What's Up, Sports Fans?

This Sunday the Colts clinched a playoff berth by beating the Tennessee Titans, 35-3.

At the same time, right there in the RCA Dome, another lopsided victory took place: My fondness for watching football was completely blown out by my aversion to large, noisy, aggressive herds of people.

It was a sellout crowd, some 58,000 fans in attendance. Each time the Titans' quarterback lined up to start each play, at least fifty thousand of those people would do their part and shriek, holler, or whistle through their fingers to make as much distracting noise as possible. Between the guy in front of me and the guy behind me and their deafening finger-whistles, I got this weird doppler effect in my left ear and eventually had to sit down.

Additionally, the guy behind me had been "tailgating" all day, which, for the non-fanatics in the audience, loosely translates as "pouring beers down your gullet until you lose any shred of dignity or consideration for your fellow man."

He yelled at Peyton Manning. He yelled at Dwight Freeney. He yelled at the referee. He yelled at the beer vendor. Even *I* got reprimanded, just sitting there, for not having a proper Colts jersey.

At the end of the third quarter, with the Colts ahead by 25 points, some people on the other side of the upper section decided to start a wave. Now: waves are fun; waves are great. I say if you're gonna get thousands of people in one place, sitting in a big circle, you might as well all stand up in sequence to pass the time.

Others in my section did not share this sentiment.

Each time the wave would make its way halfway around the dome to us, the people in my section would steadfastly refuse to participate, in fact yelling at the fans in adjacent sections for their breach of gameday etiquette. "SIT DOWN, YOU IDIOTS! Don't you know we're on OFFENSE?!"

To further chastise their ignorance, a woman in front of me wondered aloud "why they sell tickets to people who don't know how the f@cking game works."

So, in conclusion, I guess I thought I was a hardcore Colts fan, all fired up to buy season tickets and go to all the games next year, but now I guess I'm not quite hardcore enough.

Maybe I'll just watch the games on TV, and Penelope and I will do the wave from the couch in our basement.