As the leaves begin to turn and summer draws closer to its melancholy conclusion, it’s time for us students to turn our attention toward one of fall term’s highlights: Football season. The crowd will scream, the Ducks will roll up another 500-odd yards on some helpless Pac-12 team and the student section will be awash with LaMichael James jerseys and spirit shirts. But beneath all that yellow and green lies a negative side to this obsessive fandom.
You know what I’m talking about. Everyone’s been there. If it’s not the totally wasted guy bellowing drunken expletives at the referee nonstop or the procession of screaming girls parading through a quiet neighborhood after another W, it’s the obnoxious people jeering at a hapless Oregon State fan in a Safeway parking lot. (Seriously, who wants to dog a team that lost to Sacramento State? They’ve suffered enough.) And if the insufferable portion of us Duck supporters in and around Autzen Stadium wasn’t bad enough, we’re spreading.
It was a sunny, dusty weekend in Brownsville, and my friend Greg and I – and 12,000 other redneck folks – were heading to one of the premier country music venues in Oregon: the Bi-Mart Willamette Country Music Festival. The headlining act was one of country music’s biggest stars, my man Alan Jackson. Greg and I had perfect seats: five rows back from the VIP section, over toward the right side of the stage. Eagerly awaiting the start of the show, I was in heaven – except for one tiny detail.
Sitting two rows in front of me was a short, heavily-muscled dude with white stunner shades and a torn-off, white Nike tee. In other words, it looked as if someone had grabbed your stereotypical So-Cal-born frat boy and dumped him into a sea of flannel-wearing hillbillies. This in itself wasn’t a big deal. I mean, I don’t know everyone who likes country music; maybe Alan Jackson is just that good. But Mr. So-Cal wasn’t content to sit quietly and wait, or even chat with his neighbors. Instead he thought it would be a good idea to stand on his chair, throw up the ubiquitous Duck sign and scream “OOOOOOOOOOO!!!” as loud as he could.
He was rewarded with some scattered applause and few returned Duck calls. Apparently going through this routine once didn’t cut it. He carried on making a spectacle of himself for a good twenty minutes. Needless to say, the appeal soon wore off. The crowd’s amusement quickly faded, replaced first by quiet grumblings and then by open hostility. The man, egged on either by the many trips he’d made to the beer garden or the addictive qualities of negative attention, didn’t get the hint. He began cursing at the surrounding folks who weren’t yelling with him and the crowd seethed. One lady loudly opined that the man needed to be sat down, preferably by “one of those tall, young men wearing a cowboy hat.” The man behind me muttered to his neighbor, “right now, I’m embarrassed that I graduated from U of O.” “I know, I’m so glad he doesn’t go to OSU,” his neighbor replied.
Luckily Alan Jackson chose that exact moment to appear on stage, averting the all-out brawl that was surely about to ensue. Mr. So-Cal was immediately forgotten as the crowd roared its approval. Suddenly ignored, he slumped back into his seat with such a look of disappointment that I almost felt sorry for him.
Why do I bring this up now, as the Ducks embark on a run to their first-ever Pac-12 Championship game? Because we as Oregon students and fans shouldn’t be tarred with the same brush that others reserve for the obnoxious supporters that give us a bad rap. Because one of the attractions of the University’s athletic program is that we’ve managed to preserve the small-town atmosphere of Eugene off the field even as we’re climbing to unbelievable heights and achieving big-time results on it. Because I want to be able to wear my Oregon gear and cheer on my team without being associated with the sort of hooliganism that’s more commonly associated with schools like Alabama, Mississippi State and LSU.
So Oregon fans, tone down the aggression. By all means, cheer for the Ducks. Bleed green and yellow. But please, let’s not start turning into the sort of fans we rooted so hard against before the football team pulled on its big-boy pants and joined the rest of college football’s elite.