Right off the top, I can’t give you eyewitness accounts of Columbus-TFC.
I was sitting in a living room in Scarborough during the second half, singing songs and telling stories at the three-year-old boy’s birthday party. There were no smoke bombs or taser-crazy cops, although one colourful plastic shaker did go flying across the room before mom patiently explained that isn’t how things ought to be done in a crowd.
[PRBREAK][/PRBREAK]
I’ve been listening to CBC Metro Morning and FAN590 this morning, and reading various media accounts of the post-game intimidation exercise the Columbus cops decided to uncork on the travelling TFC fans. I was there in person a year ago, when a milder version of the same game was acted out.
Some thoughts, if I may, aimed at the non-extremists on both sides of the debate. (Bob McCown and Barbarez can take the rest of this column off – although Mike Toth might want to stick around.)
Someone in the TFC support grabbed a broken piece of metal railing and hurled it over the side of Crew Stadium’s south stand. That’s quite a drop, folks. Not good. Pictures of this person apparently exist, and I hope they will be quietly passed on to the heads of the supporters’ groups.
I don’t want to enter the debate about whether the railing thrower also broke the railing, or if the chunk of metal in question was already loose. I want to talk to everyone who actually saw this happen.
All of us who board buses and travel with TFC want to chant, sing and have some beers. A bit of posturing and rude behavior? Delightful.
What no one seems to want to acknowledge, though, is that there’s a straight-line link between a fan throwing a railing and many others lobbing smoke bombs in the stands, and frightened, over-reacting cops tasering passers-by in the parking lot.
Furthermore, the missile-lobbers don’t care. They conveniently join the chorus of outrage over the policing, without thinking for a second they might have done anything at all to call down the fury.
>>>That doesn’t justify the cops. It just makes it easier for them.<<<
There is a code, of course. You don’t rat out your fellow fans. There’s a code in hockey, too, and I still think Todd Bertuzzi is a criminal who ought to be in prison for what he did to Steve Moore.
I’m assuming there’s a comfortable majority of TFC fans who don’t want missile throwing. I wish more of them were more inclined to tip off security. It’s one thing to say – quite correctly – that it’s a tiny minority that serves up all the repulsive garbage. But silence, ultimately, is approval, and you can’t expect people NOT to react to those videos.
A couple of days go by, and here comes the media reaction. Stern, serious-sounding CBC hosts grilling Ryan Keay, one of the nicest soccer supporters I’ve ever met. They don’t know any of the fans, and all they’ve seen are the YouTube videos. Their scorn-tinged questions put Ryan in the impossible position of trying to explain what happened, and defend the vast majority of fans, simultaneously, live on the air. He tries, but it’s impossible.
The interview made all TFC fans – everywhere – sound like denial-blinded lunatics. The point was made, but the deeper truth went unserved.
So now I’m going to call out two of my fellow journalists – people I know, like, and have talked soccer with on many occasions.
- Mike Toth, FAN590: You have a tendency, old soul, to take one point from over here, and another from way over there, and assume that’s the whole story. Further, you sometimes slide into treating anyone who tries to fill in the gaps as if they’re idiots. They’re not. I’ll happily tell you the rest of this story any time you’d like – and the beer’s on me.
- Gareth Wheeler, Toronto Sun: I share your outrage over bombs and violence, amigo. But if you take that hard a line against the entire group, all it does is harden the group. You know too much about these people not to take a more measured, considered approach. Let’s talk about it on The Grill Room some night.
Denial – alas – is a big part of all of this. My personal aversion to smoke dates back to the crushing remembered suffocating pain of an asthmatic childhood. But there’s a deeper point that’s going missing in this entire post-match debacle debate.
It’s not about the smoke. It’s about the flares that inevitably follow once a group of fans decide smoke is okay. Those are dangerous beyond words. That torrent of smoke in the south end on Saturday will – soon – produce flares. Escalation is a normal, predictable part of mob behavior, and everyone who’s quiet about it now will have been a consenting, contributing factor when something horrible finally happens.
Folks, I get it. I’m part of it. I love it. If the hard-liners think I’m a wanker, I’ll take that as a compliment, thanks.
Can we all just do a slightly better job of protecting the fun? It would make it a whole lot easier for the media – and the Columbus cops – to single out the dangerous idiots from the vast majority of benign, happy ones.
Onward!