They've gotten out of control, these Boston fans. They've mutated. There was a time when they took a perverse pride in suffering, they romanticized th

Search

Member
Joined
Sep 21, 2004
Messages
34,770
Tokens
http://m.philly.com/phillycom/pm_101821/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=8EkN4QXg
Gonzo: Boston fans have become obnoxious

Posted:06/27/2011 4:48 AM
By John Gonzalez
Inquirer Columnist
If there's a reason to end interleague play, this is it. The next few days figure to test our collective patience and sanity. Brace yourself: Boston fans are coming.

The Phillies will begin a three-game series with the Red Sox on Tuesday. Over the course of the season, the Fightin's do all sorts of promotional giveaways, everything from hats to bobbleheads. This would be a good time for a different kind of freebie: maybe noise-canceling headphones or, if those aren't enough and more drastic measures are needed, surplus World War II-era cyanide pills. One bite and the suffering will be over.

They've gotten out of control, these Boston fans. They've mutated. There was a time when they took a perverse pride in their suffering, when they romanticized their lack of sports luck. Then the Pats won and the Sox won and the Celtics won and, more recently, the Bruins won. Whatever humility Bostonians had was long ago traded for some of those giant "We're No. 1" foam fingers and a slew of omnipresent smug smiles.

The people in Boston have become obnoxious, arrogant, condescending. And those are just my friends up there. The rest are worse, an openly supercilious lot who never hesitate to tell you exactly how good they have it. Pride, as Marsellus Wallace said, will mess with you.

Boston has always been a great beer town - try Bukowski Tavern or Sunset Grill if you venture up that way - but the favorite intoxicant these days is victory. The city is hammer drunk on titles. Since 2002, the Patriots have won three championships, the Sox have captured two, while the Celtics and Bruins claimed one each. As a result, the fans there have become the sports equivalent of the mouthy businessman who gets loaded at the bar and won't shut up about how much money he's made and how much better his life is than yours. He drones on and on about his summer house and his expensive cars and his cushy Rich & Famous lifestyle while you order up another happy-hour discount brew and thumb the already well-worn want ads. The Karmic bartender needs to cut them off. Their gloating is insufferable.

"Since he was born, I've been to every parade with my son," Michael Kairevich III told the Boston Globe after the Bruins beat the Vancouver Canucks. According to the story, the dad and the boy even have a special parade route spot in front of the Four Seasons Hotel. They go there after each title. It's sickening.

There's a whole generation of mini-monsters just like that running around up there, figuring it's their birthright to stand outside some fancy hotel every year and get showered with more confetti. You can almost hear the little prepubescent elitists squawking.

Aftah wahtin three lawng yee-ahs, the drought is ovah. We have anothah championship. Hawkey is bahhhck in Bawston.

The older fans are just as bad. After the Bruins won the Stanley Cup, I asked my buddy Flan, who lives up there, whether people were rioting in Central Square - a particularly lawless area of Cambridge where Flan and I once watched two hobos fight in the middle of Massachusetts Avenue. (True story.)

"Nope," Flan said. "We act like we've been there before."

I'm seriously considering rescinding his wedding invitation.

But I suppose it isn't entirely Boston's fault that it's overrun with smarmy, self-satisfied fans. The media have happily fed the town's ego for years and continue to overstuff it at every opportunity. A quick review of the latest saccharine platitudes served to Boston reveals a menu sure to make the heads there grow fatter still.

Let's see, there was the "No one can beat the Red Sox" declaration on SportsCenter last week, along with the requisite "City of Champions" headline employed by the Boston Globe and Montreal Gazette following the Bruins title. WEEI.com - the online arm of the main sports-talk radio station in Boston - went with a navel-gazing piece, "Why we win," while every outlet from Boston magazine to ESPN.com to the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle ran stories billing the city as "Title Town."

It won't be long now until Boston adopts Jay-Z's "Already Home" as its official anthem. But really the fact is, we not in the same bracket/Not in the same league, don't shoot at the same baskets.

In the interim, Boston Globe and SportsIllustrated.com columnist Dan Shaughnessy - a man who's written about Boston sports for decades - summed up the vomit-inducing situation perfectly in the first sentence of a recent piece. The story appeared under the obligatory headline you might expect: "Being a sports fan in Boston has become an embarrassment of riches."

"The rest of the country," Shaughnessy wrote, "must be sick of us in Boston."

Pass the Pepto.

*
 

BEER DRINKER
Joined
Dec 20, 2005
Messages
3,030
Tokens
real, non asshole boston fans, think Dan Shaughnessy is a putz..so take that for what its worth
 

New member
Joined
Oct 26, 2006
Messages
7,718
Tokens
This article is written by a fucking moron. As if us Philly fans are any better.
 

New member
Joined
Jul 20, 2002
Messages
75,154
Tokens
Boston sports fans feel as if they're in heaven....

BOSTON - To Brittany Shepard, life without a Boston sports championship every year or two is like the days before text messages and Twitter: a bygone era she simply cannot fathom.


View attachment 12446

The Bruins' Patrice Bergeron kisses the Stanley Cup after the Bruins won Game 7.


"No, I don't remember," Shepard, 19, said about that time before championship trophies were taken on tours of New England's old mill cities and bucolic towns, and championship banners hung from rafters.


"Boston sports have had an amazing dominance, and it's always been that way to me. It's kind of like a way of life."


That way of life is a relatively new concept here. For decades, New England fans sported a collective identity as losers - the timeworn phrase had been "long-suffering losers" - while the Red Sox, Bruins and Patriots delivered many calamities but zero championships.
But this city has ridden an unprecedented wave of success over the past decade: The Bruins' victory in the Stanley Cup Finals on Wednesday made Boston the first city to win championships in all four major sports within a 10-year span.


