By Dave Anderson:
I went to a jock high school During my senior year, we won at least four state titles. Our crowds were boisterous, obnoxious jerks. We would identify a few players on the other team and have five hundred people mock them in unison for the entire match. Our tactics varied as we used class-based, sexuality based, misogny and slut shaming attacks on a regular basis. The only type of attack that we did not use was ethnic/racial. This was for two reasons. First, my school was ethnically and racially diverse so it was often a Domincan, a Cape Verdean, a Puerto Rican and two red-headed Irish Catholics coming up with the chants. Secondly, we knew that if we went racial, we were getting tossed from the stadium as the school and league administration had no tolerance.
Last night, I was refereeing a WPIAL soccer play-off game. The game was at a neutral site, but the white team was from three miles down the road while the blue team was thirty miles down the river. The crowd was overwhelmingly for the white team. The crowd started to get into the game and found their player to pick on. They mocked his shoes. They mocked his lack of a left foot. They mocked his unwillingness to play through contact. They mocked everything about the player.
And then I heard "Hey #77 is a faggot"...
And within fifteen seconds, the rest of the crowd turned on the idiot who had just said that and hustled him out of the stadium. And then the crowd started right back on 77's case.
Minor progress here as that crowd self-policing behavior would never have happened at my high school when I was there.
Now that is truely heartening.
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