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Tuesday October 17, 2006
Who's afraid of a little fight? (FIU-UM "Brawl")
OK, I’m just getting caught up here, and everybody knows about the fight between the football teams of U.M. and F.I.U. that took place on the field of the Orange Bowl the other day. There is all sorts of outrage about this, which outrage has now gone national.
My question: What’s the big goddamned deal? Excuse me, but aren’t sports teams supposed to have big rivalries? Isn’t it the whole point of sports to be entertainment? From the strongly-worded opinions that are flying around the internet, news, and TV, you’d think somebody got killed or something. Geez, it’s a fight. These guys are in college. They’re involved in an physical (some would say ‘violent’) sport, where shit-talking is totally within the norm. And didn’t fights happen in like every hockey game played until just recently? I just plain don’t see what the fuss is about. I mean, a silly open letter from a university president? 31 suspensions? A sportscaster getting fired? Is that really the required response to a fight that lasted less then a minute?
I want to comment specifically on Lamar Thomas’ firing. You can hear the offending passage in the video that Rick linked:
Now, that’s what I’m talking about. You come into our house, you should get your behind kicked. You don’t come into the OB playing that stuff. You’re across the ocean over there. You’re across the city. You can’t come over to our place talking noise like that. You’ll get your butt beat. I was about to go down the elevator to get in that thing.
What Rick refers to as “egging UM players on,” (hint: the guys on the field can’t hear the announcer, so he’s not egging on shit), I would call “making light of a situation.” But in our society, we’re now unable to distinguish between different shades of bad, and once once something can be described as ‘bad,’ everybody’s got to fall over themselves to make it sound as terrible as possible. That guy who made light of it? Why, he’s just as bad as the “perpetrators,” and he’s got to go. Good grief.
Now we’ve got permanent rule changes, goofy apologies flying all over the place, and more finger-wagging then you can wag a finger at. Give me a break — you can’t encourage ever-increasing levels of verbal asshole behavior and then suddenly be all freaked out when it gets physical.
Anyway. Link to the long version of the video, link to a shorter version with some blow-by-blow analysis. I Ambrosia has some nice insights into the FIU/UM psychology at Metblogs. Robert has some good comments, too. Next!
Update: At Miami Nights, B.A.C. is spot-on. And Ana Menendez says: “Oh, sure, everyone’s simply appalled. Who’s ever heard of football players slamming into each other? Where did all that meanness come from?”
Disclosure: fwiw, I graduated from F.I.U. Also, I don’t know shit about sports.
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I think it’s ironic how you point out society’s lacking the ability to differentiate between shades of bad regarding Thomas’ situation, yet you are lumping a football game and a fight, where people were being kicked on the head, and stomped on by others with cleats (which could potentially lead to career ending injuries), together as if they were of the same entertainment value.
As far as Lamar, he’s a grown ass man who had a job as a color commentator, not a hype man.
Rivalries, scuffles, and shit talking are one thing, but this was plain stupid. If I wanted to watch a no-holds barred fight, I’d tune into a UFC or Pride match, not a football (or hockey game).
Yes, it truly asks ‘way too much of South Florida fans, whose well-deserved reputation as the nation’s worst and least informed is reinforced almost weekly throughout the year, regardless of sport, to comprehend sportsmanship, integrity, appropriateness of behavior, and other such quaint concepts.
It’s a game, folks, not life and death, and there was supposed to be a time when the purpose of college-level “amateur” sports was to develop character, not win games, make money, entertain prospective donors, or sate the blood-lust of drooling goobers in the bleachers.
As for Lunkhead Lamar, perhaps the best commentary on his oral on-air encouragement for fan masturbation can be found in the enlightened fan reaction rerpised by Bob Norman.
Were it up to me, and it certainly ain’t and never will be, there’d be no college sports whatsoever, no corn-fed “student athletes” dragging their knuckles around the campus, and none of the corruption that it engenders in academic, civic, and business circles around the nation. Want a release for your energy? Get laid. It works for me and I highly recommend it.
Here’s the Bob Norman post Steve was trying to link to.
Plust testing comments . . . 1, 2 3?
Yeah, they don’t work quite the same. you have to scroll down. I’ll fix it…
Actually, that’s NOT it (altho it’s pretty good, too). This
is the one. Sorry for the snafu.
New version of Txp: Comments are confusing, and strings of all-caps longer then two characters are getting shrunk down to impossible size. Both will be fixed tonight.
Punishments were just way too severe. UM is upset because FIU will sooner or later take some of her fans and FIU is upset because of UM’s reputation.
This will become an even stronger cross town rivalry. Not just in sports but in academics as well. Who wants to go to UM and pay $1000/credit when they can go to FIU and pay less than $200/credit and still come out and make the same money?
UM is scared because FIU will continue to grow and get stronger both on and off the field.
FIU class of “99”