FreeRepublic , LLC
PO BOX 9771
FRESNO, CA 93794
STOP BY AND BUMP THE FUNDRAISER THREAD
Posted on 01/16/2003 9:40:44 AM PST by Greg Luzinski
PHILADELPHIA, Jan. 15 — For a decade, Daniel Flagg has regularly attended Philadelphia Eagles games at Veterans Stadium. He always wanted to meet his heroes, and last Saturday night he did — right in the middle of a playoff game against the Atlanta Falcons.
In the second quarter, as a security guard apparently looked the other way, Flagg walked onto the field and sat on the Eagles' bench, next to running back Duce Staley, then beside quarterback Donovan McNabb. He even grabbed a cup of Gatorade to make it seem as if he belonged.
"You from Jersey? I'm from Jersey," Flagg told McNabb before security guards intervened.
It was another eccentric moment in three decades of oddball behavior at the Vet, the notorious stadium where passionate spectators have provided a deafening home-field advantage for the Eagles and a forbidding atmosphere for visiting teams and fans. The artificial turf has been just as hard and threatening as some ticket-holders in the infamous 700 level, the upper deck of the stark concrete bowl.
On Sunday afternoon, Philadelphia will play host to Tampa Bay in the National Football Conference championship game. It will be the last football game played in the Vet, which opened in 1971 and soon earned the widespread reputation as the worst, and wackiest, stadium in pro football.
The Vet is a place of leaky pipes, unreliable heat and glacial elevators, a dank arena where a mouse-chasing cat once fell through the ceiling onto the desk of an assistant coach; where visiting players looked through a peephole into the dressing room of the Eagles' cheerleaders; and where the upper deck has gained a reputation as a hostile tier of taunting, public urination, fighting and general strangeness.
At a game in the early 1980's, a fan named Jeanette Miller sat in Section 730, removed her shoes and soon noticed that the guy in front of her was sucking her left big toe. She had friends a few sections over who attended games with a keg strategically hidden beneath a wheelchair.
Next season the Eagles will move to nearby Lincoln Financial Field. Only one problem. The Phillies still have a baseball season to play at the Vet, and city officials are concerned that football fans will try to remodel the place in a misguided episode of "This Old Stadium."
While security guards will frisk spectators for alcohol and weapons on Sunday, they will also be checking for wrenches, lest anyone tries to walk off with any of the arena's 66,000 seats as a souvenir. City and team officials stress that the vast majority of spectators are well behaved. Yet, police officers riding bikes, motorcycles and horses ringed the field near the end of the Atlanta game. That show of force will be made again this weekend, Deputy Police Commissioner Robert Mitchell said.
"We're going to ensure these Huns don't come in here and pillage and ravage this place," he said at a news conference this week.
After his foray onto the field, Flagg pleaded guilty to trespassing in a court hearing, and was assessed a fine and court costs amounting to $240. "They were two great players and I wanted to meet them," a contrite Flagg, who is 29 and lives in Edgewater Park, N.J., said in an interview. "I guess I could have picked a better time."
Built in a circular design similar to Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh and Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, the Vet was meant to accommodate two sports, if not exactly comfortably. The crowning football moment came in an Eagles victory over Dallas in the 1981 N.F.C. championship game. Leonard Tose, the extravagant team owner at the time, served lobster Newburg, filet mignon and Champagne in the press box for Monday night games and the playoffs. But whatever charm the stadium had has faded. The current Eagles owner, Jeffrey Lurie, refers to the crumbling stadium as "the dump."
The infamous booing of Santa Claus in 1968 took place not at the Vet but at Franklin Field, where the Eagles once played, on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Still, the Vet was not without its own disreputable moments, ranging from boorish to criminal. The mascot of the Washington Redskins was hospitalized after a beating in the early 1980's. And a career-ending neck injury to Dallas receiver Michael Irvin was greeted with cheers in 1999.
"For some reason, you're able to hear their fans," John Lynch, a safety for Tampa Bay, told reporters this week. His team has failed to score an offensive touchdown the past two seasons in two playoff defeats at the Vet. "They'll throw things at you. They say some pretty nasty things."
One of the most notorious moments at Veterans Stadium came on Dec. 10, 1989, when Philadelphia fans pelted the Dallas Cowboys and their coach, Jimmy Johnson, with snowballs. Edward G. Rendell, who later became mayor and who will be sworn in next week as Pennsylvania's governor, paid a fan $20 for a toss, saying he did it to try to get a drunk to move on and quit bothering others. But the subtlety of the moment has been lost on the average fan, who has embraced the episode as one of endearing mischief.
The artificial turf seemed to unnerve opponents as much as the fans did. A Chicago receiver named Wendell Davis ruptured the tendon in both kneecaps in 1993 on a play during which he was not touched by a defender. An exhibition game against Baltimore was postponed in August 2001 because soft spots beneath the turf made the field too dangerous. Visiting players often cannot figure out what shoes to wear on the current NeXturf, much less decipher the complexities of the Eagles' rapacious defense.
For the home team, playing on the turf has been like "eating pork and beans all the time," Hugh Douglas, Philadelphia's All-Pro defensive end, said.
"If that's all you've got, you kind of acquire a taste for it," he said.
The four major sports teams represent a central part of the identity of this city, Joel Fish, director of Philadelphia's Center for Sports Psychology, said. Football, in particular, portrays the classic "Rocky" mentality embraced here, a blue-collar, underdog ethic. Neither the teams nor the fans are transplants, as in some Southern and Western cities, Fish said, which fosters intense loyalty, passed from generation to generation.
That enthusiasm combines with a longing for success and frequent experience with failure. No city with four professional teams has gone longer without a championship than Philadelphia, whose last title was won by basketball's 76ers in 1983. The Eagles have not won a National Football League championship since 1960.
These days, Fish said, rowdy behavior, especially in the Vet's upper deck, has almost become a badge of honor, and appears to be fueled, in part, by a lack of respect for the dowdy stadium.
A makeshift municipal court, known as Eagles Court, was set up in the basement of the stadium in November 1997 after a game against San Francisco in which about 60 fights occurred, a season-ticket holder broke an ankle trying to rescue a friend, and a flare gun was fired into empty seats.
"Guys in bright green Day-Glo robes and silver hair — that's not the typical courtroom you're used to in the city," said Municipal Judge Seamus P. McCaffery, who presides over Eagles Court, now held weekly at a nearby police precinct.
McCaffery said he once proposed to television executives that "Sport Court" would make for great viewing as a kind of "People's Court" for miscreant sports fans. "Can you imagine the wack jobs?" he said. "It would be the funniest sitcom going."
Many people will not miss the Vet. Still, a sense of nostalgia exists, along with a fear that the new stadium, with its spacious dressing rooms and natural grass, will make opponents feel too comfortable, lessening the Eagles' home-field advantage.
"I think you'll lose a lot of the rough edges that contribute to fan behavior and the psychological edge the Eagles have," Fish, the sports psychologist, said. "The rough edges will be varnished."
Joe Piscipo doing dinner theater in Alabama could not be reached for comment on whether he will sue for use of his material.
Great stuff there!!!
Kind of says all you need to know about Ed Rendell, the people of Philadelphia, and the voters of Pennsylvania.
Those wacky Eagle fans...
Actually, it sounds rather tame compared to the stories I've heard regarding Philthy-delphia.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.