Badgers, we’ve been here before. Once again, our football team prepares to take the field in Pasadena to duke it out in the Rose Bowl, and once again I prepare to sit in a car for 35 hours straight to get there.
The long drive, however, is not what I’m most apprehensive about this time. Nor am I too concerned with the outcome of the game. I am worried about the way we Badgers will represent our team, our school and our conference when the entire country will be watching.
Throughout the year, I’ve been frustrated and annoyed by claims that Wisconsin has the worst fans in the nation. College students and football fans are a pretty rowdy bunch, and I do not for a minute believe that our fans can be that much worse than fans from other schools where football is an equally important tradition. But just because other people do it too doesn’t make bad behavior good, and after the Big Ten Championship game, I received an email from a Michigan State fan detailing bad Badger behavior in Indianapolis that offended even my hardened sensibilities.
“Before the game, at a local bar [and] grill, a University of Wisconsin fan looked me straight in the eyes and said, ‘I hope your kid has autism,’ as I am 8 months pregnant and was wearing a Michigan State t-shirt,” Tiffany Petersen, MSU graduate, wrote.
Petersen later mentioned UW students calling police officers “pigs” and refusing to turn their ESFU shirts inside out for 10-year-old children seated behind them – although to be fair, if those parents have problems with their children hearing or seeing naughty words maybe they shouldn’t take them to college football games.
While some of these complaints may be over-the-top exaggerations, there are certainly many that are completely accurate, and many more that never get sent. And as Badgers, we tend to respond the same way; we criticize the complaining party and proceed to shout louder – and meaner.
Somewhere along the way, at least a portion of our fans decided it was OK to ignore common decency when they put on their Badger gear. There is a difference between sassy trash talk and telling a pregnant woman you hope her baby is born with autism. There is a difference between rolling your eyes when police officers make a request and openly flaunting their authority. And yes, even though the student section of a football game may not be the best place for a 10-year-old, when one lands in there it is not too much to ask to tone down your language.
Anyone who has been to Camp Randall even once knows that for every Badger who ridicules an opposing fan, there is one who will help “the enemy” find their seat. For every UW student who chants along with ESFU there are many more who belt along to Build me up Buttercup. We are, in general, an intelligent and friendly group of people who want to see our team do well.
We are all proud of our school and our team. Ending up at the Rose Bowl two years in a row is no small accomplishment, and when I get to California, I’ll be among the loudest fans there, not just at the game, but everywhere I go. But allowing pride to get in the way of treating opposing fans with the most basic courtesy gives the rest of the country a picture of our school that is in no way accurate. On as scale as large as the Grandaddy of Them All, we cannot allow ourselves to be seen as anything less than serious competitors who other fans love to meet – both at the game and the bars after.
Carolyn Briggs ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English.
