The school has a great team and a great marching band and a great stadium and a bunch of stuff I usually like in a college football powerhouse
But they also have a tradition of not treating the fans of visiting teams very well
My brother took my dad to the OSU campus to see the longhorns play there oh more than a decade ago
My brother knew that visiting fans got treated poorly and rudely but he thought that wouldn’t apply to our dad because our dad was clearly in his eighties
Well my brother overestimated the courtesy that OSU partisans are willing to show the fans of visiting teams.
My brother and my father are the most gracious and well-behaved people ever
And yet for the crime of walking to the stadium dressed in burnt orange longhorn jackets my brother and my father had beer poured on them were spit on had serious obscenities yelled at them and had people bump into them deliberately and then follow them heckling them and had other people attempt to trip them
Let me emphasize that my dad was clearly in his 80s when this happened
That and other experiences my family members had visiting that stadium on game day meant that the three of my nephews who grew up in Ohio all refused to apply to OSU to go to college even though they knew it was a good school none of them were willing to be a part of that kind of horrible behavior
Some school traditions just suck and that’s one of them
So today I’ll be rooting for Notre Dame
Sorry about the rant
And if there are any OSU fans hanging around,
let me say for your sake that I’m sure there’s a lot more to the school than that and much of it is positive
But it’s not cool - still, more than a decade later - that my dad got treated that way
I am NOT for OSU.
The school has a great team and a great marching band and a great stadium and a bunch of stuff I usually like in a college football powerhouse
But they also have a tradition of not treating the fans of visiting teams very well
My brother took my dad to the OSU campus to see the longhorns play there oh more than a decade ago
My brother knew that visiting fans got treated poorly and rudely but he thought that wouldn’t apply to our dad because our dad was clearly in his eighties
Well my brother overestimated the courtesy that OSU partisans are willing to show the fans of visiting teams.
My brother and my father are the most gracious and well-behaved people ever
And yet for the crime of walking to the stadium dressed in burnt orange longhorn jackets my brother and my father had beer poured on them were spit on had serious obscenities yelled at them and had people bump into them deliberately and then follow them heckling them and had other people attempt to trip them
Let me emphasize that my dad was clearly in his 80s when this happened
That and other experiences my family members had visiting that stadium on game day meant that the three of my nephews who grew up in Ohio all refused to apply to OSU to go to college even though they knew it was a good school none of them were willing to be a part of that kind of horrible behavior
Some school traditions just suck and that’s one of them
So today I’ll be rooting for Notre Dame
Sorry about the rant
And if there are any OSU fans hanging around,
let me say for your sake that I’m sure there’s a lot more to the school than that and much of it is positive
But it’s not cool - still, more than a decade later - that my dad got treated that way