Eagle Fans Raise Big Stink

PHILADELPHIA —  It is the smell. Of cat urine, human urine. Of whatever it is the rats leave behind.

It is the hardness. Of the turf, of the seams in the turf when you trip over them. Of the fans. And what they throw. The batteries. The iceballs. The snowballs with batteries in the middle. The bottles and cans and rocks.

It is the noise. The obscenities. The boos, oh, the boos. For the visitors, of course. But for the home team too. Former Philadelphia Eagle quarterback Ron Jaworski remembers throwing nine consecutive completions in a game against the Washington Redskins. When the 10th pass fell incomplete, the home crowd booed him.

Sunday afternoon, just before dusk, when the cold weather will turn bitter in South Philadelphia, when the Philly fans will turn to liquor to warm their hands and their lungs, the last football game to be played at Veterans Stadium will begin.

The NFC championship game between the Eagles and Tampa Bay Buccaneers will kick off and some man in the 700 section will urinate in a sink. If the man is polite, he will run the water afterward. Not all of them are polite.

Veterans Stadium opened on the corner of Broad and Pattison in 1971. It was one of those copycat multipurpose stadiums built in the 1970s, same as Riverfront in Cincinnati or Three Rivers in Pittsburgh. Ugly. Concrete. Utilitarian. Made for nothing in particular, able to host anything.

Steve Sabol, head of NFL Films, headquartered in nearby Mount Laurel, N.J., recently helped produce a piece on the Vet.

“Every stadium around the league has a certain distinctive quality,” Sabol said. “In Kansas City, you have the smell of barbecue from the tailgaters. At the old Baltimore Memorial Stadium, it was the smell of crab cakes. At the Vet? It’s the smell of urine.”

How do you bring that along to the sparkly, new place under construction across the street? The new stadium sounds so prim.

Lincoln Financial Field.

Plush seats, plenty of bathrooms, cup holders. Lots of fancy, corporate boxes. Restaurants. Brew pubs. How’s a man to throw a bottle of specialty brew at the opposing quarterback instead of a cup of swill?

How’s a man going to feel good spitting at Michael Irvin as he’s being carried, unmoving, off the field to an ambulance, when there’s no rat around to carry off the detritus?

Those other copycat places never gained the mythical status of the Vet.

They never had an exhibition football game canceled because both coaches, Baltimore’s Brian Billick and Philadelphia’s Andy Reid, agreed the turf conditions were too dangerous.

They never had a real court set up in the basement with a real judge. You couldn’t get on an elevator in any other stadium with fans in handcuffs heading down to be tried immediately for their unruly conduct. And have one of the handcuffed men caught with a joint in his hands. Except at the Vet.

When Jon Gruden arrived in Philadelphia in 1995 as offensive coordinator, he asked around, trying to find out why there were so many stray cats running everywhere. To kill the rats was the answer. Gruden suddenly found the kitties very appealing.

“The birds, the rats and the cats,” said Eagle quarterback Donovan McNabb about what he will miss most about the Vet. McNabb giggled, then got serious.

“It goes a little deeper than that,” McNabb said. “The feeling goes more toward defending the territory of so many great guys who played here before us, guys like Ron Jaworski and Harold Carmichael. We have an opportunity to send off this place in a special way.”

Ah, the memories.

Of Irvin, the receiver for the hated Dallas Cowboys, being carried out, unmoving, on a stretcher as 66,000 riled-up, tanked-up men and women booed and screamed and spat and threw things at Irvin.

Of Santa Claus being booed.

Of the “body bag” game, when then coach Buddy Ryan promised the Redskins they’d be beaten so badly, hit so hard, knocked around so violently, “they’ll have to be carted off in body bags.” The Eagles won, 28-14, and nine Redskins left the game with injuries. Eagle fans still talk about the game. It makes them proud.

The fans.

More than anything, it is the fans that make the Vet whatever it is. Dark, dank, dangerous, smelly, scary.

Special.

“As the final game draws closer and closer,” said Merrill Reese, “I’m beginning to feel something I didn’t expect. Sentimental.”

Reese is the Eagles’ radio play-by-play announcer. Sunday’s game will be his 260th at the Vet. He remembers proudly, “Jan. 11, 1981, the exact moment when Wilbert Montgomery exploded off the right side on the [Eagles’] first play of the game against the Dallas Cowboys in the NFC championship game. I knew right then we were going to the Super Bowl.”

His ugliest moments, Reese said, came during the strike season when he had to fight his way through vicious pickets to broadcast games played by replacement players in a town where being a scab is considered worse than being a Giant fan.

Filling this no-frills stadium for 32 years have been fans with no frills. They come to the game equipped only with lungs the size of New Jersey and a vocabulary to match. They come ready to rip and roar and they play no favorites.

Sabol says the late George Allen used to like coming to the Vet when he was coaching the Redskins.

“George used to say that the fans at the Vet are so fickle and disloyal and intolerant that if he could get ahead by 10 points, it would be like playing at RFK Stadium,” Sabol said. “George said the fans would be booing the home team.”

Defensive tackle Darwin Walker sounds like the perfect Eagle fan, even though he is from South Carolina.

“To be honest,” Walker said, “I know guys are excited about the new stadium and all the good, new stuff, but I’m going to miss it. I like to keep it gritty and grimy. I kind of like being at the bottom of stuff, having the worst. That’s the way I like it and that’s how the fans here like it. I think they like the reputation.”

To understand the Vet, Sabol says, you have to understand the history of the city.

“It goes back to the religious conflicts between the Puritans and the Quakers,” Sabol says. “When a Puritan hung a Quaker, everybody was happy. The Puritan was happy to be able to do the killing and the Quaker was happy to be suffering. This whole inheritance has been passed down to the Philadelphia sports fan. The need to do the killing and the need for the suffering. It’s all part of the tradition.”

Rats, cats, Eagle green hats. Urinating in the sink, throwing your drink, making a stink. It’s all part of the tradition. Suffering the losers, all of them, all the teams that have never won a Super Bowl. Tradition. It may all end this season. Or maybe not.

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Diane Pucin can be reached at [email protected].