His name is Ed, and he’s your typical deranged, deprived Philly sports fan.
It’s probably a good thing Ed has other things to occupy his time, a steady job being one of them. Otherwise he would be calling sports talk shows regularly and letting the city’s pro franchises know what he thinks of them, not that they have ever asked his opinion.
As it is, Ed is consumed by Philadelphia sports, or maybe it’s the other way around, like a tiger eating its young. He could barely be restrained when his beloved Eagles even thought of drafting anyone other than Texas running back Ricky Williams last month. To Ed, Williams was The Answer for what is, on its best day, a questionable franchise. Here was a player with extraordinary power, speed and entertainment value.
Did the Eagles listen? No, they did not, taking Syracuse quarterback Donovan McNabb with the second overall pick. New Orleans then traded all of its draft picks for the right to take Williams.
“Donovan eventually will come in, get the (stuff) kicked out of him, throw three interceptions, and the angst will be unbelievable,” Ed says, his legs nervously pumping under his desk. “We wanted something to believe in next year. If Donovan is a success, we’re looking at it occurring in maybe two years.
“The fans are at the breaking point. I’m a fan. I’m at the breaking point.”
The telephone rings. Ed excuses himself. It’s the majority leader of the state Senate with questions about a tax bill.
Ed is Philadelphia’s mayor.
Play well, or else
Donovan McNabb can do very little wrong in Chicago, where he grew up and starred at Mt. Carmel, so imagine his feelings when on the biggest day of his young life, he received the civic equivalent of a wedgie from the people of his future home.
First lesson in smokestacked, blue-collar Philadelphia, Donovan: There are no feelings. Boo hoo? Boo anybody.
Ed Rendell, the mayor of the country’s fifth-largest city, had gone on all-sports radio station WIP before the NFL draft and suggested that fans call the Eagles and lobby for Williams. Angelo Cataldi, the fuse-lighting host of the WIP morning show, then went him one better and gave out the Eagles’ private telephone number on the air.
On draft day, WIP rented a couple of buses and filled them with the most borderline psychopathic Eagles fans it could find for the ride to NFL draft headquarters in New York. When two seats went unoccupied, a couple of homeless guys were recruited and put on the bus. (“You should have seen the amount of beer those guys drank,” Cataldi said. “They thought they had died and gone to heaven.”)
All to no avail. The Eagles took McNabb.
That one of the louder boos was coming from the mayor’s office says more about Philadelphia and its sports fans than it does about one excitable public servant.
The people here take sports seriously, perhaps more seriously than anywhere else in the country. And you’re seriously in trouble as a pro athlete if they get a whiff of poor play or, worse, poor effort.
“You have to not (stink) here to not get booed,” Phillies pitcher Curt Schilling said, shrugging.
Matthew Scott (stunk). Scott is the only person in the United States to have received a hand transplant. In recognition of his historic surgery, the Phillies asked him to throw the ceremonial first pitch at their home opener this year. His pitch bounced across the plate.
If he thought he was going to get another hand from the crowd, he was out of his mind.
“They booed the (stuff) out of him,” Cataldi said. “The guy’s looking around like, `Oh, good, I just got out of a hospital bed. I’ve still got the sutures here. I get booed because I didn’t throw a strike.’ “
Andy Reid (stunk) too. Reid recently was introduced to the crowd at a Flyers game, and he was booed loudly. It didn’t seem to matter that he had yet to coach an Eagles game, not with the McNabb pick still putting all its weight on the fans’ chests.
Santa Claus most definitely (stunk), on principle alone. In 1970, the Eagles were a pathetic football team, so pathetic they had a chance to get the top overall pick in the next year’s draft. Everyone agreed the best player available would be Stanford quarterback Jim Plunkett. All the 2-10-1 Eagles had to do was lose to 2-11 Boston in the last game of the season on a snowy day in Philly.
As part of the halftime entertainment, Santa Claus came out on a slow-moving sleigh to circle the field. Very, very bad decision, what with the Eagles holding a big lead and Plunkett fading from sight. Fans began pelting Santa with snowballs, and rather than remove him from the middle of a mobile driving range, Eagles officials let him ride three-quarters of the way around the field before rescuing him. Santa was so dazed he didn’t know who had been naughty. Probably everybody.
Tough town, Philadelphia.
Scott Williams found that out quickly. The 76ers gave the former Bull a seven-year, $21 million contract in 1994 based almost exclusively, as far as anyone can tell, on his having played with Michael Jordan. Fans booed him unmercifully before he was sent to Milwaukee this year, his ego the size of a protozoan.
Former 76er Shawn Bradley got it for being 7 feet 6 inches and as useful as tonsils. Former Eagle Ricky Watters got it for being more worried about protecting his ribs than catching passes. Del Ennis got it so much for hitting into double plays as a Phillie in the 1940s and ’50s that his obituary a few years ago mentioned it.
New Phillie Ron Gant is getting it for hitting Calista Flockhart’s weight.
“I’m just getting used to it,” Gant said of a sound he hadn’t heard in his three previous big-league stops. “From what I understand, if you play hard and do well, they love you. And if you struggle, they’ll let you know that too. They know their baseball here. They want you to do well, I know that.”
Former Eagles quarterback Randall Cunningham heard the boos for being too cool, but somehow he is back in good graces in Philadelphia after playing well for Minnesota. Von Hayes was such a bust for the Phillies that fans chanted “5 for 1” at him whenever he got to the plate, symbolic of the five players the Phillies gave up to acquire him from Cleveland.
