting him to pick them up and keep them. What kind of an idiot tries to schedule a brawl? “Let’s see, Thursday I’ve got the Patterson account meeting, Friday I’m travelling…I can pencil you in for 11:00-11:05 AM Tuesday, does that work for you? Kicking your ass shouldn’t take the whole five minutes…”
2009 NFC Championship game, Arizona Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Eagles and saw some drunk Eagles fan trying to rip the hot air machine for drying your hands off the wall in the men’s room. Totally drunk, out of control and screaming profanities.
In my younger days, I played soccer in a weekend rec league. For whatever reason, this league consisted primarily of various ethnically based teams. So there was a Croatian team, a German team, Serbian team, etc. Over the years, being a long assimilated white bread American, I just played for whatever team needed a guy for that season. Anyway, one season I was on the Serbian team and we were playing the Albanians. This was long before I had even an inkling of the complex ethnic relations and tensions between these people. Before the game the guys on my team were trying to tell me how much they hated the Albanians and this could be a dirty game, etc. I kind of just brushed it off. Sure enough though, not 10 minutes into the game, a hard tackle led to a full on brawl between the two teams. I was kind of standing passively by, not really sure what to do, when a guy on the other team runs up to me and tries to head butt me in the face. I avoided that, but we kind of locked up, while I just tried to hold him at arms length. That was going ok until another guy on the other team jumps over and punches me in the face. I was able to unlock myself from the first guy, push the puncher down, and then kind of just ran off a safe distance to the sidelines. The referees eventually called the game and that was the beginning of the end of me playing in that league!
Kasey Keller, an American goalkeeper, played several years for Millwall. I recall an interview he gave (Sports Illustrated, perhaps?) where he talked about Millwall’s fans and their propensity for handbags. It may have been in his first season when the fans stormed the pitch and a full-on melee broke out, while the teams were still on the field! One of them ran past Keller, shot him a big grin, and hollered, “HEY, KAS!” as he continued on to join the fray. He was dumbfounded that this was what Millwall fans thought was a great day out. One of his points of relating this story was that despite their reputation for rowdiness, Keller never felt threatened. It was like the fans’ punch list was: Go to match. Get drunk and sing songs. Have a punch-up. Get arrested.
