Football game

I went to my first Eagles game yesterday. It has been many years since I've been to a pro football game (to give you an idea, it was an LA Rams game) and I was pretty excited about it. As most of you know, I attend many baseball games, so my impressions will be refracted through the lens of my baseball experiences.

My daughter and I arrived at Lincoln Financial Field around half an hour before game time. As we walked toward the field, we saw the streams of people approaching the gate coalesce into a mass surrounded by chain link fence. This was the frisky mass, where you approach the frisking stations. To give you an idea of the atmosphere here, just imagine that you're at the airport and about 70,000 people are getting on a plane at once and they all approach security in a big crowd instead of a line. On the good side, nobody's got luggage and you don't have to take off your shoes, on the bad side, almost everyone is drunk and carrying a can or bottle of beer, which is tossed to the ground right before the frisking commences.

Frisking is done by gender, with females funneled into two lines and males into the other dozen. This causes a tremendous bottleneck as women struggle to get to their assigned line and then the men go through and wait. The frisking itself was thorough without being invasive and nobody got abusive.

Once through, we entered the stadium. Almost immediately, I felt a vibe of drunken male aggressiveness and rah-rah-ness that I didn't exactly find pleasant. The first order of business was to find a cash machine. I had inadvertently come with just barely enough cash to pay for parking (just barely meaning I need to pay $3 of the $25(!) in quarters). Since this is a Financial Field I figured that getting money would be no problem. However, the Lincoln Financial rep that I asked had no idea where the ATM was located. Fortunately, there was an ATM right next to the beer stand and fortunately there was a beer stand right next to the ATM.

There are, in fact, a massive number of beer stands in the stadium, which is good because the food choices are, to put it kindly, inadequate. When I was in Florida Spring Training in dinky little ballparks, the only thing you could get to eat if you didn't want beef was pizza. Same thing here, save for one stand that had fried chicken filets. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the wide variety of choices at Citizens Bank or any of the newer baseball parks. Or maybe the food choices just suck.

The stadium is a good place to watch football. The game was okay, I guess. I'm not a huge football fan, and the only real attraction for me is the occasional amazing athletic feat that the Eagles are capable of. But this game was completely devoid of spectacle. It was close and somewhat exciting as a result, but nothing very interesting happened. By the fourth quarter, the fans around us were more engaged in arguing with the fans of the opponent sprinkled through the section than in the game itself. The best part, and I have to admit that it is a very wonderful part, is the singing of "Fly Eagles Fly" after every touchdown. I've not experienced a lot of fight song and this is a good fight song. I also very much enjoyed watching the remote controlled camera fly over and around the field.

As we were leaving, the guy behind me on the stairs kept pushing up against me, as if that would make me somehow move faster than the person in front of me. And there it struck me what was bothering me the whole time. I somehow knew that if I pushed back, or turned and said something, that I was going to get the crap beaten out of me. As we passed back through the chain link fence on the way out, I thought it'd be a while before I did this again.