Bloody Sundays : Experts Try to Find Reasons for Increasing Fan Violence Around World

Shane Geringer went to a Raiders game last month, took off his shirt, got some sun, had a few beers and then, police said, kicked another fan into a coma.

Almost routine, claim behaviorists who have studied the incident. Apart from the degree of injury, they said, bleacher blows are thrown just about everywhere every Sunday. And in terms of drive-by shootings and terrorist bombings, they added, football punch-ups barely quiver the needle on today’s gauges of calculated human violence.

In fact, say psychologists, sociologists and lawyers, the incident at the Coliseum fills the paradigm for a now all too common disorder: fan violence.

Consider its parameters:

* Geringer, who will be arraigned on felony assault and battery charges today in Los Angeles Municipal Court, was described by his Los Angeles lawyer as “a fanatic Raider fan.” Attorney Leslie Abramson also said her client has had a drinking problem since age 13.

“That’s a bad mix, a dangerous mix . . . the lowering of inhibitions with alcohol and the lifting of excitement by being a rabid sports fan,” noted Richard Lister, a Costa Mesa sports psychologist.

* Geringer was in a crowd of 50,000.

“It is known that in mob scenes, people do all sorts of things that they wouldn’t do alone,” said David Phillips, a professor of social science at UC San Diego.

* Geringer’s attack on Paul Albrecht, a Pittsburgh supporter now recovering from head injuries, occurred in the fourth quarter of the Steeler’s 20-3 loss to the Raiders.

“These fights just don’t happen,” commented Ira Reiner, Los Angeles district attorney and follower of professional football since 1946 and the Rams’ first game in Los Angeles. “They are invariably the culmination of three quarters of increasingly rowdy behavior . . . that is tolerated (and) that finally ends up in a fight sometime around the fourth quarter.”

* Geringer is 19. He recently left high school and lives on his own.

“The typical fan rioter is around 20,” said Jerry M. Lewis, professor of sociology at Kent State, Ohio, a global expert and author on crowd behavior and sports violence. “Then there is what I call the Alienation Hypothesis as the young white male becomes estranged from his institutional ties. Family. School. Work. Church. Where he (then) identifies is with his peer group . . . and that is what accounts for gang warfare.

“But why sports? Well, sports becomes a medium to express an identification with a team, and to your fellows. Very seldom do sports rioters act without an audience. And so the audience provides them with a sense of meaning to reduce the alienation.”

The facts of this international matter of sports violence have written some violent box scores.

Brussels, 1985: Thirty-nine dead, 520 injured during a European Cup soccer riot. Detroit, 1984: One dead, 80 injured celebrating the Detroit Tigers’ victory in the World Series. Detroit, 1990: Eight killed, 127 injured after the Pistons win the NBA championship.

In the past, only programs and suggestions were thrown at umpires, players and rival fans. In the present, from Beijing to Tiger Stadium, from Seoul to the Montreal Forum, acid, bricks, seats, urine, rocks, pipe bombs, firecrackers and feces are being tossed.

And in Los Angeles last week, fears of crowd violence rose high enough for Coliseum and Raider management to impose a one-day ban on beer sales Sunday--with clear hints that fighting fans are on probation, and permanent restrictions on beer sales are a definite consideration.

There is a consensus among sociologists--including the late Irving Goldaber of Miami, founder of the Center for Study of Crowd and Spectator Behavior--that sports violence is increasing.

“I have found the line to explosiveness is being crossed more and more,” wrote consultant Goldaber in a report authored shortly before his death in 1988.

Kent State’s Lewis--although emphasizing that even soccer hooliganism is an isolated ill and its social severity small compared to street crimes--believes the nation’s next Kent State-type confrontation “will be at a sports event.

“We haven’t reached the point yet . . . but it may be coming.”

When or if it comes, it is unlikely to add anything new to centuries of deep research into sports thuggery--but make that more than a millenium of study.

For it was at chariot races in AD 532, that fans joined furies and forces in what may well have been the first crowd protest over bad officiating. They demanded the resignation of several start-finish judges. Riots roiled for several days before fans of the Ben Hur Division asked their emperor to intervene. Or they would overthrow him.

The emperor did respond. Troops were called to disperse the mob. And 30,000 sports fans died.

In the ensuing 1,400 years, countless theorem and theses, learned papers and half-baked hypotheses have attempted to analyze the causes that degrade friendly rivalry into fatal confrontation.

* Last year, sociologists Moshe Semyonov and Mira Farbstein of Tel Aviv University wrote that sports violence is indeed characteristic of social systems. “Teams representing communities of subordinate ethnic minorities are more violent than others . . . and teams characterized by violent players are more likely to have violent spectators,” they said.

* In similar vein, a team of British researchers at the University of Leicester said its studies suggested sports violence exemplifies “the lower social class where violence has become a legitimate expression of masculine aggression among youthful peers. Participants are usually from the lower working class and aged 17-21.”

