Would reactions to crowd outbursts in golf differ if the clowns who shout “you da man,” “mashed potatoes” or “get in the hole” had anything interesting or imaginative to say? Which is more annoying: potentially changing the outcome or the event or the pathetic self promotion of the spectator? Golf’s Sound Check: At Tournaments, Loud Fans Are Getting Louder At roughly 5:30 p.m., Poulter stepped to the first tee, and as soon as he hit his drive, a shout of “Baba Booey” rang out from the half-empty stands. No surprise there. In a series of Twitter messages last week, Poulter railed on the fans who shout inane remarks, timed to fill the silence after a player’s swing, and exchanged terse messages with the radio shock jock Howard Stern. Golf tournaments are generally quiet affairs, where fans are expected to be fluent in the etiquette of a sport that affords silence as each player pulls his club, swings through the ball and follows its path. That moment of silence, however, is increasingly being breached. Anyone attending the Barclays tournament this week or watching on TV will notice a new and seemingly out-of-place fan behavior during those quiet moments after a player completes his swing: the frequent shouting of remarks like “You the man!,” “In the hole!” and, the current favorite for no good reason, “Mashed potatoes!” The fans shouting to be heard are attention seekers from the same family tree that produced [I am omitting the name from the article to avoid providing the desired publicity], whose thirst for fame in the late 1970s spurred him to attend major sporting events, including the Super Bowl and the Masters, wearing a rainbow-colored Afro-style wig and positioning himself where the television cameras could not avoid him. Christian End, an associate professor of psychology at Xavier University who specializes in fan behavior, said: “Probably part of their motivation is to get their 15 minutes of fame. Every time they show a television clip of a shot where the individual who yelled can clearly be heard, that person is kind of part of that event. They are in a way a part of sports history.” “Anytime you’re told not to make noise, you want to make noise. I think it’s something like a pure tribal mentality. Some people just can’t keep quiet, and usually the ones who make the most noise are the ones who’ve had the most beer. That’s true pretty much at all sporting events and concerts.” “People are at concerts to listen, and they don’t want to listen to you,” he said, adding, “If I ever were to yell at a concert, I’d come up with something better than ‘Free Bird.’ That’s the equivalent of ‘Get in the hole!’ or ‘You the man, Tiger!’ Boring. Overdone. Unoriginal.” nytimes/2013/08/23/sports/golf/golfs-sound-check-at-tournaments-loud-fans-are-getting-louder.html
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 12:21:54 +0000
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