NEWS
Students resistant to cutting game-day profanity
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Also by Matt Scherling:
- Luther's concert to benefit Camp Heartland (April 23, 2003)
- Cieslewicz did more with less (April 3, 2003)
- Trio of armed robberies reported in campus area Saturday night (February 17, 2003)
- 21-year-old raped on Dayton Street Saturday night (February 4, 2003)
- Sober driver may get charged in seat-belt violation (December 11, 2002)
Related Stories:
- Alvarez to students: Watch your mouths! (October 4, 2002)
- Athletic department contemplates ticket-price raise, reduction of courtesy cars (January 29, 2004)
- UW football tickets will increase next year (March 1, 2004)
- UW Athletics budget includes rise in ticket prices (February 23, 2005)
- UW prepares for new ticket policy (September 1, 2005)
by Matt Scherling
Friday, October 18, 2002
In spite of a mass e-mail sent Oct. 3 from University of Wisconsin football head coach Barry Alvarez pleading with student season-ticket holders to reconsider an explicit chant at Badger home games, students have shown little interest in giving the sailor talk the heave-ho.
“I am asking you to consider eliminating the one cheer that has been offensive to a number of people that attend our games, especially those with young children,” Alvarez wrote in the e-mail.
UW student Jeff Rose, who received the e-mail, is confident the obscenities to which Alvarez referred are chants exchanged between the student seating sections where one instructs the other to “eat shit” whereupon the offended section responds with, “Fuck you.”
“I am a senior at Madison, and every season we’ve been chanting it,” Rose said. “I don’t understand why all of a sudden Alvarez is asking us to stop now.”
UW student senior Nate Miller believes Alvarez’s request only encouraged students to chant the expletives louder at the game the following Saturday — the Big Ten opener against Penn State.
“Alvarez should rethink his strategy if he is serious about actually convincing the students to cut out the chant,” Miller said. “It has been around as long as I can remember.”
Recent graduate Jason Song, a self-professed die-hard Badger fan, believes the absence of censorship has been a long-standing tradition of the liberal stronghold of Madison, and the chant should be retained as a mechanism to uphold freedom of speech principles.
“They are just words,” said Song, who believes an outside party persuaded Alvarez to attempt to clean up the student-section language. “I mean, if they can actually stop the students from chanting this, what’s next? I offer Barry a hearty ‘eat shit,’” Song said.
