Thursday, June 12, 2008

Keep that trash down on the bayou


There's nothing like responding to an insult . . . by living down to it.

There's nothing like taking a stereotype . . . and giving it new legs.

There's nothing like being too bloody stupid to realize that the nation isn't laughing with you, but instead is laughing at you.

Well, dat's Loosiana for you!

IT ALL STARTED when California-Irvine's baseball coach, Mike Gillespie, gave an interview to the school's hometown paper. In that interview, Gillespie compared Louisiana State's fans to Nebraska fans -- and not in a positive light:
Gillespie said the LSU fans will be different from those UCI encountered at Nebraska.

“That was pretty electric,” Gillespie said of Saturday night’s crowd of 8,646 at Haymarket Park that witnessed UCI’s 3-2 win over the host Cornhuskers. “It was a sea of red, but they’re not a hostile group,” Gillespie said of the Nebraska faithful.

“They’re not on you, and they’re not rude and they’re not vicious and they know the Civil War is over and they know how to act,” Gillespie said, before backtracking somewhat. “Now, I don’t mean to suggest [that is the case at LSU] I really don’t.”
YES, HE DID MEAN to suggest every word of it. And then some LSU fans set out to prove the man right.

Now it's all over the Internet exactly how right Gillespie was . . . and, to a degree, he was right. Stupid to say it to a reporter but pretty much right, nevertheless.

Nebraska fans are some of the classiest in the nation -- no, the classiest in the nation. For as long as anyone can remember -- after the clock ticks down to 00:00 -- fans at Memorial Stadium have given the visiting team a standing ovation.

Win, lose or draw.

Even Oklahoma.

BY COMPARISON -- unless half-drunken chants of "Tiger bait!" can be considered a warm, loving welcome for visiting teams and fans -- this cannot be said of LSU. And unless hearty greetings of "F--- (fill in the blank)!" are considered non-hostile behavior, my experience with LSU home athletic events (and even some away games) tells me that Gillespie wasn't completely full of beans.

Ask any Nebraska football fan brave enough to follow the Huskers to either the 1985 or 1987 Sugar Bowl where, each time, the opponent was . . . LSU.

I remember the 1987 game well, because I was there. And my wife is a Nebraska alumnus.

It's an amazing -- and amazingly unpleasant -- thing to be on the wrong end of "Tiger hospitality" in the Big Easy. But why believe me? Believe
the postgame story from The New York Times:
The key sacks came from Broderick Thomas, the end, and Danny Noonan, a consensus all-American middle guard, on the last two plays of the third quarter after L.S.U., trailing 17-7, had taken over on the Nebraska 17-yard line following a blocked field-goal attempt

A defensive tackle, Neil Smith, a New Orleans native, said the motivation for Nebraska came on the first night in town, when nine players and two graduate assistants were arrested in the French Quarter for disturbing the peace, charges which were later dropped.

''A lot of guys say they were mistreated and didn't want to come back,'' Smith said. ''I felt like we needed to give them a bonus to get them to want to come back.''

Noonan, one of those arrested, said the incident was influential in the Huskers' performance. ''I think that only helped us,'' Noonan said. ''We got fired up. The people treated us like dirt.''
AND LET'S NOT FORGET the treatment Tennessee received when the Vols came to Tiger Stadium for a 2005 weeknight game in the wake of Hurricane Rita.

So, the UC-Irvine coach told the truth as he saw it during an unguarded moment. As it happens, the truth as
Mike Gillespie saw it was pretty close to the truth as it actually is.

Of course, there are a great many polite, gracious and welcoming Tiger fans. Those may even be a sizable majority. The problem is an inordinately large minority of hateful, rude, profane and -- yes -- racist jerks.

Monday evening, in response to Gillespie's "disrespecting" of the locals, a couple of these morons thought making a joke of the Civil War would be a real knee-slapper. Which kind of proved the Anteater coach's point about Louisianians not knowing the Civil War ended in 1865.

The loss of a generation of Southern men might be the stuff mirth is made of back home . . . and the deaths of 600,000 Americans might be 900,000 too few for some LSU fans who seek a best-of-three smackdown . . . and the fact that my homeland made chattel of human beings and thought it so good it fought a war to, among other things, preserve its
"peculiar institution" might be damned funny to some Tiger fans, but that crap isn't going to fly here. Or across most of America.

To summarize -- just in case Baton Rouge didn't get the memo -- the Civil War wasn't a laughing matter. And it's still not.

I can't imagine that LSU's African-American students were amused by the baseball "joke." Neither, I imagine, was most of Baton Rouge, where white folks happen to be in the minority.

AS A NATIVE of Louisiana and an alumnus of LSU who now resides in the United States, maybe I'm the person to inform Tiger fans of one cold, hard fact of life -- your act is wearing thin.


This is one example that you've entered the Michael Richards Zone. This is another. And this is yet another.

And
this one . . . this one includes a YouTube video that renders the "humor" of the Alex Box Stadium "Civil War" banner null and void. Out here in America.

In case you don't want to follow the links, here's the video, shot in January before the BCS National Championship in New Orleans:



LET ME lay this out for folks from my home state -- particularly those who plan to make the trip to Omaha this week to cheer on our Tigers.

I was born and raised in Louisiana. My family had been around Baton Rouge for a generation before Jefferson struck a deal with Napoleon, and I know that my hometown (along with the rest of the "Florida Parishes") didn't join in on the fun until 1810.

One of my great-great-grandfathers lies in a Confederate grave at Port Hudson, La. Another died in the Battle of Atlanta. Somehow, I don't think a "two out of three" Apocalypse would sit well with them.

