Matt Beaudoin, right, was killed by a drunken Yankee fan for chanting “Yankees suck”…
Last week I posted about a crazed middle-aged female Yankee fan in Nashua running overMatthew Beaudoin, 29, for chanting “Yankees suck,” and this response came in yesterday from Dawn Jordan.
Yes someone died. He was a wonderful person and a very good friend of mine. I have noticed 3 yankees suck stickers on nashua cars in the past week. The stickers have likely been around for months or years and I never noticed it—a great idea in retrospect. At the least owners should perhaps worry about destruction of their vehicle. We have seen the worst case scenario. This crazy woman would have found another reason to vent her rage however I would dicourage anyone I loved from displaying such a sticker.
Certainly, the stickers have been around for years. Chris Wrenn, a Boston area music industry huckster, first made them in 2000. I think Wrenn bought a Red Mustang with the profits? Nonetheless, I’ve seen him in a Red Mustang complete with Yanks Suck sticker…
Now, does Yankees Suck propaganda contribute to violence? Yes. Did it contribute to the death of Matt Beaudoin? I suppose that it did. All the commercialized hype of Yankees/Sox-fan hate, best seen at the bootleg t-shirt stands in Kenmore Square and on River St in the Bronx, helps fan the flames of fights like this (note the Yankee fan being tossed over a railing and the “Boston sucks” chant that follows).
But the Nashua incident might be the first “Yankees suck” death. As one of the first people to market a Yankees Suck shirt, it’s been hard to ignore.
When I first started making those shirts, in 99, I was obsessed with foreign soccer fans. I loved how a team became part of kids’ identities in London, Barcelona, Rio, and beyond. I loved the soccer-fan style—wind-pants, good jeans, parkas, weird sneakers, Brit-pop hair. I watched videos of the mass brawls in the stands and on the streets. I read Bill Buford’s book “Among the Thugs.” So when the Fenway crowd on a cold night in April 99 began chanting ‘Yankees suck’ during a Sox game against….Minnesota, I knew I had to make a shirt.
In the years since, Yanks-Sox fan culture has adopted a hooligan mindset. I certainly did nothing to stop it, and overall I think it’s interesting to see baseball fans so passionate, yet the level of violence tolerated at the Toilet and Fenway has gone too far.
Really, I’m all for bar/street fights, but 300-pound assholes bitch slapping each other in the stands next to 10-yr-olds is lame. Stopping this would be easy: added security during Sox-Yanks games. As for the Nashua death, let’s just hope it was a one-time thing.
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May 13th, 2008 at 11:07 am
“Now, does Yankees Suck propaganda contribute to violence? Yes.”
I disagree and think that this follows the same video games/rap music-causes-violence line of thought. Stable people — even drunk stable people wrapped up in the Yankees/Sox rivalry — don’t run over each other when they’re pissed off.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the rivalry can get out of control and often negatively changes the atmosphere of a game, but I also think the fans who get violent have bigger issues and that this just aggravates them (much like bad driving and a girlfriend who “talks back” do).
May 13th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Yeah, but when have ever seen a fight start over people chanting “Zelda! Zelda!” or “GTA IV, GTA IV” or “Rambo First Blood!!!” Sox and Yankees fans have their own language of intimidation—that often lead to violence—and the shirts/stickers are somewhat responsible.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I’m just pointing out that fights over athletic teams are generally a symptom, not the problem itself. Like how football hooligans tend to fit a depressing sociological profile and often use fighting as an outlet for their anger towards the rest of society. Simply put, you’re being too hard on yourself and/or “Yankees Suck.”
And I would love to see a Zelda-inspired fight.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Zelda fights are fucked up.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
I agree with MacKenzie. This woman clearly had something wrong in her brain and if wasn’t a ‘Yankees Suck’ chant that set her off, it definitely would have been something else. We see it all the time, but just dont read about it, because it doesn’t hit as close to home or is not as ‘headline grabbing’ as the Yankees Suck story. Severe violence over parking spots, video games, articles of clothing…it happens all the time. In my opinion, the ‘Yankees Suck’ chant (however lame it is–26 titles) had absolutly nothing to do with the death of this man. This woman’s fragile mental state had EVERYTHING to do with his death.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Because they draw from unique demographic bases, sports teams are more political than any other entertainment. Thus sports language can be manipulated to violent ends. In the Nashua case (as I state above), I hope it’s a one-off. But if you watch the link of the fight in above post, you’ll see a brawl, then a chant. This happens all the time in Sox-Yanks universe: fan language leading to violence.
Now, look at Argentina’s soccer gangs. River and Boca crews control all levels of criminal enterprise in Buenos Aires. Likewise, in Boston and New York a regional “nationalism” and pseudo-gangsterism (Departed, Sorprano “honor” codes) is at stake when the two teams play.
So any added (semi-legal) propaganda promotes a nationalist mentality and helps promote a violence.