Ladies Come Out Swinging

Female Fans in the Trenches of America's Pastime

BY GILLIAN YOUNG

Click to see full size
Illustration by author
fighting baseball players

Take me out to the ball game

Take me out to the crowd

Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack

Christ, I just saw a girl get attacked

And its rip rip rip out her piercings

If there's no blood it's a shame

'Cause it's grab, scratch, gouge, slap you're out

At the old ball game!

I, TOO, WOULD HAVE FOUND these words a sadistic desecration of baseball's innocent anthem before I attended that Red Sox game last August. After a stressful exchange with a scalper, I was contentedly shelling peanuts and sipping Bud Light in the right field bleachers of Fenway Park. By the second inning, it became apparent that Pesky's Pole was not going to be the only thing blocking my view of the Sox and the Angels playing below.

Two rows in front of me was a relatively unnoticeable couple in their late twenties, save that they were dressed in matching red Champion warm ups and the boyfriend, hulking and goateed, looked remarkably like Red Sox catcher Jason Varitek. During Varitek's first at-bat, the girlfriend (sporting a Varitek jersey) sprang up onto her seat, cheering loudly and snapping photos on her disposable camera. This activity became a ritual each time Varitek strode to the plate, and garnered a chorus of complaints from those whose sightline was repeatedly blocked by the scrawny chick whose pictures were never going to come out anyway.

The girl initially responded to the pleas to sit down with a summary "SHAAAAAT AAAP," which, by revealing the extremely annoying tone of her voice, only fanned the flames. The remarks rose to a crass crescendo in the fourth inning, accompanied by the girl's raspy screech. Though she initially directed her "SHAT AP YOU FAGGOTS AND WATCH THE FRIGGIN' GAME" to everyone behind her-even locking eyes with me, quiet as a dormouse-the conflict was ultimately dominated by another couple, sitting one row behind the Variteks.

No longer able to stand the harassment of his sweetheart, Varitek II stood on his hind legs and reeled around to face the other couple. Before Varitek could make a move towards the man, the other girlfriend, wearing a powder-pink Red Sox hat, stood up in his path and aggressively placed her hands on her hips. The next thing I knew Varitek's girlfriend was diving past her boyfriend and over the empty seats, batting Pink in the face and gripping on to her long brown hair. Pink retaliated viciously, pulling out the other girl's facial piercings in the process of wrestling her to the ground.

With the help of some other men, the boyfriends managed to pull the girls out of their hair-pulling gridlock. Out of nowhere, a spry security guard leapt onto the chest of Varitek II, landing on all fours like Spiderman. Varitek's girl stood up dazed, her face bleeding where the eyebrow and lip rings had been. While Pink combed out severed clumps of hair and replaced her cap, the Variteks were escorted out of the stadium. As the game continued, all I could think about was how heinous their car ride home was going to be.

There're No Hippies In Baseball

When I told Ivette Ricco, president of FemmeFan Inc.-"the SportsZone for the Female Sports Junkie"-about the catfight I had witnessed, she was surprised that the women were both Red Sox fans. "That seems pretty unusual to me," Ricco said, "If they were Sox and Yankees fans, well that makes more sense!" With one girl wearing a Varitek jersey and the other a pink Red Sox hat, the angst that erupted into violence at Fenway apparently went deeper than team affiliations.

Ricco suggested beer guzzling as a potential cause. "My observations have been that women (in general) are not likely to get physical or combative unless there are men encouraging them and/or lots of alcohol flowing through their blood streams," Ricco told the Indy. Fueled by men and alcohol, women "buy into the 'trash talking' part of being a spectator."

While both Pink and Varitek II's girlfriend were at least four beers deep when the fight broke out, Ricco's alcohol diagnosis cannot explain another psycho female fan encounter that befell Yoni Goldberg B' 04 and Will Hubbard B' 05 at Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS at Yankee Stadium. With the Red Sox holding a commanding lead, many fans began to vacate the ballpark, and Goldberg and Hubbard, sitting in the bleachers, spotted two empty seats just behind the Red Sox bullpen. They asked two girls sitting directly behind the seats if anyone was sitting there.

"Almost on command, one of the girls, wearing a Yankees hat, screamed for police officers to get us away, insisting that we didn't have 'the right' to be sitting there" Goldberg told the Indy. When the boys sat down anyway, the situation took a turn for the worse.

"It was at this point that she launched into a 30-minute diatribe during which she attacked, among other things, our sexuality, financial means, hygiene, intellect, and physique," Goldberg recalled. "Then the girl really began losing her mind and started telling us that we could never satisfy her sexually and insisted that we had tiny dicks."