I know "Fergit, hell!" In fact, in elementary school, it came as something of a surprise to me when I first learned the South lost the war.

Having grown up in a milieu where it was possible to not know the South lost the war, it is no surprise that I also know segregation . . . and know what racism looks like when I see it. And I know the Alex Box Stadium ha ha banner was sick sick inappropriate.

YOU DON'T come up with that kind of stuff -- even as a joke, even to tweak a loudmouthed opposing coach -- without making a very basic assumption that LSU is a "white" school and the Tigers are a "white" team. Despite the African-American players on it.

That kind of sick conditioning is something you fight, for the rest of your life, to overcome. First, however, one has to recognize it's sick. Then one must decide to resist the sickness.

Obviously, judging by at least one LSU fan site, folks down on the bayou are struggling with the first part of the equation. The "it's sick" part.

"America's original sin" sure has staying power. More than 140 years after the South's "peculiar institution" died a violent death, people just can't confess that dirty little secret everybody already knows.

Not after the South started a war that damn near destroyed it.

Not after it lost most of a generation in that war.

Not after a century of Jim Crow, that de jure attempt to undo the 14th Amendment south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Not after the civil-rights movement and several acts of Congress finally killed ol' Jim Crow.

Yeah, the Civil War. Best two out of three. Ha ha. A joke.

A joke built upon the corpses of a mountain of martyrs.

TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH, it would have been a lot funnier if LSU officials had given every fan walking through the gate a little American flag. War over . . . and Mike Gillespie looks like a fool instead of looking vindicated.

That's probably how it would have gone at Haymarket Park in Lincoln. And that's exactly why at least one Louisiana expatriate now calls Nebraska home.

And as a Nebraskan, and an Omahan, this native Baton Rougean has one thing to say to my fellow Tiger fans: Leave your "funny" banners and some of your other "peculiar" notions back in the swamp. They're not welcome here.

The jambalaya, etoufée and gumbo, you can bring. That, and the best of that Fightin' Tiger spirit.

6 comments:

James H said...

It should be noted that Marshall at the game made them take that down almost as soon as they hosted it up.

I know LSU fans can be over the top at times but sometimes Fan Horror Stories take on a life of their on. That seems to be a part of the lore for each school SEC or otherwise

By the way as to the American Flag idea. If you go to the Irvine site and look at the LSU picutres you have up you see the Bus was greeted by loads of fans with American flags. Of course that picture is not being circulated

http://ucirvinesports.cstv.com/sports/m-basebl/

Go to June 8th Photos in their section Phot section to see.

In the end we make a Federal case what a few fans did and then make huge leaps as to a fan base and their thoughts or intentions. Or we cannot.

The Coach made some comments and a couple of fans had some fun with it. That is all. Whether it is in good taste or not can be deabted till the cows come home as well as the other aspects of Football fan do's and don'ts

Anonymous said...

I think you go a little too far here. I'm from Baton Rouge, and I know it has its problems with racial division. Big ones. But I still wonder how much these fans were trying to be funny. They didn't deal with it in the right way, no, but it helps to remember how insulting it can be when people lump all Southerners into the category of racist, hateful revisionists. An overreaction maybe, but we do have sarcasm down here too, and I think that possibility should be taken into consideration.

The Mighty Favog said...

James,


You didn't mention the picture of the guy with the purple-and-gold Confederate battle flag. Hasn't the University been trying to get people to knock that off?

Really, that ceased being amusing at least a couple of decades ago. And it shouldn't have been amusing then.

The problem with the "bad egg" argument is that LSU has so many of them -- or at least just enough of them to give the school a horrible reputation.

A bad egg here and a bad egg there, and then another one over yonder . . . soon enough, you have some serious omelet material. Every school has "bad eggs," so what do you think makes LSU stand out so?

Remember, I have personally experienced what abject (expletive deleted) Tiger fans can be. All it took was walking around in Nebraska attire at the Sugar Bowl. I am married to a Nebraska grad and, frankly -- for somebody who also follows Nebraska -- choosing whom to pull for between the Tom Osborne Huskers and the Bill Arnsparger Tigers was pretty much a no-brainer.

CONVERSELY, surely there must be some real sports-fan louts somewhere in the state of Nebraska, and surely a few must get into Memorial Stadium or Haymarket Park. So why, then, don't we hear about bad NU fan behavior?

A giant pro-Nebraska media conspiracy? Is that why every coach and media type is endlessly proclaiming NU fans the nation's best? And classiest?

No . . . there are underlying forces at work here. And if you think my post was just about "bad eggs" among the Tiger faithful, you gave it merely a surface-level read.

Anonymous said...

http://www.planetblacksburg.com/2007/09/bayou_benevolence.php


Click on or copy and paste this link to find out about southern hospitality....There are plenty of idiots in this world....You can only hope to make it through life without running into most of them.
Geaux Tigers!

Anonymous said...

i was upset with the uci coach's comments. i hate being labled as an ignorant racist because of where i live (baton rouge).

nothing pisses me off more than when people are happy about being stubborn, ignorant, jerks.

thats why this is so funny. nothing would piss coach gillespie and the uci fans off more than a reinforced sterotype. it was clever as hell.

that being said... i would never have done something like that for fear that it would have been taken out of context. (heres where i would link to this blog.)

The Mighty Favog said...

Cap, my blog post may have done many things -- none of which you liked -- but taking that sign out of context was not one of them.

The problem -- from your perspective -- is that I put the whole incident IN CONTEXT. More than you'd like, actually.

You want even more context? Try this on for size, cher.