A Cautionary Tale…

HawkAroundTheClock

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Wasn't it the same passionate fan base (along with key players) who put pressure on the post-Nordstrom regime, essentially 'forcing' it to sell to PA rather than move to LA? I wasn't around back then, so I'm really asking because that's the impression I have.
 

SharkHawk

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Well written, and point taken. 100% taken.

At the rate things are going, professional sports are going to have to change. There are too many incidents at stadiums, outside of stadiums, between fanbases on the internet. It is heading backward here. American football is heading the way that British Football was in the earlier times, and have since cleaned up considerably, but with that they have had to do certain things like chain of areas of the stadium for opposing fans, use separate entrances and exits, etc. Actions do have consequences. I know an American kid who went with his American school to see the US play England at Wembley Stadium a few years ago. They were given stern lectures before the game to not actively cheer for the USA for their own safety, to not wear anything with the team name or country on it. In no way to identify themselves as Americans. These high school students thought they were smarter than those giving the advice. All it took was one kid to do what he had been warned not to do, and they had to get escorted out of the stadium by police (a LOT of police) and we're talking like 12 kids. They were found out as Americans.

Should you have to be worried about being "found out" that you're a Seahawks fan in San Fran or AZ? That's where we're headed people. Do we want the NFL to have to consider playing to a TV audience only? I'm totally serious. It could happen. There have been games played to empty stadiums in other leagues and other sports due to political or fan unrest. This isn't something to mess with, and the NFL is heading down the wrong path. Things do have to change. Many of you make fun of baseball, and say their games are boring, and their fans are nerds. But look at what happened to Brian Stow because of his daring to love the Giants at Dodgers Stadium. His life is ruined as he knew it. So is that of his family.

Football fans are much more aggressive and all it takes is one idiot. It's going to happen. Don't pretend it's not. Alcohol will play a factor, as will the whole fake machismo "this is our house" bullcrap. It's a powderkeg. I just hope like crazy none of you are involved and you all stay safe. Look back at this post in 2-3 years and see if you see things any differently. I bet every one of you will. Just watch. It's going to happen. NFL stadium security sucks, and the fans tend to think their $60 buys them the right to do whatever they want. I am sad that it is heading to this point, but I have zero doubt that something awful will happen at an NFL game in short order.
 
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FidelisHawk

FidelisHawk

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SalishHawkFan":151ghj1p said:
And I'm saying that's the wrong lesson to learn from this. The Nordstroms could have just as easily sold the team to Paul Allen and we may have had decades of Super Bowl appearances and be a long running dynasty.
Where do I start,,,
First off, the Nordstrom family was the Paul Allen of that time, a wealthy owner with deep pockets that hired football people to run their football operations. They never meddled with the affairs of the team they owned.

Second Paul Allen wasn’t Paul Allen at that time, in ’83 Microsoft had yet to build much less sell an operating system. In ’86 they went public and raised $61 million, in ’88 the Seahawks were sold for $80 million.

Third the minority ownership under the Nordstroms were some of the wealthiest people in Seattle and none had either the means or the desire to be vetted by the NFL, a process every perspective owners must go through.
So their choices of buyers were not as vast as you portray…

SalishHawkFan":151ghj1p said:
That it didn't work out that way is beyond the abilities of any of those protesters to foresee. NO ONE could foresee what might have happened that day.

Well I saw the possibility at the time. You had to be blind or stupid to think you could disrupt a man’s means of support and not think there will be ramifications. Now the extent of the damage the new ownership would eventually cause was certainly unforeseen, in fact it took several years for it to manifest itself.
SalishHawkFan":151ghj1p said:
Protesting, on that day, was the RIGHT thing to do.
It might have been if they had an actual agenda, but they didn’t, they were just angry fans. The sad aside to this story is they weren’t even angry at the Nordstroms, they were angry at the NFL, they were angry because there was 57 days with no football, they were angry about replacement players. The Nordstroms were just convenient targets.
SalishHawkFan":151ghj1p said:
I'm not going to play games with people who want us to live in fear of the consequences of excercising our freedom. Especially not when their prime example is a case where no one COULD HAVE possibly foreseen the chain of events that would have followed.
I never professed anyone should live in fear of their acts, only to think before we act or react. I’m sure there was at least once you wished you’d taken pause before you did something or reacted to a perceived wrong and that was what the OP was about. If not then more power to you, you’re a better man than me.
SalishHawkFan":151ghj1p said:
It's a BS "cautionary tale".
BS or not that’s what happened, I didn’t change the details. If it helps think of it as a moral about cause and effect and change the names so the innocent will be protected.
SalishHawkFan":151ghj1p said:
I'm betting the OP is conservative, hates liberals and thinks "freedoms" are things soldiers fight for in Iraq and liberals are naive to hate the Patriot Act. I may be wrong, but I tend to find the only people that ever lump consequences and freedoms together are the same ones that always are quick to give up our freedoms for safety.

