A Note from a Peacekeeping Philadelphia Sports Fan

It's almost Super Bowl Sunday, so I'm going to take a brief break from music to bring you this short message about Philadelphia Eagles fans:

If you're a fan of football or even just a resident of the tristate area, you have probably told a joke about an Eagles fans. The punchlines about drunkenness, rowdiness, and stupidity abound.

We've all heard the stories about rocks in snowballs and drunk monsters attacking Santa Claus. Perhaps you watched the local news segment above warning Minnesota Vikings' fans to prepare themselves before entering enemy territory (read: the city of Philadelphia)? Every sports team has its bad apple fans, and I'm here to assure you that we're not as bad as the Huffington Post, CNN, the New York Times, Saturday Night Live, CBS, and countless other media outlets would have you believe. But yes, the city did grease our telephone poles with Crisco to prevent any...incidents.

However, these posts are all dedicated to 1918, and the Eagles franchise wasn't founded until 1931. So, I decided to check out what Philadelphia sports fans were like in one hundred years ago. In fact, I wanted to explore the Philly Sports news from February 4, 1918--exactly a century before Super Bowl LII.

An Alternative to Football

As it turns out, yes, Philly fans were into fighting, but not the kind that occurs in the parking lot of the Linc. In the Sports section on Monday, February 4, 1918, boxing proves to be the most popular topic. An anonymous columnist waxes poetically about the nobility of this country's fine pugilists. Ironically, his essay centers around the death of John L. Sullivan, a champion fighter from Boston (for non-football fans, this is ironic because that's where Patriots fans live).

Pictured above is the header image of the aforementioned sports column. The stodgy man with a pipe is a far cry from greased up Crisco poles.

In fact, football is not mentioned anywhere within the column or the page of local sports news, but baseball, basketball, soccer, and even auto racing news are all covered. Philadelphia's pre-Eagles franchise, The Frankford Yellow Jackets, played regular Saturday (and sometimes Sunday) games, but perhaps they did not last past the Fall season. The authors are also surprisingly silent about World War I or any other current events of February 1918.

I'd be very interested to know how the political and social climate of 1918 affected Philadelphia fandom. With players protesting the National Anthem and speaking out against the current administration, today's sports fans are forced to contend with the events of the world while watching the game--and rightly so. The backlash over a man's choice to kneel caused internal strife and open fighting among the city's sports fans in September of 2017. I wonder if labor strikes, anti-Communist sentiments, racial tensions, or the war-time draft affected how people interacted at the boxing ring?

Sources:

"Snappy Sporting News and Comment Written for Monday Reading," 4 February 1918. Philadelphia Inquirer. 8.

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