To sport the anthem raising,
Sing, children, great and small;
Sing out, all rectums hazing,
Praise Football, one and all!
See how our team this year,
Which now is safely ended,
Hath in its love rear-ended
Our children far and near.
O coach and teammates praising
Whose love and grace abound!
Their wondrous anal grazing
Is sung the whole world ’round.
With digit, broom, and pool cue
They pierce our nether hole;
O football we adore thee
Our country’s heart and soul.
[I]t is because of the hooligans that many regular fans stopped going to the stadium. Dinamo Zagreb are a good example of this. Their Maksimir stadium is the largest in Croatia, with a capacity of 35,000, but their average attendance is a shade over 4,000. Their hooligans, the Bad Blue Boys, occupy three tiers of one stand behind a goal, but the rest of the ground is empty. Their dedication has driven everyone else away.
… When fans go to the stadium, they are corralled by police in riot gear, herded into the stadium and body-searched. Police treat football matches as a riot waiting to happen and often seem as if they want one to occur, if only to break up the boredom – in Germany, they get paid more when they are forced to wear their riot helmets, which many fans feel makes them prone to starting and exacerbating trouble rather than stopping it. The situation that created the Hillsborough disaster – that is, a total breakdown in trust between the police and football supporters – is recreated again afresh. The old adage that treating people like animals makes them act like animals is played out everywhere.
… For many of those involved with violence, their club and their group are the only things that they have to hold on to, especially in countries with failing economies and decreased opportunities for young men. Ideas of bruised masculinity and masculine alienation filter heavily into this argument as well. It is rare that young, successful men with jobs and families go out of their way to start fights on the weekend at football matches.
“Violence has no place in football.” This is the sort of thing people always say after violence has broken out in a way that would appear to prove the opposite, and it seems to me that anyone who says it is either lying or missing the point. Of course violence has a place in soccer. It has a place — a deep, foundational, ineradicable place — in every sport. Proximity to the roots of violence is not the only thing sports offers us, but it’s such an essential part of the enterprise that without it, I’m not sure what we’d be left to watch, or whether we’d want to. “Passion should not equal violence” is a meaningless statement in this context, because passion in sports is mingled with violence at its source. When you let in the one, you let in the other. We are a species that regularly longs to burn each other’s castles to the ground.
… Screaming for a goal, laughing at a player fight, punching a wall after a loss, dressing in the colors of a team — I imagine we’ve all done all these things. We’ve paid to do them, and we didn’t pay to do them because we are such gentle and peace-loving souls but because standing near the threshold of violence feels amazing. Watching the membrane that separates you from real insanity go translucent for a few hours is an exhilaration that can see you through the mundanity of any number of Tuesdays.
I wonder if it will occur to Damascus High School, located a few miles from UD‘s house, to remove the sign – a proud reference to the school’s football mascot, a hornet – that greets you as you drive through the school’s front gates. I wonder if they know the smutty jokes people are making about the stinger that dangles between the hornet’s legs in the image that accompanies the sign; if the school is on to the lord of the flies allusions that occur to people when they see the word swarm. When your school has managed to spawn a gang of broomstick-up-the-ass rapists on the football team, everything takes on new meaning.
It’s all national and international news now, and the story of the boys who trapped other boys in the locker room and shoved a broom up them will get bigger as details of the depravity (and its almost-certain recording/photographing by someone) emerge.
The passing the buck story has already begun: Defense lawyers blame it on the school, as if the rapists (who also beat their victims) didn’t do it. (Though if what one Washington Post commenter alleges – that football powerhouses like Damascus do “special” transfer of talented players to their schools – then of course the Montgomery County system does have much to answer for.) The school has – bizarrely – blamed whatever its principal means by social media. Each participant (given the nature of the charges, they’re being tried as adults) has blamed another participant. I’m sure we’ll hear attacks on the parents, attacks on football, attacks on peer pressure, attacks on hazing culture. I mean, we know how the story goes because of Bixby and Steubenville and all the other high school football gang rapes. The blame lies with the people who are going to go to prison.
This blog focuses on universities… but after all, these are the sports heroes coming to your campus in a year or two.
And after that, it’s off to the Redskins!
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NO meaningful comment, as the story goes viral, from the school’s principal. Her twitter feed stops around Thanksgiving.
It used all them guns to kill itself. And others.
… are public, parents and students should be hopping mad. How is it that a dangerous gang of rapists was admitted to the school? Some of them apparently already had serious police records.
In this instance, they raped children. Fourteen year olds. Classmates. Teammates.
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Admitted, hell; these are football heroes. Students are instructed to go to their games and cheer.
Pschaw, say their lawyers. It was just hazing.
And hazing is totally legal and American as apple pie!
Pschaw further, say their lawyers. It’s the fault of administrators who didn’t keep an eye on the lads.
UD‘s pretty sure administrators not only didn’t keep an eye. UD‘s pretty sure administrators ran very fast in the opposite direction when they saw the gang coming.
So why were these guys sitting next to unsuspecting children in the classrooms of Damascus High School?
