Let's Face It, Rioters Are Fans, Too

In the wake of the instantly infamous riots that gripped Vancouver after the Canucks' loss to the Boston Bruins in the NHL's Stanley Cup finals last week, I heard a couple of media personalities try to rationalize the debacle by claiming that  the perpetrators weren't "real" hockey fans or Canucks supporters. This tired excuse, which is faithfully trotted out in the U.S. whenever fan hijinks devolve into mob violence, begs an obvious question. Here, one has to ask who, exactly, were those troublemakers kitted out in bespoke Canucks' paraphernalia? Were they a particularly organized flash mob of anarchists? Probably not. In fact, a lot of them probably were passionate Canucks fans. They were too passionate, clearly, and quite stupid, as well, but fans, nonetheless. It's probably time for us, as a sporting culture, to put on our big boy pants and realize that.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

Obviously, this isn't our first brush with fan violence. In an analogous incident from May 2008, hooligan supporters from Glasgow soccer club Rangers expressed their displeasure with their club's humbling loss to Zenit St. Petersburg in the UEFA Cup Final by cutting a swath of destruction through the host city of Manchester that was described as being as bad as anything the area had suffered "since the Blitz."  Sadly, tales of soccer hooliganism are legion, with Italy's Serie A providing many of the recent battlegrounds, but fan delinquency isn't cabined to European soccer. How about those lovably loyal Cleveland Browns fans who gave us a bottle tossing incident in 1991 that Nick Bakay dubbed "The Day It Rained Pilsner?" Or the night in 2004 when fans attempted a coup at the Palace at Auburn Hills during a NBA regular season game between the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers? More recently, Major League Baseball was rocked by the savage beating of a San Francisco Giants fan outside of Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles. For crissakes, this isn't even the first post-Game 7 Stanley Cup Finals riot in the city of Vancouver. The fact that lists like this are nowhere near exhaustive only speaks to my point.

And, yet, America's sports media continues its self-serving refusal to acknowledge that the whole premise of the bad-fans-aren't-real-fans argument is laughably flawed. I suppose it's bad business to tell your audience that they sometimes act like common criminals, but it's an insult to a viewer's intelligence to act like "real" sports fans are morally incapable of behaving badly.

Are these people you'd invite to your housewarming party?
No, but that doesn't mean they aren't sports fans.

FANCIER OR FANATIC?

There's some etymological uncertainty over whether the word "fan" was, when first applied to baseball fans during the 19th century, a shortened form of the word "fancier" or "fanatic." Usually, the majority of sports fans in this country (and probably the rest of the world) act more like fanciers than fanatics; however, when fanaticism takes primacy in sports, things can get ugly, just as they do when fanaticism dominates political or religious spheres.

Ultimately, people are capable of acts of malice and profound stupidity. "Real" sports fans are people. So, they, too, are capable of the kind of deviance that roiled Vancouver last week. Let's face it, good fans are capable of being bad people.