Is It Just Me?: Or is it Nuts Out There? by Whoopi Goldberg

surprised when they have driven someone to a breaking point. If you are a trash talker, have you thought this through? Not every player’s gonna go, “Oh, OK. That’s cool, you’re just heckling me.” Some guys aren’t going to take it well. And some just might come up into the stands and get in your face. And then what are you going to do? Because you can’t beat them. You have no place to run. And even if you did . . . are you going to outrun a pro athlete?
    Good luck, superfan.
    It never used to be like this. All right, maybe when I was a kid, you’d hear, “Get outta there, ya bum!” Maybe you’d hear that. But you wouldn’t hear, “Hey, you frickin’ idiot, your mother is a blah-blah-blah.” People didn’t do that. And they didn’t do it because it wasn’t right.
    At the bottom line of it all, you’re there to watch the game. And if you don’t want to see the game, then why did you go? Other people might actually want to see it, and it’s not OK that you go and mess up their evening with their child. An evening when they shelled out good money for the seats, the parking, the food, everything. It’s not cheap.
    Here’s the thing. My answer to it . . . Want to be an ass? Stay home! Be an ass inside your house. Yell and scream at the TV all you want. Don’t go screwing up somebody else’s good time because, A, you’ve had too much to drink, or B, you don’t know how to act in public.
    Fan ugliness is everywhere. When the Yankees were playing the Phillies in the World Series, the New York papers had the nastiest pictures and headlines right on the cover. Real taunting, you know, just sort of stepping on their manhood. What is that?
    Those players were visiting in New York with their families. Why should they have to look at pictures of themselves in skirts? Or the picture they Photoshopped of Pedro in the baby diaper.
    It seems wrong to me. Just wrong.
    And when a newspaper does that, it sort of validates it for the punks who go to the game to heckle Derek Jeter, thinking he’s going to hear every word they say. Heckle Jeter? Let me hip you to this, dear heckler:
    You are a flea on the ass of a mosquito on Derek Jeter’s jersey. That’s what you are.

Chapter 34
Play Nice or Stay Home
    Rude fans at sports stadiums don’t stop at heckling. Hell, no. Why should they be satisfied merely yelling trash about a player’s mother’s STDs (yikes!), when they can step it up to an arrest for disorderly conduct?
    These people are jackasses. Plain and simple But come on . . . we both know it’s more than that. I’m going out on a limb here. I’m going to say that I believe these . . . offensive individuals . . . may have some special help. And I think it’s alcohol.
    What?? Get outta town . . .
    These losers are somewhere on the scale between “Buzzed” and “Hammered Off Their Asses.” And here’s the thing . . . If you can’t hold your alcohol, you should not be at the game. Drinking. That’s it right there. You should not be at the game drinking if you cannot hold your liquor.
    For the longest time until it was finally stopped, the old Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands had a weekly gathering of about five hundred drunks near the infamous Gate D, harassing women every Sunday football game. It was a total mob mentality. And people would wonder, how did five hundred people get away with that for so long?
    I know why. It’s exactly because there were five hundred of them. Call it vulgarity in numbers. Because if no one gets reported, or nobody gets in trouble, a guy figures, “Well, if I’m with them, I can’t get in trouble either. They can’t find me in five hundred other people.” And when you include alcohol in that, man . . . Alcohol tends to make people believe that it’s OK for them to do or say anything.
    Duh.
    But, oh, what stunts they pull . . . Like the fans who like to pack batteries in snowballs and throw them at the football players. That’s just dangerous. What gives