Negatives of Alcohol and Sporting Events Detroit Fans
Negatives of Alcohol and Sporting Events: Detroit Fans
Sigmund Freud, who crafted himself a pretty good living out of post-game analysis, once observed that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. He said this without needing to go back and look at the videotape, which puts him slightly ahead of many members of our current head-coaching roster.
And now, in the wake of the Canadian Anthem Flap (Volume 47), it feels like the appropriate time to trot out the corollary, as follows: Sometimes a moron is just a moron.
Just a guess here, but I'm betting the people who booed the Canadian anthem never thought past the third beer.
Sometimes the Little League parent who trashes his kid in front of God and everybody else is just the fool in the rain. Sometimes the hockey goon who takes a physical game and turns it into pointless bloodsport is the stupid exception, not the reasonable rule.
And sometimes that embarrassing act by the fan in the stands is just that.
Give it a moment. It'll pass.
There was a great temptation on the parts of the self-appointed guardians of human behavior to make a mountain out of the molehill that was built the other night before the Pistons-Raptors game just outside Detroit, not far from the Canadian border. There, a group of remarkably vocal and undeniably clueless fans began booing during the playing of the Canadian anthem.
The timing was unfortunate. Strike that: The timing was insanely hideous. It occurred on the same day that funerals began in Canada for four soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan, victims of "friendly fire" when an American F-16 mistakenly bombed a cadre of Canadian troops.
You put those facts together, and you very quickly could conclude the worst about the moronics that emanated from the Palace stands.
You also -- and let's be very precise here -- would be going one fact too far.
The thing about morons is this: It is impossible to give them too little credit. Yet in a situation like this one, the tendency is to go the other way -- to assume, for example, that the booing in the stands and the burial of four soldiers could somehow be combined in a single thought pattern.
Sorry, no. Just a guess here, but I'm betting the people who booed the Canadian anthem never thought past the third beer. I'm betting the people who booed didn't know Canadian soldiers had been killed...