I was listening to the 1955 classic by the Four Lads - “Moments to Remember”, which has the line “the day we tore the goalposts down”. And that got me wondering - does anyone still do this?
Back on the old days, in some US college football games, and usually if the visiting had won - the visiting team’s fans would remove the H-shaped wooden (or light metal) goalposts and parade around the field with them (sometimes exiting the stadium with them, parading down the main street, and disposing them in a body of water or in front of a high-ranking university official’s home.
Today - most stadiums have the heavy-metal, well-anchored tuning-fork goalposts which are almost impossible to take down, but it happens regularly in Tennessee. (you need a hacksaw, or a dozen guys hanging off one side as in this video (skip ahead to 2:20)).
So - does this still happen outside Tennessee? Does it happen in other sports? Rugby? Maybe Aussie Rules? Can you carry a soccer goal around the field? Basketball fans simply cut off the net to celebrate.
As a Packers fan, I remember it happening sometime at Lambeau Field while I was in high school (so, sometime in the late '70s or early '80s). The Packers weren’t very good in that era, and I can’t remember what the occasion was, so it might have been beating the hated Bears. And that was with one of the “tuning fork” goalposts.
I think that, generally, it’s more of a college thing than an NFL thing, and I can’t think offhand of a recent NFL example, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s happened once or twice in recent years.
I participated in the tearing down of goalposts in 1988 at Cornell after one of our very few Ivy League championships**. If I recall there was lots of bending it back and forth to get it to give and being in a crowd of 1000 students pushing on something like that was a bit exhilarating and a bit terrifying. We attempted to throw it one of the gorges but were redirected by campus police to the Arts Quad. Annoying at the time but older wiser me agrees it was probably for the best.
** Unlike our laxers who are the current D1 National Champions!
They’ve gotten so much better with security at games in recent years. In recent decades! It is getting less and less frequent. And that’s a good thing. Take a look at NBA championship wins in the 60s and 70s and it’s just crazy at how people stormed the court.
Look for Hank Aaron’s home run when he beat Babe Ruth’s career record of 714. IIRC a couple of fans met him between 2nd and 3rd and ran with him, patting his back. And this, soon after he received death threats for if he ever broke the record.
So while it still might happen, it is much, much less frequent.
Today’s athletes make multi millions a season and team owners want to protect their investments.
Absolutely so. Pretty much all of the major North American sports stadiums and arenas now require fans to go through metal detectors as they enter, and the list of items which people can’t bring into games keeps growing.
There’s also much less tolerance now for fans storming the field/court, as you note, and at games where it’s anticipated that they might (i.e., a championship game, a rivalry game), there’ll be a lot more security present, to discourage it.
If you look at the first video I posted, there were lots of security people and police around the goalposts, and they were even shoving people and pushing them to the ground - but then they seemed to give up.
At a certain point, when they’re overwhelmed by a group of a few thousand motivated fans, security is likely to fall back and just try to contain things, rather than keep trying to stop it.
When I was at Northwestern in the late 70’s - early 80’s we lost 34 football games in a row. On two occasions my classmates tore down the goalposts and carried them over a mile to throw them in Lake Michigan. After the second event, the local police/campus security would have a cordon of uniformed officers present to protect the goalposts from a repeat.
This does occasionally still happen; Vanderbilt fans tore down the goalposts last year when they beat Alabama and marched it through downtown Nashville to throw in the Cumberland River.
One thing that should be noted: many colleges are now equipped with collapsible goal posts that can be collapsed by the stadium workers almost immediately after a game is completed, if they are concerned that the fans are going to rush the field.
I have never seen a visiting team’s fan base storm the field, let alone in numbers great enough to tear down the goalposts. I’ve always seen the home fans do it.