“The one thing Philadelphia fans are looking for is the blue-collar guy,” said former 76er Steve Mix, now a broadcaster for the team. “I think anybody who steps out on the basketball court or the football field or the baseball diamond or the ice, all the people really want is a guy or a team that is willing to go out and give it their all night in and night out, no more, no less.
“If you’re willing to do that, then they’ll applaud you until the cows come home. If not, they’ll be quick to boo. And there’s been a lot of boos. And there’s been a lot of standing ovations as well.”
There have been this year, with the 76ers making the playoffs for the first time in eight years. The boos have been reserved for the Phillies and, at dangerous decibel levels, the Eagles.
Long-restless natives
When did this start? When did the first contagious boos form in the throats of Philly fans and pour out like acid rain? When did this become part of Philadelphia’s culture?
Nobody really knows.
“It goes back as far as I can remember, and I’ve been around a long time,” said 76ers statistician Harvey Pollack, 77. “It’s just the makeup of the Philadelphia sports fan. When a team does something wrong or a player does something wrong, the fans get on them.
“When I was a kid going to Shibe Park in the 1930s, the Philadelphia A’s would play the Yankees. If Ruth or Gehrig hit home runs, the fans were booing the pitcher. They’d boo at the drop of a hat. In the same game, they’d boo the team at the beginning of the game, and if the team made a big rally, they’d cheer at the end of the game as if they had never booed.”
If we could somehow put the entire psyche of Philadelphia on a couch and analyze it, we might find some repressed memories and an answer to a city’s low self-esteem. In 1800, the nation’s capital was moved from Philadelphia to Washington. Philadelphia also was the country’s center of commerce, but that changed in 1836 when the Bank of the United States was abolished. There was rioting in the streets. New York eventually bypassed Philadelphia as the nation’s financial capital.
Talk about a losing streak. You’d boo too.
“You take that sort of foundation for paranoia and you heap on it that they haven’t won a football championship since 1960,” said Sal Paolantonio, an ESPN reporter and former Philadelphia newsman who wrote a book about former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo. “They went 70 years without a baseball championship. The Sixers had the worst record in the history of the NBA for many, many years. They haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1974. It adds up.
“It’s a very secular place. People don’t leave here. It’s very comfortable, but it takes a long time for the light of day to get here. It’s really like a small town.”
Which brings us to Tony Vetri, 37, who works as an usher for Phillies games at Veterans Stadium. He lives near the stadium in South Philadelphia. He knows what his hard-working neighbors want from their highly paid athletes.
“It’s all in attitude, in how they work out before the game, or maybe when they come up to the plate they don’t swing hard,” he said. “Or say they’ll hit a single and you know it could have been turned into a double. He stops at first and stands there, and you’re like, `Rrrrrrrrun!’ (Third baseman) Scott Rolen showed a lot of people you can turn a single into a double.”
There’s a certain unofficial gauge Philadelphia uses to measure its athletes. We’ll call it the hustle meter, and McNabb would do well to pay attention. Pete Rose is a hero here because of his headfirst, hurt-later effort. Hall-of-Famer Mike Schmidt gets low scores for a perceived lack of passion.
“The fans rode Mike a lot,” Vetri said. “He struck out a lot. Mike always had that lackadaisical attitude about him. But he was all right.”
All right? The man hit 548 home runs. He was a three-time MVP and a 10-time Gold Glove winner.
“I’m telling you, these fans are tough,” Vetri said. “They want to win. They want to win now.”
Really, what they want most is to rewrite 1964, when the Phillies crumbled in what might be the greatest collapse in baseball history. They had a six-game lead with 10 games left that season. They lost eight of their last 10, and St. Louis won the pennant. In Chicago terms, it’s the ’69 Cubs, the only difference being that nobody likes lovable losers in Philadelphia.
“Everyone in town, from the cleaning ladies in our dorms to the people who served us food, died a slow death with the Phillies that year,” said Mayor Rendell, who was a junior at Penn that year. “It was an incredible communal experience. I really have never seen anything like that.”
Past embarrassment
After the NFL draft last month, Philadelphia’s Chamber of Commerce sponsored a breakfast to welcome McNabb. Rendell was there with open arms. Some people had been embarrassed by the snarling face the city initially showed McNabb. But as Cataldi points out, “I don’t think this city can be embarrassed anymore.”
Rendell insists that Eagles fans will accept McNabb. Philadelphia wasn’t booing McNabb, he said, but simply booing the organization’s history of bad drafts. Still, Philly fans are going to follow Williams’ every move, and if he does well, God help Donovan McNabb.
And if McNabb succeeds, he’ll be a god, lowercase, though a Super Bowl title would be a capital idea.
“The fans may be harder when you’re bad, but they’re as good or better than any other fans when you’re good,” Schilling said. “If you don’t play well, you’re going to get booed, more so here than other places–but not unfairly, I don’t think.
“There’s a satisfaction when you walk off the field here and get cheered. These fans are not going to give you the obligatory hand clap. They’re knowledgeable. They’re smart. They’re passionate. They’re sick of us not being good. Can’t blame them.”
There’s a passion here, win or lose. A few years ago, former Eagles owner Norman Braman had a luxury box next to the mayor’s box. Sometimes when the Eagles would stumble, a frustrated Rendell would pound on the glass partition between the two boxes.
“He’d scream, `Norman, do something!’ ” Cataldi said.
Eventually, Braman did. He had his wife install blinds over the glass.
