Fans Disguised As Empty Seats (November 1955 and October 1987)
If games are played in an empty stadium, is anyone there to see them?
Welcome to Throwbacks, a weekly-ish newsletter by Michael Weinreb about sports history, culture and politics.
I. Dotting the Why
I have a running joke with a friend of mine that went public last fall, when we were both interviewed for ESPN’s series of documentaries on the 150th anniversary of college football: I once told him a top-tier college marching band affords the home team (roughly) a three-point advantage. He responded by assuring me that I am utterly insane. Agree to disagree, etc.
I have no way of demonstrating that my theory is empirically true, but here’s the thing about it, now that we live in a post-truth world: He has no way of proving that it isn’t true. No one, not even the analytic wonks, have been able to determine why home-field advantage is a thing, but they all acknowledge that it is a thing, so why couldn’t a few especially competent clarinet players make the difference between winning and losing?
II. Attendance: Zip
(Photo: Akron Beacon Journal)
I don’t know when sports are coming back, and I don’t know what the hell they’re going to look like when they do come back. No one knows anything at this point, not even Anthony Fauci, who somehow managed to piss off a mass of Pro Football Talk bros this week merely by acknowledging the fact that 22 large men attempting to mutilate each other on a patch of grass might not be the optimal atmosphere for mitigating a highly contagious disease. Every proposal, every leaked story about a possibility of a possibility of a possibility, brings up even more questions that we don’t seem to have the answers to yet. Beyond the legitimate and understandable fears brought on by both a public-health and an economic emergency, the last couple of months have become a measure of Americans’ ability to weather uncertainty about our cultural future—those thorny gray areas that have essentially been eliminated from the national conversation—and it’s gone pretty much as you might expect.
But let us say sports do come back by the fall, and they’re played in empty stadiums, or in stadiums that are at 25 percent—or even 50 percent—capacity. I’ve been wondering what it will feel like to consume them, and how much it will alter the tenor of home-field advantage, and what it will mean to experience the games themselves.
As someone who has written about sports for nearly two decades, I have been to many arenas and stadiums that are almost entirely devoid of actual human beings (often while covering the football team at the University of Akron, pictured above in 2019). An empty stadium is an eerie thing, particularly for football, which generally draws larger crowds than any other sport in this country, and is especially dependent on the energy of those crowds. Football stadiums are massive; the one I grew up attending now holds roughly 107,000 fans and was regularly sold out, at least before the sports-attendance bubble burst a few years ago.
Without a crowd, baseball can probably subsist—as it did in 2015, when the Orioles and White Sox played in an empty stadium in the aftermath of protests over the death of Freddie Gray—merely because of its assembly-line churn of games. Without a crowd, basketball can probably subsist, because it is an indoor sport played on a relatively small court that’s focused on the athleticism of its participants. But football? Football is designed to be played in massive stadiums. Football requires an excess of kinetic energy. Football needs people in order to feel authentic. Without a crowd, what is the Iron Bowl? Without a crowd, does anyone really care about the Seattle Seahawks?* Without a crowd, does every football team in America become the equivalent of the New York Jets playing their home games at Vanderbilt University?
*(I feel obligated to unleash this insult because I live in Portland at the moment. Apparently, the people of Portland—a city that makes less sense to me than I even anticipated it would—cultivate a low-level rivalry with Seattle that centers primarily around professional soccer and independent bookstores. It is gloriously twee, and has little to do with football, since most Portlanders would view a leather football as inherently offensive if it didn’t at least come with a vegan option, but come on, the Seahawks’ uniforms are terrible.)
III. The Aints
It is easy to look up the largest crowds to ever attend a sporting event in modern history. It is not quite as simple to determine the smallest crowds ever to attend a sporting event in modern history. This is because those numbers are often pasted over by citing “ticket sales” rather than actual attendance, or by giving away those tickets in parking lots or shopping malls to people who literally have nothing better to do than watch an entirely uninteresting competition between a pair of extremely bad teams. (There’s a reason fans don’t generally wear paper bags on their heads or sit in the bleachers knitting in crowded stadiums.)
Nobody wants an empty stadium. An empty stadium signals that something about the game we’re watching is strange, or off-kilter, or utterly inept. An empty stadium signals that the whole social construct that lends sports meaning has somehow failed.
