Stay classy, Philadelphia
A Phillies fan and a Phillie Phanatic
This past weekend saw a matchup of New York and Philadelphia teams across multiple fronts. The Eagles hosted the Giants in a divisional grudge match that would serve as the verdict on where each team stood at the end of half a season of football. And then, of course, the defending world champion Phillies played host to the Yankees for three games of the World Series.
The result for the weekend was a split for New Yorkers. The Eagles kneecapped the Giants, 40-17, as quarterback Eli Manning settled back into his pouty, head-hanging ways. But then the Yankees took two of three games. And the most satisfying facet of the wins for Yankees’ fans (and those Mets fans who, faced with a cruel and twisted choice, rooted for the Yankees over their despised Phillies rivals) was that they silenced, temporarily, the frothing and frenzied proles of Philadelphia, who emerge every so often to remind us why the City Of Brotherly Love is one of the worst sports towns in the fruited plain.
The recipe for a bad sports town is simple: Take a second-tier, postindustrial port poised at hailing distance from a shining metropolis that has moved on to bigger and better things (think not just Philly but also Oakland, Baltimore, South Boston, vast swaths of the United Kingdom—basically anywhere The Wire could have been set). Chain its disaffected and insecure populace to a sports franchise with some past glory that serves as a taunting reminder of how far all have fallen. And then, optionally, add one or several insane owners, bloodthirsty coaches, or dirty players to the mix. Stir to combine.
Nowhere is this bitter cocktail more deeply drunk than Philadelphia, where the four major sports franchises have a total of seven championships in a combined 300 years of history. The result is that, as sports writer Buzz Bissinger put it in The New Republic, Philadelphia fans (“particularly the hard-core indigenous ones living near Pat's Steaks in the south end of town") tend to "actually enjoy wearing a chip on their shoulder. They like venting and feeling lousy and fatalistic, life a Sisyphean struggle.”
And they like to make their enemies feel their pain. The Eagles’ faithful cheered when their defense sent eight Washington Redskins off the field on stretchers in a famous episode known as the “Body Bag Game” in 1990. And they cheered again when Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Michael Irvin suffered a career-ending spinal cord injury at Philly’s old Veterans Stadium in 1999.
Philly fans have long been bad. As Bissinger went on to note, they drove old baseball manager Eddie Sawyer out of town, fearing for his life, after a last place finish in 1959. And no city treated the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson worse in his historic 1947 season. Philadelphians cheered and rained down epithets as their team threw at Robinson’s head, dug their spikes into his shins on slides into second base, and even aimed their bats, as if rifles, at him from the dugout and made gunshot noises.
Though their hate is now more ecumenical, it is no less intense, even in victory. After last year’s World Series-clinching win, Phillies fans unleashed on the streets an orgy of hooliganism unmatched in the U.S. in recent memory: Cars were tipped, dumpsters set on fire, windows smashed, riot police deployed in force.
In perhaps the most iconic moment of the conflagration—captured, as all such moments will be, on YouTube—a shirtless Phillies fan mounts the pole of a Broad Street traffic signal and shimmies out to sit on the arm 15 or 20 feet above the ethanol-fueled throng, amid the arcs of a bottle-and-can barrage that wouldn’t have been out of place in one of those wide night-vision shots of anti-aircraft artillery over Baghdad. When a bottle pegs the fool square in his brainspace, he loses his seat, catching the pole on his way down and dangling by his hands momentarily before falling into the human stew below. A cheer goes up surrounding the impact zone, followed by a spray of liquid that could either be beer foam or the schmuck’s lifeblood.
Fast forward to last Saturday night, with the Phillies hosting the Yanks for game 3. From the first pitch onward, it was clear that the Phillies fans saw the Yankees—from that shining metropolis that had moved on to bigger and better things—as Captain Ahab saw his white whale, and piled upon the Yankees the sum of all the rage and hate felt by their whole race from Adam down. The “YANKEES SUCK!” chorus lasted two full innings, interrupted only by the perfect cadence of the “YOU DID STEROIDS!” chants leveled at Yankees starting pitcher Andy Pettitte, while the Phillies themselves fed their fans’ bloodlust by pegging the Yankees’ Mark Teixeira and Alex Rodriguez a combined five times. Though the Yankees took two of three in the Phillies’ house, the crowd’s malevolence never waivered. And by the time the Series shifted back to the Bronx, it was clear that, win or lose, Phillies fans would find a way, sooner or later, to go back to doing what seems to make them most comfortable—stewing in their own despair.