With the Patriots' Super Bowl victories in 2002, 2004 and 2005; the Red Sox's World Series titles in 2004 and 2007; the Celtics' NBA title in 2008; and now the Bruins' triumph, Boston has gone from Loserville to Titletown.


"This is sort of a golden age, isn't it, of sports here," said Richard Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England.


Perhaps the golden age is sweeter for those who predate it - those New Englanders who might not consider a major sports title a birthright on the order of New York Yankees fans and Duke basketball fans.


"For older generations, it has a greater importance," Shepard said. "I always had to listen to what my mom said, which is to take it all in, because you don't know how long it's going to be until you win the next one."


Rooting for Boston teams was ingrained in Shepard while growing up in Cheshire, Mass.. Her mother is a fervent Red Sox fan, and Shepard became one as well, a passion matched only by her love for the Bruins. She also follows the Celtics and the Patriots. On Wednesday night, she said, everything came together for her Boston sports fandom.


"I was in my apartment hysterically crying for 25 minutes before running into the streets of Boston, screaming," said Shepard, who will be a sophomore at Boston University.


She said she spent Wednesday afternoon in a Bruins jersey, trying to recruit incoming freshmen to join the university band (she plays clarinet). Later, she and her friends were running through Kenmore Square, where revelers gathered, and continued for about 2 miles to Boston Common, where she took a victory lap.


"It's unbelievable that it's been so long," Shepard said of the Bruins' last Stanley Cup, 39 years ago.


Since the Patriots opened the floodgates in 2002, championships have been like the New England weather: If you want something different, just wait a little while. And while Shepard revels in it, there's one thing she doesn't like: fans who jump on the bandwagon, only to fall off when the trophy has to depart for another city.


Johnson said the resurgence of Boston teams coincides with the advent of social media, creating a group of young fans who not only watch their favorite athletes play, but also read their thoughts on the Internet.


"The relationship between the fans and the teams has grown closer even as it has grown farther" in the age of multimillion-dollar contracts, Johnson said.


That is especially true in Boston, where athletes like Shaquille O'Neal inspired legions of Twitter followers to meet him in public, and thousands pack the stands at smaller sporting events such as New England Revolution soccer games.


"Boston is the Hollywood of sports," he said. "Sports matter here. Lots of teams, not just the big four, have an audience and a constituency.


"This has always been the greatest sports city in the country, in my estimation. This just underscores it."


By Katie Zezima NY Times
 

Rx. Senior
Joined
Nov 8, 2007
Messages
5,490
Tokens
As a Boston fan, I feel a certain pride in myself because of all the homeruns I've hit for the Red Sox and touchdowns I've scored for the Patriots

There are a few fans of those teams who haven't pitched a shutout at Fenway park or hit three-pointers for the Celtics. Why would anyone be bothered when those idiots express a certain smugness or try to gloat. Can John Gonzalez not realize that their existence has made zero difference in the outcome of any game?

(Shaughnessy completely degrades Boston sports by refusing to look at it accurately)
 

New member
Joined
Jul 20, 2002
Messages
75,154
Tokens
Phillies Fans purposelessly vomits on 11 year old girl Phillies Game.

 

Member
Joined
Sep 21, 2004
Messages
34,770
Tokens
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-b...red-sox-fans-arrogant-ruthless-235857102.html

Luke Scott calls Red Sox fans ‘arrogant, ruthless, vulgar’ trouble-makers
By David Brown | Big League Stew*–*17 hours ago

Wolverine here, Luke Scott, doesn't like Red Sox fans. (Getty)
What in the world is Bobby Valentine going to say about this? So far, he has tweaked the likes of Terry Francona, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and others with his rapier wit. Now, he might be on the verge of sparring with a man who owns the biggest arsenal of guns and fishing spears in Major League Baseball.
Tampa Bay Rays slugger Luke Scott, who not 48 hours ago confined his enemies to "criminals and communists," forgot one. Fans of the Olde Towne Teame, the Boston Red Sox.
Scott, reminiscing about his time sitting injured in the Baltimore Orioles clubhouse watching the Red Sox collapse and the Rays rise up against the Yankees on the final day of the 2011 season, said his teammates were pulling for Tampa Bay all of the way. Why was he, MLB.com asked? Because Scott really dislikes Red Sox fans.
"Just their arrogance," Scott said. "The fans come in and they take over the city. They're ruthless. They're vulgar. They cause trouble. They talk about your family. Swear at you. Who likes that? When people do that, it just gives you more incentive to beat them. Then when things like [the last game of last season] happen, you celebrate even more. You go to St. Louis -- classiest fans in the game. You do well, there's no vulgarity. You know what? You don't wish them bad."
Luke might want to check with Cubs fans on that last point, but OK. Further, there's no sense in arguing, intellectually, that one fan group is "more" vulgar than another. I do like the "ruthless" smear, though. It's probably the one complimentary nugget Scott tossed Boston's way. Scott obviously doesn't like Red Sox fans, but he's also acknowledging that they are a force with which to be reckoned. Hey, at least he didn't say they're all from Old England instead of New.
 

Forum statistics

Threads
1,106,145
Messages
13,433,440
Members
99,284
Latest member
engegmentringonline
The RX is the sports betting industry's leading information portal for bonuses, picks, and sportsbook reviews. Find the best deals offered by a sportsbook in your state and browse our free picks section.FacebookTwitterInstagramContact Usforum@therx.com