And this…
I would NEVER presume you’re a tree hugging liberal that thinks the government owes you a living or someone who believes the wealth of people who have worked a lifetime to amass it should be distributed to the less fortunate by a government that can’t agree on how to spend the money they already have fast enough, because I don’t know you or your beliefs.

Kindly accord me the same courtesy because if you did know me you would find your presumption is indeed wrong…
 

HawkAroundTheClock

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Fidelis, your thoughtfulness and articulation are admirable. I won't use the term "BS", but I'm not sure the parallel examples are, well, parallels.

On one hand, currently, we are seeing random acts of fan thuggery and bullying - both at games and online - directed at opposing teams' fans.

On the other, more than two decades ago, fans of one team organized to let the owners of that team know that the fans wanted the labor dispute resolved.

I fully agree with and understand the "think before you act" message, but I'm not seeing how these two scenarios mesh beyond that. One requires taking responsibility for one's self and abstaining from assaultive behavior. The other requires ... not voicing displeasure with ownership?
 

SharkHawk

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Fans voicing displeasure usually first takes on a single act. Not an organized situation like you saw at Nordstrom's stores. It starts out innocently enough, just as it did in LA. Fans stopped going to games. Then they needed fans to come in, so they started offering all of these benefits to coming. Then fans came out to the games and were pissed at the product. Next thing you know a guy is dying in the parking lot.

I've seen fistfights over a holding call. It doesn't have to be displeasure with the owner. Right now NFL fans are overwhelmingly against Roger Goodell. The barking about this guy is non-stop and it has gotten ugly. I see no reason why it will relent. Owners aren't getting rid of him. He makes them money. Fans don't like him. Read the ESPN boards. You have guys who have made it their full time job to call everybody a "sissy" and every variation of it if they tend to agree with protecting the assets on the field. They are just absolutely hate-filled filthy, foul-mouthed awful people. I can imagine what happens when one of those guys goes to a game and gets tanked and doesn't like how a personal foul is called. I can see what I saw in Seattle when Behring ran the show and there was very little security, the Raiders were in town, they were beating us soundly, and our whole section erupted into a complete riot and I'm covering my mom trying to protect her from getting killed (literally).

It doesn't take much of a spark to light a match, and one match can start a pretty darn big fire. Right now... The NFL itself is the issue. The fans (or the diehards as they call themselves) feel the NFL is turning into flag football and are all full of booze and testosterone, and it can erupt. They are mad at the product. They are mad at calls. If the Seahawks were in the midst of a losing season and it were later in the game, I can see the stadium going batshit crazy over that call on Kam against the 49ers. It doesn't take much, and then everybody is going to be stunned when ticket prices double for securities sake, and we have fencing and hockey walls around the field, and fans aren't allowed in to see warmups, signs are done away with, and the whole experience gets worse. Why? Because somebody didn't think before they acted.

I guarantee you that there are fan bases much dumber than Seattle's and something is going to happen in Cleveland or Cincinnati or Philadelphia. It's a matter of time with the present state of affairs. It doesn't have to be displeasure with ownership. Any number of things can set an idiot off. I think the message is sound and it is clear to those of us who see the degradation of common human decency, in particular in group settings. I think this is a warning that those who are loudest against it probably need to read a bit deeper into and understand for the sake of those of us who now can't even attend games with our children or even by ourselves (I can't protect my kid because of my back surgeries, so I can't go to a game.... because I'm afraid something would happen and I can't pick him up and run out of a situation like I could have 3 years ago, and that sucks for me, because I don't get to see games like many of you do). It's already impacting me directly, and it sucks. I'd love nothing more than to walk into the stadium with my son and enjoy a game like I used to with my dad. We had no fear of some drunk idiot acting like an idiot and my dad saying, "Hey, watch it, I've got kids here" and everybody saying "Yeah, cool it" and that was the end of it. Now, I'm afraid in this environment if my Dad had done the same thing he'd get attacked by 5 people and everybody would watch aghast and then somebody would text security and they'd show up after he got his brains kicked in. It's just the way things are.

People warning you to think before you act is NEVER a bad thing, and those who try to paint it as a political issue or a "bleeding heart liberal" agenda or just being apologist morons for a bunch of morons. It is a matter of respect for others and respect for the reason they play the games... for our enjoyment. Not to go sit for 3 hours and hope like hell you don't get killed. That's the wrong way and it needs to STOP.
 

