Seattle fans questioned

Top 2 reasons why the Seattle Seahawks are not like the Oakland Raiders:

1) We win games.
2) Our fans aren't thugs.

Unfortunately, some Seattle fans have evidently been behaving boorishly toward visiting fans who wear opposing jerseys, including at last week's contest against the 49ers. Allegations include verbal abuse, foul language, and even a gutless beatdown of a San Fran fan. (See yesterday's Seattle Times article, "Are too many Seahawk fans becoming alcohol-fueled bullies?")

The online discussion of the article on the newspaper's website brims with much of the same illogic common to all online discussions.

Engaging in outrageous behavior doesn't make you a hardcore fan. It just makes you a public menace and embarrassment.

Sportsmanship and fervor are in fact entirely unrelated phenomena.

Poor sportsmanship is not evidence of greater passion for your team. It is just evidence of bad character.

Similarly, good sportsmanship reflects good character, without detracting from the depth of your fervor for your team.

It is possible to be a massively hardcore fan while remaining unfailingly decent, and that is the Seattle way.

Diehards might enjoy a slight buzz, but they won't want to get wasted in the stands, because inebriation interferes with one's enjoyment of the game's full dimensions, and because public drunkenness is criminal, obnoxious, and poor form.

Diehards understand that football is a family sport, so our language and behavior as fans must remain appropriate for children to see and hear.




It doesn't matter that fans in some other cities behave as bad, or worse.

Seattle needs to hold itself to a higher standard.

Our goal isn't to be slightly more civilized than the savages in Oakland or Philadelphia.

Seahawk diehards have higher aspirations. Namely:

1) To set the standard for sportsmanship in this country and the world.

2) To buy up so many seats that there are vanishingly few tickets left over for the fans of our opponents to procure.

The most misguided notion expressed by some readers was that cursing at and physically intimidating our opponents' fans in the stands somehow constitutes an essential element of the 12th Man mystique.

False. The 12th Man is effective because Seattle's fans are the most intelligent in the league. We achieve astonishing volume because we yell only when it makes sense to do so. We don't waste our lungs and our throats yelling when our team is on offense, or during stoppages in play. We carefully conserve our voices, waiting until we're on defense to blast our opponents on the field with a withering sonic inferno.

Some good sense emerged in the online discussion, however.

At least one writer attributed the recent decline of decorum at Seahawks Stadium to the change of team leadership from Mike Holmgren to Pete Carroll. I don't disagree.

Others perceptively opined that the boors are bandwagon latecomers, not longtime fans.

In any case, Seahawk diehards need to exert positive peer pressure to restore civility to Seattle's arena.

Bullies are cowards who depend upon crowd support or acquiescence. Nothing deflates a bully faster than when the crowd ostracizes him for his objectionable behavior.