Lynn G.
Posts: 33034
Joined: 7/15/2007
Status: offline
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Here's my deal. It's going to sound completely naive', but up until about six years ago, I was almost completely unaware of the whole NOTION of angry rivalries between fans of competing teams. I grew up in a house with a dad who was a rabid Viking fan, but who just never apparently got into the rivalry stuff. I never heard negative crap about other teams (except just in the context of wanting to beat them on any given day) and never, ever heard a slam about other team's fans. In my mind, Wisconsin was the neighboring state and the Packers were the neighboring team, and if the Vikings were ever out of it or playing badly, I had no trouble rooting for the Packers as a second favorite team. That was why, when I got the invitation from a Packer fan, I happily signed up on a Packer board and started participating in friendly conversations. There were a couple right away that were pretty cold, but I didn't think much of it and I spent the first year or so cultivating honest-to-goodness friendships. I even became the organizer of a number of offline gatherings because we were all having fun and posting online, and it just seemed to make sense to get together in person the way I had already been doing for years with my Strib friends. One of those offline gatherings is where I met my future husband - so I have no regrets about the experience over there, but what I found was that little by little, one by one, the people on that board were starting to turn. When I look back, it gained momentum when the Packers were doing badly (i.e. the 4-12 season a couple of years ago), but I tried really hard not to fan any flames. For example, when the Vikings beat the Packers, I literally would not post for several days or a week because I was cognizant of the sensitivities of the fans. In a nutshell, things got really, really ugly over there and even my friends (several of whom had attended our wedding) turned on me. For quite a while I had been reading and essentially ignoring all of the "Viking fans are fairweather fans" kind of comments and all of the slams on my team, my coaches, my stadium, my fellow fans... And I started giving it back. I would say for the first two years on that board I maintained a "high road" attitude and pretty much just ignored the insults, but at some point I started returning volleys - and once that happened it was over. People who had thought I was a person who they could walk all over found out that I had a limit. And you can only take so many chants of "we're better fans than Viking fans" before you stand up and start blackening eyes. The end result is that I went from being a very naive' fan and from thinking we're all the same inside - to thinking that Packer fans were the most insecure, mean-spirited, arrogant and full of BS fans on the planet. How's that for a swing? I stopped participating in that board well over a year ago, but the hangover exists. I obviously know many exceptions to the stereotype I had developed, but I find myself looking for those traits because I'm still so ticked at everything that happened. For the record, my husband stopped participating in that board before I did because of the spiteful, anger-filled kind of posts. And also for the record, when we parked blocks from Lambeau field with our Minnesota-plated car - he put a Packer hat in the rear window to let it be known that it was a Packer car - because he "didn't feel too confident that his brethren would leave the car alone." Anyway - maybe I need to go to therapy to undo the damage from that board. :D I DID say to the Packer fans around me on Sunday that I didn't assume that "the jerk" was representative of all Packer fans. They said he was an asshole too.
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