Last Saturday’s football game between Clemson and Maryland was a classic ACC match up.
I had two friends from Clemson come up to watch the game, and I got them guest tickets so they could sit with us in the student section. After the early morning tailgating, we started walking up to the stadium with the mass of red Terps fans. We encountered a few drunken students who would yell things such as, “Clemson sucks.” Nothing out of the ordinary, except one guy in particular decided he was going to try and start a fist fight with one of my friends. After breaking up the sixth-grade shoving match and telling the guy to get out of there, we arrived at the stadium. We sat in the student section, and then the jeers began.
This was no problem – bringing my friends to the student section, I fully expected to have people yelling for their team and against the other. Then one friend got hit in the face with a bottle or a cup and she started to cry. Then some guy came up and tried to push my other friend down the stadium stairs. Then some other guy told my friend he was going to rape his girlfriend after the game.
The filthy crap that came out of the mouths of some of the Maryland fans was some of the most infuriating rubbish I’ve ever heard. I and many other fans lost total interest in the game because it was absolutely ruined by classless thugs.
So instead of complaining more about an unfortunate situation me and many others were forced to deal with, I am going to call you out.
Despite campaigns and efforts by university President Dan Mote, Ralph Friedgen, Gary Williams and a sportsmanship committee designed to convince Maryland fans to stop being heathens at home games, inappropriate vulgarity still continues today. It wasn’t enough for ESPN to air a special on how terrible we were as fans (in the wake of the famed “F— You, J.J.” game”), and it seemed the pleadings of Maryland alums such as Scott Van Pelt, who told the student body we were not personifying Maryland with the atrocious sportsmanship we were showing, did not change a thing.
It is OK to jeer, it’s OK to say the other school sucks and it’s OK to laugh and call them nerds. It will never be OK for you to disrespect someone in the way in which we have a history of doing.
Fans that travel to Maryland to see games are just as excited about their team as we are about ours. Follow the example of The Crew, the soccer fan club: cheer for your own team and respect others. Let them leave thinking, “Man we just got whipped, but I had a good time.”
Change the way you are acting. You are the ones bringing this school down. You are the ones who put us on the national stage in an ESPN special calling us tactless. You are the one who drove away Joel Statham last year when you practically booed him every time he came out. You are the ones bringing us all down. Change.
Justin D. Wright is a junior music composition major. He can be reached at jwright7@umd.edu.
