Teasing, Taunting, and Revenge: Lessons in Injured Pride

Teasing, Taunting, and Revenge: Lessons in Injured Pride

When The Ohio State University, a mega land-grant state school and a perennial football powerhouse, takes the field against a charter member of the Big Ten, the elite Northwestern University, the stadium buzzes with good-natured score-settling and rivalry. From their side of the field, Buckeyes’ loud cheers press the point that the Wildcats haven’t any hope.

History is on their side. As of 2024, the record over the last century stood decisively at 66-1-14 in favor of OSU. Check the record book if you like; you will find the final scores equally lopsided.

But on the stands across the field, students (followers if not quite fans) at the prestigious and pricey (if not quite fancy) Chicago university, do not seem much bothered while getting creamed. They take up their own cheer: “It’s All Right, It’s OK; You’ll be working for Us Someday!”

As a graduate of an Ohio State university, (not the) that attracted a mix of strivers and partiers, many of them the first of their families to attend college, I will admit to mixed feelings at the exchange. The edgy chant is clever and funny. Mostly harmless, too. But the class implications of the prediction? Not so much as playful teasing verges toward the unsportsmanlike.

Safety Rules

On the field at college and professional football contests, strict rules mitigate the violence of the game and strive to make play both safer and fairer in enforced generosity.

Helmet-to-helmet contact, which invites concussion and its lifelong sequelae, merits severe penalty. So too for “horse-collar tackles” that torque an opponent off his feet. A flagrant face-mask infraction that hazards a neck fracture could draw a fine in excess of $10, 000.

An unintended consequence of the quest for safety turns the bulbous new headgear into weapons. Physicists have calculated that the force of impact during a tackle ranges upward of 80 g’s. So, the rules of the game also prohibit “spearing.”

Taunting vs. Fair Play

These dangerous infractions and straightforward penalties seem simple compared to sanctions against unsportsmanlike conduct. The hair-trigger emotional pitch of professional football—fueled by celebrity, giant salary, and professional elite athletes’ egos—makes insult particularly risky to playing a game fairly and smoothly.

We have gotten used to the inventive choreography that follows a spectacular touchdown catch. (Like other geezers, I’ll grind my teeth at the extravagant displays that the NFL permits now.) But removing one’s helmet after a magnificent catch is regarded as “excessive celebration” and so is a punishable act of hubris in this team sport. (“There is no “I” in team…”) Celebration meant to humiliate can draw a possibly consequential penalty of fifteen yards.

Flexing and Fighting and Anger Management

“Flexing”—striking a muscleman’s pose in an opponent’s face—is one of the silliest, most juvenile, and yet most effective and insulting taunts. The message: I’m a he-man and you, chump, are a wimp. To publicly brand an elite athlete who has enjoyed adulation from grade school onward, well, that’s asking for what the television commentators will minimize as “a little back-and-forth.”

Fighting is anathema to non-blood sports, even in a rough game like football. (Although professional hockey comprises a notable exception. In this fast-paced game, fighting is understood as a kind of self-policing and enforcement of accountability for cheap shots.) Violators in football can be ejected from a game, risk a suspension, or may even be obliged to attend anger-management therapy. (Am I alone in finding something amusing in that irony?)

Formal rules step up when Emotional intelligence falls short.

But Back to the Fans

The instances are rare, but fans themselves can be cited for unsportsmanlike conduct. After an upset win in college football, the stands might empty onto the field. And because that onrushing is unsafe and the university is responsible for crowd control at games, the NCAA discourages the practice of “field invasion” with hefty fines. The worst instances occurred with a game’s outcome inevitable, but time left on the clock; Auburn was fined $100,000, and Oklahoma twice that amount for this offense. Throwing trash on the playing field is punished less severely. Red Raiders fans at Texas Tech can cost the team a 5-yard penalty for tossing tortillas on the field and an additional 10 yards if they keep it up.

Tortillas and Soothing Injured Pride

Texas Tech mascot, Raider Red, exhorting fans with the “Guns Up!” gesture.

Source: Image courtesy Levi Mericle via Wikimedia (2007), released to public domain.

Tortillas, you wonder? The practice may have originated in response to an insult from a partisan sports-talk radio host who insisted that the city of Lubbock could boast of nothing other than “Texas Tech and tortillas.” You want tortillas, partner? Well, now we’ll give you tortillas! And so, they flow like Frisbees.

This is not the only instance where a reappropriated word embraces an insult to demonstrate the resilience of the insulted. Think here of defiant, retaliatory self-designations like “Yankee,” “les Fauves,” “queer,” and “tree-hugger.” “Obamacare” is another instance where a denigration turned to a rallying cry.

When Fandom Turns Fanatical

It is a measure of the drama of athletic contests that passions among devotees run at a high key. So much so that riots have sometimes followed championships. Following big wins, overheated fans ran amok and overturned cars in Detroit, Columbus, Chicago, Philadelphia, Edmonton, and Los Angeles. Alcohol has routinely factored in. The cork came out the bottle, literally, in Cleveland in 1974, as celebration turned to riot after the Indians’ organization unwisely sponsored a “Ten Cent Beer Night.”

Hooligans and Thugs

The occasional North American civil misbehavior cannot compare to premeditated and routine soccer “hooliganism” in Great Britain and Europe. Soccer—football to the rest of the world—is a supremely tense and suspenseful game. Hooliganism, a reaction born of frustration and malice, much of it accumulated before game day, differs not just in degree but in kind from teasing and taunting.

Arising from tribal team-rivalries, the “football hooliganism” that is suppressed by squadrons of police in stadiums has sometimes turned deadly outside. On occasion, football gangs also disturbingly reveled in fascist impulse as skinhead and neo-Nazi racial attacks erupted chaotically onto the streets.

Make no mistake: sports rivalries are mostly joyous in victory and gracious in defeat. Even in keen contests, the generous and forgiving “sportsmanlike” spirit of fair play routinely prevails. Opponents shake hands post-game.

But soccer thugs spoil for a fight and plan otherwise. Sometimes they outfit themselves with steel-toed jackboots.

Share:

Picture of Muhammad Naeem

Muhammad Naeem

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Most Popular

Social Media

Get The Latest Updates

Subscribe To Our Weekly Newsletter

No spam, notifications only about new products, updates.

Categories

Related Posts

Uncategorized

Are Humans Meant to Share Beds?

Post Views: 3 Recent research on animal sleep behavior has revealed that sleep is influenced by the animals around them. Olive baboons, for instance, sleep

Read More »