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Whoops. Every one of them turns out to be a stellar human being.
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New Zealand coverage. You can’t buy this kind of international publicity.
And, sure, similar attacks might have happened in the Champions League. Many have already pointed to the obvious example of Liverpool supporters attacking the Manchester City bus. But the big difference is the context, the control around it.
Our security apparatus is better.
Violence does love a vacuum, and it don’t get more nihilistic than bloody Buenos Aires football.
[W]hy do people care so much? What is the source of that passion? That, perhaps, is the most uncomfortable question of all. It is commonplace to discuss passion for a football club as an unquestionable good, but how healthy is it, really, for people to tie their self-esteem quite so tightly to the results of a football club?
What does that say for the other institutions from which meaning might be derived?
Can we even call it meaning? Isn’t it just jaw-dripping satisfaction at having eaten one’s enemies?
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Hours after yet more absolutely insane soccer violence, G20 leaders arrive in the city for a summit.
The protests, looting and attacks before the Copa Libertadores final came just days before world leaders — including Presidents Trump, Xi and Macron — descend on the capital for the G-20 summit. The violence raises questions about the city’s preparedness to welcome an expected 8,000 visitors this week.
The team owners, the gangs who run the various game-related rackets, the corrupt police, the corrupt armed forces, the corrupt government – all have too much of a stake in the matches to care about corollary damage. And anyway…. Ours, theirs, in the stands, on the field, on the streets…
As any habitual observer of Argentina’s lower leagues – where police escorts are even skinnier and the headlines at national level sparse – can tell you, barely a match goes by without an away club’s vehicle being subjected to such an attack, with the minimum of repercussions.
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The sadness of Argentina is that it has yet to disprove VS Naipaul, who in the blistering final pages of “Argentina: The Brothels Behind the Graveyard” seethes with disdain for a country that never grew up from being a colony, that worships idols, believes in magic, exemplifies misogynistic machismo, and will never move past a culture of violence, corruption, and plunder. These sentiments are hardly credible descriptions of Argentina’s past, present, or future, but Naipaul’s anger arises from witnessing cultural attitudes that Argentina still cannot entirely deny. There is still too much paranoia, still a tendency to quickly declare enemies, still an unnecessary level of acrimony on display in political life.
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In an entire special section dedicated to the scandal, less than 24 hours after the violence occurred, [a] Nación columnist, Francisco Schiavo, wrote that “this happened right when it should not have happened, with the imminent G20 summit putting the city of Buenos Aires on lockdown. But it happened,” he wrote, “because of who we are as Argentines.”
Reuben Foster’s team manager knows a good kid when he sees one.
[Foster] … served a two-game NFL suspension to start this season because of his arrest for misdemeanor marijuana possession in January in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and a gun charge that was part of his arrest on Feb. 11, when a loaded Sig Sauer 516 rifle was found on a bathroom floor. In June, Foster pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor weapons charge and was ordered to perform 232 hours of community service. He was also given two years of probation, during which he is barred from possessing guns.
In 2017, before he was drafted, Foster failed a drug test at the NFL combine after allegedly submitting a diluted urine sample. He was kicked out of the combine after an altercation with a hospital employee…
In May, a Santa Clara County Court judge dropped domestic-violence charges against Foster, a week after [his girlfriend] took the stand and recanted her allegations that Foster struck her in Los Gatos on Feb. 11…
[The] inside linebacker was arrested on one count of first-degree misdemeanor domestic-violence battery [last] Saturday night at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay…
Only in America, mes petites; only in America.
Only in America would a person even think to say that anyone presenting herself to a surgeon as simply wanting this or that surgery must get it. The special brew here, of limitless national wealth and limitless personal entitlement, is uniquely American.
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Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: The quality of writing in the opinion piece is strikingly high; I love the prose. The larger argument that happiness is not an end (see Adam Phillips for some of the best language about this) is an excellent one. Plus, the writer had a lot of good stuff to say about the recent Avital Ronell embarrassment.
But otherwise. Good lord.
… reigns not merely in Buenos Aires (Argentine sports atrocities happen to be tonight’s global-media focus), but in empty soccer stadia everywhere. Fans, players, owners — so many now behave so violently that more and more games are played in Total Spectator Silence, today’s spectators being simply too dangerous to allow into the arena, or onto the streets near the arena. Games are postponed while authorities wait for everyone to stop beating and knifing everyone. When no one stops, games are cancelled.
Not enough that international soccer as an institution is fully, foully, hopelessly corrupt; to this sickening, all-the-way-down financial obscenity we must add disgusting endemic violence.
And… so…
On with the game! It’s a man’s world, babe, and if you think for one minute that injury rape and riot will stop international soccer (or American football, or American fraternities), you’re nuts. Meet the man of the hour, the face of the game, everyone’s soccer hero. Stand back! Everybody dies.
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And in other Argentine soccer news…
… whose last football battle featured the twenty or so Ole Miss students who showed up throwing drinks at the Mississippi State players before the game. During the game, virtually everyone on the field had a big ol’ brawl. Every player got an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.
Life of the mind, deep south.