Philly Fans Behaving Badly
Eagles fans throw beer cans - Vikings fans donate money to fight cancer
PHILADELPHIA (AP) —The Minnesota Vikings fans who walked through hostile enemy territory at the NFC championship game had to expect the boos, the obscene gestures, and the shouts to go home; But some behavior surpasses the limit of “unsportsmanlike.”
Eagles fans opened coolers and chucked unopened beer cans at Vikings fans. Social media users captured snapshots of fans dodging and weaving cans, crushed red solo cups and all kinds of trash launched toward anyone in purple and gold. Many more Vikings fans reported on Twitter of witnessing random acts of violence.
Philadelphia police say a man is accused of punching a police horse and a mounted officer during an arrest before the Sunday game. Police say a mounted state police corporal was trying to disperse a crowd in a stadium parking lot at about when a man struck the horse twice in the shoulder, then hit the corporal in the face. 19-year-old Andrew Tornetta is being charged with aggravated and simple assault, reckless endangering and related offenses.
Jana Hokinson of Manson, Iowa, was one Vikings fan who traveled to Philadelphia for the game. She told Minneapolis’ WCCO-AM radio that she walked into the stadium with a group of other Vikings fans. Suddenly, two men in the front of the group were hit in the head with something and bleeding.
“One guy had a cracked forehead and the back of his right ear was just bleeding. The other guy, it was his left ear,” she said.
She said that security told their group there was nothing they could do.
Once she got to her seat, the fans around her were giving her group some good-natured grief at first, but after the Vikings scored, one of her sisters got spit on by Eagles fans, and another sister had food thrown at her.
She said she left after the third quarter and “security escorted us out because I got beer cans thrown at me.”
“It was crazy,” she told the radio station.
When the Eagles fans come to Minnesota: “I just hope our fans stay classy. Because that’s a whole other level of crazy down there. And I know the fans up in Minnesota, they’re not going to stoop that low. I hope they don’t.”
Perhaps Minnesotans will continue practicing good sportsmanship as they did after defeating the Saints. You may recall the Vikings fans donated over $100,000 to New Orleans Saints punter Thomas Morstead’s charity, What You Give Will Grow, an organization that focuses on pediatric cancer.
Patriots V. Eagles is more than a 2005 Super Bowl rematch. It sticks two of the more maligned — and misunderstood — fan bases in the NFL within striking distance of each other at US Bank Stadium.