"On top of being fags and hippies, she informed us that we worked in convenience stores," Hubbard added.

Goldberg finally responded with a remark about New Jersey, and the girl snatched off Hubbard's hat, threw it into the bullpen, and ran out of the stadium. Several minutes later, and with only half an inning remaining, Goldberg and Hubbard were ordered to leave the stadium. The boys were incredulous, but the cop insisted.

"Don't make me repeat myself," he warned.

"Excuse me?" asked Goldberg.

"Don't make me repeat myself."

This disorderly conduct transpired in a section of Yankee Stadium where no alcohol is served. Goldberg and Hubbard were not intoxicated, and said that the girl did not appear to be drunk either. While the Fenway brawl cannot be attributed to team rivalry, and the Yankee Stadium incident was not caused by alcohol, gender remains a common factor in both situations. This unruly female behavior, if indicative of a larger trend, may prove particularly disruptive to the masculine dominion over sports spectatorship. And though we might call the more typical fighting between men at sporting events belligerent and blockheaded, are women blockheads if they are simultaneously challenging a traditionally male space and conventional understandings of femininity through their aggressive actions?

Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend

When I asked Ricco about her appearance on WBZ Radio in Boston last year discussing the female fan and taking calls from Boston-area women, she replied that the fans she spoke with "were very much in keeping with the fans that visit www.femmefan.com on a regular basis. Women who love their sports and are serious fans, but they are women first and fans second. That is to say that they watch with a different 'eye' and their emotions are usually better controlled than the men."

On femmefan.com, it becomes apparent that being "a woman first" means adhering to "what a girl wants"-with its full implications of mainstream materialism-and then demanding it from the institution of professional sports. Click on "Hear Me Roar" and you'll find four installments of "If Chicks Ran the NFL," a pending list of requests on behalf of female sports junkies. In addition to halftime Chippendale dancers and Charmin toilet paper, the femme fans demand blended margaritas to "help us swallow those shingles with Cheez-Whiz they call Nachos," and "wine, because beer makes us 'go' way too often, and puts on the pounds. The wine has to be the good stuff not Wyoming Valley vintage 2000 with twist-off caps." Femme fans also insist on "Team apparel that fits us and isn't made for men who are 6'2" and weigh in at 330 pounds."

After hearing about the Yankee incident and witnessing the Fenway catfight, I was initially surprised when I came across the following statement in an article on the bourgeois future of high fashion in the nominally progressive BlackBook Magazine: "So, basically, fashion is sports for women, an opiate of the leisure class." Though I'm sure everyone from a Wisconsin Cheesehead to Mary Kate Olsen would have something to say to the author of this absurd generalization, it dovetails with the femme fan's demand for the good stuff not Wyoming Valley vintage 2000 and tight shirts. It has often been said that sports is an opiate of the masses, and it is an opiate that is traditionally masculine. Because women have been customarily excluded from sports spectatorship, while staking a claim in this space, they might potentially disrupt its comfortable and pacifying nature. That is, if they don't glut themselves on girly drinks and found their identities as fans on hackneyed expressions of female desire.

As the Fenway pugilists and the Yankee aggressor demonstrate, things may get violent in the process. Rather than being "women first and fans second," these women's identities as female fans are dynamic: at Fenway, Varitek's girl stood up to enjoy the game her way, and then fought with another woman in place of their boyfriends, while the Yankees fan rid the stadium of two enemy fans with a definitive sexual insult. As serious sports fans, their aggressive actions show that they will not be sated with blended margaritas and tailored jerseys; as women, their demand-in contrast to the femme fan-is to create a space in the stadium that is neither passive nor stereotypical.

During the second Red Sox game I attended, however, the chance for a good fight was smothered by a characteristically female opiate: the chick flick. That night a climactic scene of Fever Pitch, starring Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, was being filmed at Fenway, and the fans were asked to stay after the ninth inning and cheer as Barrymore sprinted from the outfield and made out with Fallon behind first base. It was the loudest cheering I had heard all night. I perked up when I heard a piercing screech, but a girl had only lost her purse in the teeny bopper exodus to get Fallon's autograph. The opiate nature of sports takes fans' minds off pressing issues in the real world-like war, for instance-allowing them a cathartic release projected towards the pseudo-warriors wielding bats and stealing bases on the field. Likewise, the movie shoot distracted the eyes of female fans from the prize of fighting their way into a masculine arena.

Gillian Young B'05 can put some spin on the ball

Back to Top

the college hill independent

http://www.theindy.com