My "Moran" experience at Bucs/Seahawks game Sunday

[RobertSeattle]

My Tampa Bay resident brother has season tickets to the Tampa Bay Bucs and invited me to fly down to the Sunday game which I did. His seats are in the "blue collar" 300 level area to set the stage.

A guy a few seats to the left and one row down from our seats, has, ever since 9/11, affixed a 3x5 US Flag to the railing in front of his seat at every Bucs game. In the post 9/11, you could basically do anything you wanted with a US Flag as long you could spin it as honoring 9/11.

But I guess the Stadium authorities decided to finally enforce their own rules on Sunday after two years of looking the other way. (If you ever check - there are very thorough - there are no affixed personal signs anywhere in Raymond James stadium - the only thing affixed is advertising or Bucs logos). So the stadium management guy comes out and very calmly tells the guy he needs to remove the flag and he gives him a clear out --- he can hold it up with his hands but he cannot affix it to the railing with twine or anything else – that’s stadium rules
As you would expect, this flips out the guy who's been bringing the flag and about 5 or 6 other "morans" around him. The Tampa Police are right on scene and they don't take crap from anyone. They tell the morans to shut up and comply or exit the stadium. The latter occurs. The Tampa police handled it quite professionally - they know they have to nip in the bud anything like this before it gets ugly.

I'll just be curious if the chief instigator of this tries to make a mountain out of a mole hill out of this and tries to get Tampa's right wing radio involved in this.

[alphafemale]

1. I'd be surprised if this is the last we hear of it.

:eyes:

[soup]

2. St Petersburg Times picked up the story-

>snip< Like other Buccaneers fans at Raymond James Stadium, Kenneth Hill was enduring the team's woeful performance when a security guard caught his attention.

"You've got to take your flag down," the guard told Hill, who had an American flag tied to the railing in front of him in the first row of the upper deck.

Hill, a Pinellas Park resident and a Bucs season ticket holder since 1989, said he has been hanging the flag during games since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

What happened next resulted in two families being thrown out of the stadium and another fan being arrested on charges of punching police officers. It also raised questions about a Bucs policy that some view as unpatriotic.

Hill and the police give different accounts of Sunday's incident.
>full article here:
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/09/21/Tampabay/Flag_gets_fans_booted.shtml

[RobertSeattle]

3. Thanks - that sounds like "my" incident

Punching a cop - what a maroon - and a customs agent to boot. Go figure.

[DavidFL]

4. This is about 10 days late...

but I remember this incident. Tampa's local rightwing NBC affiliate did a story on this during it's 5 o'clock news. To me, the story seemed very sympathetic to the flag flyer; can't remember his name offhand right now though. What really irritated me was the reporter kept connecting the word "patriotism" with his act of hanging an American flag and I wanted to throw something at the TV because simply hanging a flag, in a football stadium no less, is not "patriotism." The word used to have a much different meaning before the rightwingers bastardized it and convinced too many Americans that things which are actually nationalism are "patriotic."