Saturday, November 26, 2011

Missouri Border War–A Thanksgiving Tradition

2011 Borders Wars

My family loves football, even though none of us went to a school that had a particularly strong football tradition. In fact, my and Husband’s alma mater of dear St. Louis University, has been undefeated in football since 1949. Hehe. That might be because we haven’t played a football game since then!

In any case, the past few years that we’ve been spending Thanksgiving in Kansas City with my mom’s family, some contingency of the group has gone to the Border War – the Mizzou/Kansas football game. Sometimes it’s warm and sometimes it’s not. Today, it was not!

We had fun at the game, but the thing that got me was the Kansas fans. They were just plain rude. Now, I’m all for cheering on your team and booing the refs for a particularly bad call, but this was beyond that. We were sitting in the Kansas section unfortunately, but still, there were some other Missouri fans around us.

During a M-I-Z-Z-O-U cheer, we heard “sucks” right after our ‘Z-O-U’. This actually happened a couple of times before I turned around to the Kansas fans and said that it was really sad that they were doing that and that WE didn’t do that during their cheers. They had a young kid with them, which is encouraging the next generation to be as rude as the parents are.

I overheard them a few minutes later saying then why did our fans boo their marching band. I told my brother who was sitting next to me that it’s wrong to boo the alma mater, the other team’s band or cheerleaders.

When I was a cheerleader in high school, I feel like we were held to a higher standard than what was displayed at Arrowhead stadium today. We took a knee when a player from the other team had an injury, and we shook hands with the other team at the end of the game.

Am I missing something? When did it become ok to boo the marching band?! Let’s stay classy and give a nice round of applause on a good play and listen to the band as they’re marching on the field in 42 degree weather. And for the love of God, let’s get excited for that poor twirler in the middle of the field wearing only a leotard!

It’s only a game, after all.

1 comment:

  1. I'll never understand why people act like that! It's really sad when you see it at the elementary, middle school and high school level. And people wonder how kids learn to act like that! The things some parents do are just embarrassing! I think that's one reason I was never in to competitive sports. I don't like how bent out of shape people get about it.

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