Navyhawkfan187

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I think people are taking the "picketing at Nordstrom's" too literally... He's using the "unintended consequences" as the main point. The fact of the matter is that the NFL is heading towards a precipice. People are killing each other over a children's game played by grown men for our entertainment. That is a HUGE problem and one that will, unless its stopped, lead to the demise of the pass-time we hold so dear. Who want's to see SWAT and Seattle PD in riot gear outside the stadium when San Francisco comes to town? That's where we're heading unless we as fans decide to step up and start policing ourselves. I'm not saying tattle on people for stupid stuff, but like Dom's story earlier, if a fan is getting truly out of hand most times all it takes is for you to tell them to "sit down, shut up, and enjoy the game." For most rational people that's enough. I've used the "hey man you're acting like a drunken idiot right now, maybe you should settle down a bit." line quite a lot in my years partying with Navy buddies. It works. For those that it doesn't work for, those are the people we DON'T want at our games, in our stadium, representing us and our team.
 

SharkHawk

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Navyhawkfan187":276zpujf said:
I think people are taking the "picketing at Nordstrom's" too literally... He's using the "unintended consequences" as the main point. The fact of the matter is that the NFL is heading towards a precipice. People are killing each other over a children's game played by grown men for our entertainment. That is a HUGE problem and one that will, unless its stopped, lead to the demise of the pass-time we hold so dear. Who want's to see SWAT and Seattle PD in riot gear outside the stadium when San Francisco comes to town? That's where we're heading unless we as fans decide to step up and start policing ourselves. I'm not saying tattle on people for stupid stuff, but like Dom's story earlier, if a fan is getting truly out of hand most times all it takes is for you to tell them to "sit down, shut up, and enjoy the game." For most rational people that's enough. I've used the "hey man you're acting like a drunken idiot right now, maybe you should settle down a bit." line quite a lot in my years partying with Navy buddies. It works. For those that it doesn't work for, those are the people we DON'T want at our games, in our stadium, representing us and our team.

Excellent. Thank you for stating my point in 8,000 less words! :)
 

mikeak

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Navyhawkfan187":19vv3yyl said:
Let's play out this scenario a little further....

The year is 2022, Russell Wilson has won 4 Super Bowls in his HOF career but a black shadow hangs over the NFL. Where it started as a few misguided fans in San Francisco stabbing each other outside of games in 2012, the violence has escalated, now it is not uncommon for nearly full scale riots to break out any time a visiting fan is seen inside the home stadium of many NFL Franchises. Now public outcry has gone away from the safety of the game but instead is calling for Congress to act to ban the game all together because of the threats to public safety that the aftermath of the games have become.....

Now, I don't think that this is all together a likely scenario but you can see how it might turn into that if we let it. THAT I think was the point of the OP. Our decisions and actions now (ie the way we treat visitors to our stadium) can have far reaching consequences.

Glazer's own soccer teams right?.....
 

chris98251

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Not sure when the violence at Soccer started but it's now an accepted unacceptable situation. Teams still play the game.

It's a matter of time before that behavior gets emulated here, there is too much money in it for them to shut it down I'm afraid.

Mob mentality is a scary thing, we have seen it in other situations but at a football game or any sports arena where the ability to get out of harms way is limited it could be a disaster of unimagined proportions.

Just think of fans tossing the oppositions fans off the side of the concourse etc.

When people are responsible it's one thing, things have changed where people now drink to get messed up to enjoy getting riled up, I guess no guts being sober is the only answer to having to drink to be an asshole and pick on unsuspecting people. Or the gang mentality of a group intimidation of others.

I know it needs to be stopped before it becomes unstoppable and mainstream.
 

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SharkHawk has won this thread, I agree with your posts. We are fans not a " nation " or a mob or this other B.S. that people buy into. I'd love to go to S.F. and watch the Hawks as I live in Cali but I won't after the bathroom murder there in a pre season game between the Niners and Raiders. It's a game people yes it sucks when the Seahawks lose and feels freaking awesome when they win but those acting like they are in a prison gang at the stadium is beyond stupid.
 

NYCoug

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Nice post Fidelis. I agree with you and Shark.

The guy who works next door to my job is a diehard Redskins fan from DC. I saw him for the first time in a while tonight. Wished him good luck and shook his hand and we both talked about how we hated that we had to face each other in the first round. Deep inside my soul though, I could tell we both want victory more than anything else. Still, we were both respectful and "brothers in arms."

Don't worry Fidelis, there are still beacons of hope still remaining out there. When push comes to shove, they'll outshine the trash fans that every fanbase is sadly afflicted with.
 
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