To These Fans, Hart-Canyon Is a Tea Party

Eight thousand people poured into the College of the Canyons football stadium Friday night to watch the burly Hart High Indians battle the fearsome Canyon High Cowboys.

The rabid Hart rooters were dressed in blood red. The Canyon backers came slinking in wearing menacing-looking cowboy hats pulled low to their eyes. Dozens of beefy sheriff’s deputies lurked about, waiting for that moment when they would have to pull the crazed, brawling, maniacal fans off each other’s jugular veins.

Forget it. Call off the dogs. Put away the mace. Let the hospital emergency room staff go home early. The only fights to break out between these fans would have been if two women had met while wearing the same designer skirt-and-blouse ensemble. This wasn’t a football crowd. This was the world’s largest bridge club.

The Los Angeles Raiders, now they have fans. Hundreds of people each Sunday trying to rip each other’s lips off in the Coliseum. And those people are all fans of the same team. But this gathering, well, it was just plain embarrassing to any real football fan.

As the Hart team trotted onto the field shortly before kickoff, a few boos drifted lazily from the Canyon side of the field. Not real boos. More like the boos you hear at an America’s Cup trial when a skipper shows up wearing shoes that don’t match his slacks. But even this booing was too much for a Canyon cheerleader, who scolded the Cowboy fans: “Now let’s not boo. Let’s just cheer for Canyon.”

How nice.

Some of these people must be real fans. Yo, buddy! You with the cowboy hat and all the green clothes. How about them Hart dogs, huh? Really like to whomp up on ‘em, wouldn’t you?

“Oh no, they’re nice folks over there,” said Larry Dobbins, an off-duty sheriff’s deputy whose children attend Canyon High. “I just can’t say anything bad about those Hart folks. They’re all nice people.”

Nice people? C’mon, Larry. This is a football game, not a tryout for Welcome Wagon hostesses. Football fans are supposed to enter the stadium wearing boxing gloves and protective cups.

How about you, you with the Canyon jacket? When you plan to start slapping them Hart fans around, huh? Maybe at halftime near the hot dog stand? Stomp them until they whimper, huh?

“The wonderful thing about this game is that there’s no animosity at all,” said John Shafer of Canyon Country.

All the real fans, the mangy monsters who beat their kids’ dogs just to watch them limp, must be over on the Hart side.

Excuse me, you with the screaming red Hart jacket, shirt and hat, how about them swamp-sucking rodents across the field there, huh? About time you and your friends stormed over and knocked some heads together, right?

“These games are so much fun because we’re all neighbors and all friends,” said Jerry Bathke.

Friends ? You want to hang around with your friends, rent a mountain cabin and shoot some deer. That’s what you do with friends. This is a football game. You’re supposed to be here to maim people!

Over and over they repeated their stories, these “fans.” Something about sportsmanship, about high school football being just a game, about Newhall and Canyon Country being so close and so intertwined and just, well, just being such nice places to live. Everything was just so nice .