IIIa. The Refrigerator Bowl
Often, those failures can prove retroactively amusing, as in mid-November of 1955, when the football team at San Jose State traveled to the burgeoning metropolis of Pullman, Washington, to play a meaningless late-season game against the Washington State Cougars. Washington State had a record of one win, six losses, and one tie; the temperature that day was somewhere between five and seven degrees. According to the newspapers, 424 fans who had bought reserved tickets actually showed up at some point. One solitary human purchased a ticket at the gate that day. Maybe this wasn’t the smallest crowd in college football history, but it was up there: A sportswriter counted 16 people in the south stands in the twenty minutes before game time.
It was so cold that the dial on the press-box phone froze, along with the coffee the writers drank as they attempted to type while wearing gloves and jumping up and down in place. It was so cold that the game-timer sat in a station wagon and rolled down his window to fire his gun at halftime and at the final buzzer. It was so cold that San Jose State told its student manager to build a bonfire on the sideline, but the student manager was from Hawaii, so he stared blankly at the logs he’d been given. “What are you supposed to do,” he asked, “rub ‘em together?”
It was, in fact, so cold that the marching band left at halftime because its instruments froze up, thereby negating Washington State’s crucial three-point edge. The game ended in a 13-13 tie. Nobody won, except that lone fan who purchased his reserved-seat ticket at the gate for three dollars. To that person, a 17-year-old high school football player named Charles Moore, Washington State’s athletic department issued this letter, and later refunded his money at halftime of a basketball game:
IIIb. It Doesn’t Get Any Worse Than This
On occasion, an empty stadium is a symbol of a deeper failure, as it was on October 4, 1987 in Philadelphia, when the Eagles faced the Chicago Bears. A week earlier, NFL players had gone on strike, and the NFL had attempted to plunge through this labor dispute by employing replacement players. This did not go over well in many places, including among the union strongholds in Philadelphia, where three thousand union members showed up to block entry to fans who dared to show up to witness the exploits of backup quarterback Guido Merkens, whose own name had been misspelled on the back of his jersey.
This being Philadelphia, things quickly grew contentious. Police escorted fans through gates being blocked by union members, at least one of whom, according to Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Frank Dolson, threw a sucker punch at a fan that wound up getting captured by television cameras. Tractor trailers circled Veterans Stadium, attempting to tie up traffic. Police on horseback were called to maintain the peace, and one officer injured her foot after a horse tromped on it.
Inside the stadium, things were just as ridiculous: A little more than four thousand fans made it through the union gauntlet, one fourth of the number who had come to see Temple play Akron roughly 10 days earlier. It was the smallest crowd in pro football that day, the smallest crowd for an Eagles game since 1939, and (perhaps) the smallest crowd in the modern history of the NFL. By halftime, the Eagles were trailing 35-3. A group of seven fans wore T-shirts that combined to read, “It Doesn’t Get Any Worse Than This.”
“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Eagles owner Norman Braman said, and while he was talking about the protests and the near-violence, he might as well have been talking about the very idea of trying to play a football game when a football game shouldn’t be played at all.
IV. No-Shows
Maybe this whole attendance-free era works better than we think. Maybe the public-health concerns can be confronted in a sensible manner, and maybe games being played empty or near-empty stadiums won’t turn into protest sites for extremists demanding that teams open up the gates to them. Maybe we get over the flatness of the experience. Maybe we accept that these are extraordinary circumstances, and maybe we are so thirsty for sports that it won’t matter what it looks like and what it sounds like and what it feels like to watch.
Maybe we’ve so completely ceded our preference for live sporting events over to high-definition television that none of this shit matters anymore, and maybe in ten years or twenty years we’ll regularly be playing games in empty stadiums because what’s the difference, because have you ever watched the Bahamas Bowl or the Great Alaska Shootout or an Oakland A’s game and even noticed the crowd?
But at least for now, I associate the idea of playing a football game in an empty stadium with the idea that something’s gone terribly wrong, or that something essential has failed. There’s nothing amusing about it. And I’m not sure if, in the months to come, I’ll be able to shake that notion out of my head.
Additional reading:
My first college journalism professor, who taught a weed-out course called Communications 260, was a man named Dennis Gildea, a former sportswriter for the local newspaper who had created an outrageous newspaper alter-ego who went by the name T. Wes Brillik—he was kind of the prototype for deliberately idiotic characters like Twitter’s PFT Commenter. Years later, Gildea got in touch with me; he was a professor at Springfield College and head of a sports literature association and he invited me up there to speak.
I was saddened to learn that Gildea recently died of brain cancer. He was a hell of a guy, and if you’re interested in the story of one of the more fascinating basketball coaches in modern history, Clair Bee, I recommend reading his book:
Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton, by Dennis Gildea
This newsletter is very much a work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas? Contact me via twitter or at michaeliweinreb at gmail, or leave a comment below. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.