The Philadelphia Eagles are headed to the Super Bowl, and while the region is rejoicing, the city’s tourism board is no doubt cringing at antics of the legendary local fans, which are best summed up by the recent headline in the New York Daily News: “Another Eagles fan arrested for punching police horse.”
Other treats included online video—from multiple angles—of a rather large and conceivably not fully sober Eagles fan chasing after a subway and running full speed into a pillar before bouncing off the side of the moving train back on to the platform. The subsequent media interviews with this superfan have been pure Philly. “I was a 10-pound baby born in India. I moved to the states at a very young age, about a year and a half. And I grew up to be an Eagles fan,” Jigar Desai told Deadspin. “It doesn’t make any sense, right?” We’d counter that it makes more sense than Desai realizes.
You can’t blame city officials for not doing their best to cope with the Eagles victory over the Vikings in the NFC championship. They went so far as to smear lamp posts with Crisco to keep overexuberant revelers from climbing them. Philly fans took this as a challenge and chanted “F— that grease!” as they succeeded in climbing them anyway. News reports played up the fact that there were only six arrests after the championship, but come on. Anyone watching video of the celebrations could see that downtown Philly looked like a Mad Max movie, only with more delis and cheesesteaks. What else would you expect from a team that once boasted of a jail in the stadium?
But before we tut-tut, we must note that Eagles fans embody a ferocious aspect of the American spirit that, on some level, deserves appreciation. In 1975 and 1976, the Red Army hockey team came to America to play exhibition games against NHL teams. The Soviets had a powerhouse of a team, and they rolled to one demoralizing victory after another, in the midst of the Cold War. Then they came to Philadelphia. Egged on by unbelievably rowdy fans, the Flyers played so physically—goon hockey at its finest—that the Soviet coach pulled his team off the ice for 15 minutes to protest the violence. The Flyers destroyed the Red Army 4-1, the only NHL team to beat them on that exhibition trip. The Flyers’ future hall-of-famer Bobby Clarke would later say he “really hated those bastards.” Whoever wins the Super Bowl, The Scrapbook would just like to say, God bless Philly fans, and God bless America. ♦
