“Have you ever yelled at an obnoxious fan in the stands?”
It’s a question I have gotten quite a bit. You have to understand that when your hubby is one of the main offensive decision-makers, you are going to hear frequent complaints about the play calling. It doesn’t matter if you are 100 points ahead of the other team. “We” aren’t passing enough; “we” shouldn’t have thrown that pass; “we” should run the ball more; why did “we” run the ball there? All in the same game. Sometimes I am even the one saying it.
But the short answer is, “yes, I have.” Well, I didn’t yell, really. Yelling isn’t really my thing. Snide and sarcastic comments, though. Those are my love languages.
Picture a fresh-faced 25 year-old women pregnant with her first child. Pregnant enough so that no one mistakes her for anything other than pregnant. She’s hot, she’s tired, and there’s a fan in the stands screaming profanities about the play calling.
Does he know that the offensive coordinator’s wife and kids are sitting merely a few feet from him just across the aisle? Is he aware that two of them are large, strong teenage boys? I’m pretty sure that the amount of drinking he had done prior to the 1:30 kick-off meant he just didn’t care.
The pregnant woman was, of course, me, and the sweet little boy in my protruding belly was Noah. You could count on Noah bringing the joy even before he was born. On that day it was in the form of pregnancy hormones.
I have a lot of sympathy with pregnant me. She and menopausal me have a lot in common. We both have short fuses and low ability to deal with people who are being obtusely unkind. Especially if the people being mistreated are sweet friends, and teenage boys who would never treat someone else in such a manner.
I was making regular trips up the aisle due to the condition I was in. That sweet, little boy sat stubbornly on my bladder. But this particular trip I had had enough.
I began my waddle up the steps. When I reached said offender, I leaned in enough to get his attention and subtly queried, “Were you born a jerk?”
Well, I thought it was subtle. By the time my husband came back with the story that I had never planned on him hearing, I realized that it had been overheard by pretty much every family member of the coaching staff, who happily shared it with their significant others, who came in talking about it Monday morning. By the time the story came back to me, I sounded pretty heroic. The statement was longer, and funnier. It stopped short of me single-handedly throwing the man out of the game.
I learned a valuable lesson that day. If you tell off someone in the stands, your husband is going to hear about it one way or another. I relearned it about 10 years later when I told off a man in the stands that turned about to be a board member of the college. That’s a whole other funny story.
Do I ever yell at obnoxious fans in the stands?
Not these days. I leave those issues for security to deal with. But if a seven month pregnant woman telling off a drunk man doesn’t bring you joy, I don’t know what will.
Leave a Reply