Where Sports Fans Get Their Tickets

Cowboy Fan Hubby took a circuitous route to earn his degree at the University of Texas, so we had tickets in the student section for football games for a lot of years, and I had plenty of opportunity to observe the behavior of the native fan base there. Countless games I attended over the years went something like this: the stands would have a healthy portion of empty seats until about mid-way through the first quarter when the over dressed co-eds and their dates would meander in from their pre-game parties. Once seated, one of the guys would pull a flask out of his boot and they would begin criticizing the play calling on the field. Very often, the conversation would begin something like this, “I would never have…” or “When I played…” I would passively listen as the males in the group essentially let it be known that they had been football players in high school and therefore had a command of the game. As the contents of the flask went down, the bravado would go up until the group generally got either bored or just overly anxious to get the post-game party started and would trickle back out about mid-way through the fourth quarter. A working-girl-outsider, I was probably a little overly cynical, but I always wondered why, if those ex-jocks were so talented, they weren’t down on the field instead of up in the stands criticizing the actual players and coaches. That was probably a bit harsh on my part because I wasn’t sensitive to the underlying sensitivities, but I don’t doubt I read into it correctly that these were young men trying to impress young women with tales of their glory days which manifested into how much smarter they are about the game as opposed to the high paid coach on the sideline. And we all know the saying it’s not hubris if you can back it up? Well, what I over heard over and over in the stands in Austin was hubris, no matter what drove it.