* In a 1981 paper, Prof. Jay J. Coakley of the University of Colorado blamed commercialization of professional sports and promotion of “heroic values . . . including violence to generate spectator interest” for fights among players and fans.

“For many sports teams, especially heavy contact teams controlled by repressive behavior codes, violence becomes a means for players to maintain their identities and self-esteem,” Coakley concluded. “Player violence provides a model of aggressive behavior for fans and sometimes serves as a catalyst for spectator violence.”

* Researchers at the University of Massachusetts showed films of selected football plays to an equal number of male and female students and found: “The enjoyment of plays increased with the degree of their apparent roughness/violence for male viewers only.”

* Sociologist Phillips of UC San Diego collated crime statistics after 1973-78 heavyweight boxing matches. After each bout, he discovered, homicides increased by 12.4% suggesting that “prizefights stimulate fatal, aggressive behavior in some Americans.”

* Michael Smith, a Canadian sociologist at York University, Ontario, examined a decade of hockey violence and found crowd violence “was precipitated by player violence in 74% of the cases.”

Soccer hooligans, says a European scientist, are really exercising ancient instincts for tribal warfare--and that whenever England plays West Germany, crowd conflicts are a psychological replay of World War II.

Football thugs, says a behaviorist on this side of the Atlantic, are often roused by the media and advance publicity that elevates a simple sporting contest into a spectacle of inter-city passions.

But at a tennis match, only peace breaks out.

“It is a critical-mass problem,” Lewis explained. “You have to have a critical mass of support before you generate this small universe of demonstrators.”

Nor has there ever been a golf riot. Because, Lister noted, it is a gentle sport that attracts gentle followers.

Baseball and basketball games, acknowledge the experts, are not without fan fights. But numbers and severity are reduced because baseball and basketball are not considered contact sports.

Further, said Mike Williams, spokesman for the Los Angeles Dodgers, “the Dodger experience is calculated to be entertainment for the family.”

Tailgate parties, he continued, are not allowed at Dodger Stadium. There are restrictions on beer sales and 6,000 stadium seats are set aside as a no-drinking area.

Then there is one sport where spectator violence is on a gentle par with punch-ups at a chess match: Professional wrestling.

“Wrestling is stylistic aggression,” Lewis explained. “It’s a parody, it is ritualized, and therefore the fans are ritualized. They may yell terrible things at the wrestlers. But they know it is all orchestrated.”

But at Raider games, said attorney Abramson, player contact is genuine, hard and the team image seems to be “deliberately set on a violent and hate-filled level.

“You know, the pirate image is not promoted the way Peter Pan’s pirate image . . . is promoted,” she said, “but as a really bruise ‘em, kill ‘em, crunch ‘em thing.”

Shane Geringer, she said, may have thrown a punch.

“But I really hold the management of the team responsible,” Abramson continued. “I think they encourage poor sportsmanship, hatred instead of good sportsmanlike rivalry. And here comes a 19-year-old kid (Geringer) who is being blamed for what these business-promoting grown-ups have been pushing on the fans.”

Al LoCasale, executive assistant with the Raiders, denies the accusation.

“You mean that the lions promote eating the Christians?” he asked. “A former head coach of Michigan State used to say: ‘In the good old days, dancing was a contact sport. Football is a collision sport.’ But I don’t think that has very much to do with it (fan violence).”

LoCasale believes that aggression and hostility among football spectators is a simple reflection of aggression and hostility in today’s society.

He is not convinced that inner-city and blue-collar environments are farm clubs for sports thugs.

“The biggest fight I ever saw at a football game, ever, was the Penn-Princeton game in 1947, where the city of Philadelphia had to bring out their mounted police,” he said. “You are talking about two of the (nation’s) greatest academic institutions . . . the breeding ground of gentlemen, of Presidents. And in a stadium where they did not sell alcoholic beverages.”

Excessive drinking, said LoCasale, is indeed one factor in fan violence--but it’s the drinking at tailgate parties before the game and outside the Coliseum.

“It would not surprise me if there was not more alcohol consumed before people get into the stadium than while they are at the stadium,” he said.

Yet LoCasale has little time for psychologists who analyze his sport “to make a buck by having an opinion that is uninformed.

“We have people who attend one game every 12 years and then tell you exactly what is wrong with the sport,” he said. “They wouldn’t know, in many cases, whether we put air in the football or whether we stuff it with feathers.”

Dist. Atty. Reiner believes that major violence occurs at football games because minor rowdyism is tolerated.

“I take my (12-year-old) son to these games . . . and there some bum stands up and he shouts as loud as he can down to the field: ‘ . . . you.’

“Well, you know what happens to him? Not a . . . thing. He keeps on drinking beer . . . that vulgar behavior goes on continually and near the fourth quarter he gets mad at somebody and the two of them get into a fight.”

