There were two of them. The guy on the left was short with a shaved head, looking very much like he wrestled in high school about 15 years ago and then forget how to do a sit-up after that. The guy on the right was tall and bulky, wearing a green shirt and a backwards Washington Nationals hat.
They were standing two sections and about 15 rows away from me, as I sat with two friends in the upper deck of RFK Stadium on Tuesday night. My last-place Mets were losing to the first-place Nationals. These two guys picked me out of a sparse crowd because I was wearing a bright blue New York hat and because my voice has this funny way of echoing through the rafters when I'm cheering for my team.
They didn't want me to cheer. They didn't even want me in "their" stadium.
It became quickly apparent that they wanted to fight me.
One guy flipped me off. The other guy made this "I'm watching you" motion with his two fingers. Both of them pointed their fingers and shook their fists and yelled whatever it is drunken morons yell at their prey when they think their voices can carry over two sections and about 15 rows.
I did my best to ignore them, but couldn't help but notice when they attempted to head up the stairs to my section — only to be intercepted by a perceptive usher, and sent back to their seats.
I'm the first one to admit it when I step over the rhetorical line in the stands, or in fan-to-fan conversation. And I'll take what's coming to me. But on this night, I was sitting there, watching my team, and not being a prick for once. My only sin was that I was a Mets fan in a D.C. stadium, a last-place fan in a first-place town.
During the course of the evening, I got a few "Mets suck!" shouts from other Nats fans. I was most insulted by the guy who told me to "go back to New York" ... because when you grew up in Jersey, that's the last thing you want to hear.
The Mets got plenty of heat, too. [Mike] Piazza was "overrated." [Carlos] Beltran was "overpaid." The Nationals fans even pulled the "Who's Your Daddy?" chant out of mothballs for Pedro Martinez, once again proving that the only group larger than those who hate Yankees fans are the people who secretly yearn to be Yankees fans.
Look, I'm happy the Washington Nationals are having this dream season, and will most likely enter the All-Star Break in first place in the toughest division in baseball. Even if the team falls apart in the second half of the season, the Nats will have a pretty good shot at making the postseason in their inaugural campaign in D.C.
But I was stunned by the ego, the swagger, and the haughtiness of some of the Nationals fans at the game.
They're not in the playoffs yet. Their team is less than a year removed from playing in front of chicken cages in Puerto Rico. If plans for a new D.C. stadium somehow fall apart, they're on their way to Vegas in a few years.
So where do these fans get off talking smack?
Have they earned the right?
To help figure that out, I turned to another franchise with some familiar parallels: a city that saw a losing team leave town, only to be replaced some years later by a relocated Canadian franchise that immediately became a winner.
The city is Denver. The team is the Colorado Avalanche.
The Avs won the Stanley Cup in 1996, their first season after relocating from Quebec. They won a second Cup in 2001, and haven't missed the playoffs since moving to Denver.
So at what point during this incredible run did Colorado fans get their swagger, or feel it was okay to verbally spar with other fans?
I turned to Rob Frakes of Boulder, CO — a big time Avs fans since the team arrived — for the answer.
"The [Patrick] Roy deal did it more than anything," he said, referring to the Dec. 6, 1995 trade that sent Habs Roy and Mike Keane to the Avalanche in exchange for Jocelyn Thibault, Andrei Kovalenko, and Martin Rucinsky. "After suffering through years of ineptitude as a sports town, pulling down that kind of coup just didn't happen that much."
There was another factor at play, Frakes said. "Colorado was going through a population boom. We had a lot of obnoxious transplant [Red] Wings fans lording over us as hockey's nouveau riche and 1996 being 'their year,'" he said. "The swagger developed as a counter to the denigration our fan base."
Like with the Avalanche, early success has given Nationals fans a palpable confidence. And when enemy fans — be they Wings fans or Mets fans — are introduced to the equation, that confidence becomes a formidable braggadocio.
But what if this Nats' season is an aberration? What if next season is .500 or below?
What if this sudden success suddenly disappears?
Frakes hasn't had to deal with that scenario, but he said a few down years wouldn't tarnish his franchise. "The sellouts might stop, but support should remain solid," he said.
Frakes said it would take complete mismanagement to take the Avs down a few notches. "Like what you see going on with the Rockies now or the Nuggets for the past decade," he said.
So whether or not Nats fans can continue their swaggery ways may come down to who owns the team.
And that is yet to be determined...
Random Thoughts
Did anyone else find the irony in Kenny Rogers apologizing for attacking two cameramen while speaking in a tiny room filled with cameramen?
Do you think his hands were trembling as he bottled up his blind rage towards those swarthy little men and their magic picture boxes? How close was he to a total David Banner Hulk-out, smashing the podium in front of him, ripping his shirt off, and throwing cameramen around like they were warm-up pitches in the bullpen?
Nate McMillan announced this week that he was leaving the Seattle Sonics to become head coach of the Portland Trail Blazers. Money appeared to be the primary motivation, although one can never discount the appeal of high-quality weed and illegal dogfighting...
From ESPN.com's Scott Burnside, regarding the NHL's television contract with NBC: "The league has been forced to give away its product to NBC in a manner more befitting a common streetwalker."
While I appreciate the delicate tiptoe around using the word "whoring," this guy couldn't be more wrong: don't hookers usually get something up front?
Is this just ESPN coming up with another creative way of saying it thinks hockey sucks?
And finally, McDonald's announced it is going to enlist fashion designers from Tommy Hilfiger to P. Diddy to design "hip" new uniforms that its employees will want to wear outside of work.
Because, you know, nothing makes a better first impression on a blind date than looking like you just cleaned the deep fryer...
Greg Wyshynski is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].
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