The Black Hole is coming to Sin City. And the apparent hope is that the intersection will be Disneyland.
“We like the deeply passionate fans,” LV Stadium Company COO Don Webb said Thursday, via the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “But we want the stadium to be not only a safe environment, but we want it to be perceived as a family-friendly environment. So I think there will be some changes, frankly, to the fan base when the team moves to Las Vegas and the method of operating the stadium. I think I’ll leave it there, but the team ownership and team management is very keen on projecting the right image when this team comes to Las Vegas.”
“Changes to the fan base”? It’s not a country club or a private gathering. It’s a first-come, first-served, open-to-anyone-with-the-money-to-get-in proposition. If the fan base changes, it won’t have anything to do with what the team, the league, or the stadium authority wants.
“Instead of trying to push some Raiders fans away, maybe the focus should be on uniting Raider Nation, which is completely fractured from this move to Vegas,” Omar Frias, a Raiders fan, told the Review-Journal. “And to insinuate that the Raiders fans right now or in Oakland are not family friendly is inaccurate and disrespectful.”
Here’s the reality -- few NFL fan bases are “family-friendly.” In every city, too many fans view the purchase of the ticket as the acquisition of a right to get drunk and act like buttholes. College games are bad; NFL games are often much worse.
It’s a strange aspect of the human condition, undoubtedly exacerbated by those who patronize the Official Beer of the NFL. People who ordinarily wouldn’t engage in antisocial behavior yell profanity regardless of who can hear it, threaten violence to complete strangers, and/or engage in all-out brawls with anyone who dares point out that they should sit down and shut up.
Maybe it’s gotten better. Maybe it will get better. But the teams have little control over who gets in and how they act when they get there, short of policing these situations aggressively and quickly and decisively removing from the venue anyone who is impacting the experience of other fans in a negative way and/or teaching new words to any children within earshot.
