Improving Sports Security One Tackle At A Time
Admit it, you’ve been at a game and thought, “I wonder if I could throw the rest of this soft pretzel far enough for it to land on the court” or “I bet I can hop this right field wall and sprint to the left field wall before security runs me down” or even “the next goal David Beckham bends, I’m hopping this railing and I’m kissing him. I don’t care, I’m kissing him.” Don’t pretend that you haven’t wondered how much of a disturbance you can be at some sporting event. I know you have.
Most of us don’t follow through with these thoughts. After all, tickets are expensive and games lose a lot of their charm when viewed from a jail cell. The reality is that you probably can land that pretzel on the court and if you’re fast, you’ve got a shockingly good chance of going the distance in a ballpark. I mean, if Drew Barrymore can do it, how hard can it be? Most sports security guards are fat guys unprepared to run or old guys unprepared to tell the fat guys that they can’t run. The key word here is unprepared.
After watching Swiss Cheesy (pictured) delay Sunday’s French Open final between Roger Federer and Robin Soderling by bum-rushing the court with a flag, a cap and seemingly no plan on what to do with either, it occurred to me just how unsafe athletes really are. Here’s the VIDEO of the incident. (Sidebar: Kudos to Roger Federer for keeping his cool. If anyone in knee socks ever ran up to me at any point in my life and I had an object like a racket to whack him with, I don’t think I’d stop hitting him with it until either the guy or the object were broken into several pieces)
Photo courtesy of Yahoo! Sports via Getty Images
Anyway, five guards chase after this guy like they were part of a Buster Keaton movie and they never catch him. It takes a sixth more in-shape guard to flatten this guy. And how many guards in how many sporting events have you been to where you were fairly certain you could take ‘em if you had to? I’m not saying fan craziness is an epidemic and that athletes are consistently in danger. I’m saying there’s a paper tiger standing between a dangerous fan and an athlete in any given sport on any given day and there shouldn’t be.
Can you imagine if you walked into a bar and the bouncer was 85 years old? Why bother? Father Time ain’t going to stop anyone from fighting. The same thing with security guards who aren’t prepared and willing to get messy. The problem here is that most sane people don’t want to hit or be hit (okay, that’s not a problem, but it is a cause). The solution is simple: Hire washed up athletes. Good security needs to be athletic enough to catch drunks in an open sprint and angry enough to hope for someone to try such a stunt. It’s the anger that I feel is lacking from most security staff. There’s always a gaggle of guards that are hoping if they just surround the intruder, he’ll politely put his hands in the air and give up. This of course never happens because if the offender were polite, he’d still be in his seat calling Alex Rodriguez “A-Roid” or whatever drunks do when they’re seated. So one of the guards comes barelling out of nowhere and pancakes a sucker. Instead of 1-out-of-6 doing this, they all need to start doing this. If security guards were washed-up athletes, you can bet they’d be frustrated and you could bet they’d take it out on any and all fools interested in getting a cheap laugh from a few thousand fans.
Who knows, they might also stop someone intent on doing harm.
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