Love Live Football, Hate the Fans

The Discovering Alcoholic — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:11:20 -0500

This week marks the start of college football with the first games kicking off on Thursday. My family and friends had a long tradition of going to the games and cheering our team that I broke with on the onset of my recovery.

It wasn't the fact that I couldn't handle the festive atmosphere and ample opportunity to imbibe, it's just the high concentration of drunks made the events impossible for me to enjoy anymore. Over the last decade I have ventured to a few games to check my tolerance but it seems that the proliferation of asinine drunks just increases with every year. According to Scientific American, I am not the only one who has noticed this trend.

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One of the drawbacks to attending a sporting event can be the boorish behavior of some fans who have pounded down the brewskies. Now comes a study that finds that three quarters of fans who appear to be already intoxicated had no trouble buying more alcohol. And a fifth of people posing as underage also could buy beer. The research appears in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. ~ Scientific American

The above study used actors posing as underage and/or drunk patrons who successfully bought alcohol. It’s not that vendors sell the alcohol or who they sell it to that is the problem because alcohol is not sold at college games and yet the problem still exists… in spades. No the real problem lies with the rest of the fans that accept the fact that they will have to persevere in a crowd of drunks just to see their favorite team play. This could be the reason for the increase in drunken numbers; maybe one has to be numb just to tolerate the crowd?

Back in the day, you either went to the game or were relegated to listening to it on the radio. Thanks to modern cable television, these days I get to see almost every game from the comfort of the couch. Almost every Saturday you will find me at a friend’s house (we rotate the venue weekly) enjoying grilled food, spirited conversation, and Auburn football. Yeah we still have the occasional stray drunk who has one to many, but we police our own and do not allow them to ruin the experience. If only this would happen in the stadiums.

The problem is not that alcohol is sold, or who it is sold to, but that it has become an accepted fact that there will be a high concentration of unruly, intoxicated fans at sporting events. It has become part of our culture, that is the problem.

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Love Live Football, Hate the Fans