Resolution of the problem, continued Reiner, rests with overlapping considerations: Game attendance and profits.

Hostile behavior is not tolerated at baseball games, he said, because “people would stop bringing their kids . . . and if people stopped bringing their families, attendance would drop decidedly.

“But at pro football games, it is not a family crowd. If people stopped bringing their families it would not have a consequential impact on their (Raider) attendance. Therefore, they are not motivated nor interested in seeing that this behavior does not go on.”

LoCosale denies Reiner’s point. He said his organization is dedicated to giving patrons a “Sunday at a Raider game as something that puts them in the comfort zone, something that is an exciting and enjoyable experience.”

Beer sales and policing of crowds, he said, are regular concerns of Raider management--but so are “better parking, a stadium with better sight lines, better restrooms. . . . “

LoCasale also suggested a new view of the Geringer incident.

“We have had one serious injury with 5.2 million people in the stadium in 84 home dates,” he said. “I have had someone . . . say to me that this (Geringer) is a major incident just because the photographers and the TV people were there.

“Otherwise, it is not a national cause celebre .”

The underpinnings of negative crowd behavior, Phillips asserts, are multilayered. Alcohol. Youth. Individual aggression levels. Urban environment. Even open terraces that invite overcrowding. And influences of the media.

“There is a classic . . . theory by (European sociologist) Georg Simmel . . . that very frequently, conflict was a way to solidify group solidarity and sharpen the boundaries between two groups,” Phillips said.

So in their “very effective” efforts to reinforce team and city identities, he explained, sports writers and broadcasters will “simulate conflict between those two cities and those two teams.”

Solidarity, Phillips added, becomes a byproduct of that conflict. So does aggression.

It is also patently bad box office, he said, to promote a football, basketball, baseball, hockey or boxing match as anything but intense competition between individuals or cities.

“It (the game) is not sold as a business,” Phillips said. “You don’t have people say: ‘Let’s go see Pepsi-Cola fight Coca-Cola.’ You think of it as us against them and, unfortunately, a very standard part of us against them is conflict between us and them.”

All of which has led Phillips to construct a model football fan. She would be a young, middle-class teetotaler who doesn’t read newspapers.

“Unfortunately,” Phillips mused, “such a person might not be interested in a football game anyway.”

Lewis--a dedicated researcher who believes in studying soccer hooliganism among crowds at European matches--sees a distinction between riots.

One is punishment. The other celebratory.

He said that in Brussels, during the fatal riots of 1985, English fans “punished the Italian fans, ahead of time, before the game, and said: ‘We are going to out-support you and, ergo, help our team.’

“With the celebration riot, it doesn’t help them (supporters) win because they have already won. But it gives them a sense of identity and the sport becomes the medium for getting this identity.

“And if, all of a sudden, tiddlywinks was our national sport, we would have tiddlywink hooligans.”

In 1994, the quadrennial World Cup soccer championship will be played in 12 American cities. The Coliseum, the Rose Bowl and Stanford University, Palo Alto, are among possible West Coast sites.

To reduce the importation of soccer hooliganism, said Keith Walker of the Colorado-based U.S. Soccer Federation, “banning alcohol (at matches) is a consideration” and “extensive (security) discussions” have already begun at federal levels of law enforcement.

Lewis said he has been consulted by representatives of cities interested in World Cup competition.

He has suggested concentrating matches in the Midwest and on the West Coast “and that would be a great deterrent to hooligans to travel that far.”

Yet some will travel that far and Lewis thinks there will be problems. But not with fans. “The problem is going to come with American police who are underprepared to handle big-time European soccer and European soccer fans,” he said. “In fact, I think the soccer fans will make common cause.”

His current advice to law enforcers is to keep guns to a minimum. Local police should also “learn the culture of the soccer fans.

“Even though they are marching through the center of town singing ‘Here we go, here we go,’ they are not starting a riot. They are just celebrating.”

Lewis said he has visited London’s Wembley Stadium and has been elated and stirred by the surging roar of a First Division soccer crowd. But the sound was of massive energy, he said, not mass anger.

Therein his final advice to World Cup security forces: “Get thee to Wembley.”

LoCasale of the Raiders said he would like to see a softening of some television promotions of professional football. Such as recent messages for the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers game.

“The network hyping the game was talking about this intense rivalry you will see on ‘Sunday, Bloody Sunday,’ ” he said. “I think that is an improper way to hype.”

Attorney Abramson suggests Coliseum vendors pay greater attention “to the ID of the people they are selling beer to.

“Had it been done in this case, Shane (Geringer) wouldn’t have been drinking beer at the Coliseum.”

Psychologist Lister says professional sports management should start realizing that hooliganism “is a turnoff to more sophisticated fans and educated people.”

But to some, there is little to be done.

Several years ago, Chicago columnist Mike Royko wrote of the airy causes and none too subtle effects of sports violence.

His careful conclusion: “A drunken bum is a drunken bum.”