Lame Moments in Sports #9
How to Stop Cheering for your Home Team in 1 Easy Step
or, How I Temporarily Became A B.C. Lions Fan

I went to an Eskimos game a couple of weeks ago, against those self-same Lions, and, by the end of the third quarter, I was definitely pulling for the boys from B.C. Why, you ask? Well, it had to do with the section I was sitting in with friends. We sat right in front of the most obnoxious, unpleasant, drunken morons I have ever heard in my life. Now, I'm up for a bit of rowdiness at sporting events (I'm a Millwall fan, for heaven's sake). However, I'm much more up for it if it's not simply shouting "B.C. Sucks!" and belching for an entire game. I'm not really exaggerating here, folks. That was pretty much the extent of their clever repartee - they never even really got around to cheering for the Eskimos. I mean, the most gutter-dwelling English soccer hooligan can come up with something at least a little bit witty once in awhile. Now, I'll confess, not helping the matter was the fact that I was sitting with a girl from B.C., who'd actually bought the tickets for the game, and I don't think she had as good a time as she might have.

Second bit of lameness with the night - I can't count the number of times over the years that I've heard someone talk about soccer hooliganism, and close with the line "They don't even go to watch the game. They just go fight." Well, at the Esks-Lions game, I saw four fights involving multiple people in our section of the stadium alone. By the beginning of the fourth quarter, the police had pretty much moved into our little corner permanently to deal the idiots. I didn't know it at the time, but elsewhere in the stadium, my sister was having beer spilled all over her by a similar pair of inebriated guerriers. All this a week before the Millwall - West Ham derby played out with exactly two arrests, one of them for scalping tickets.

Anyway, I'm an Eskimos fan again, but it was close for a little while.