Last year, during the world-famous "Three Jews and a Mexican" road trip, we attended several ballgames for free, posing as respectable journalists committed to chronicling all the wonderful things the South had to offer.
In Memphis, we took in a Redbirds game at the local minor league stadium. After pretending to take notes in the press box and getting our fill of their free buffet, we marched ourselves down to the best seats in the house, right behind the Memphis dugout.
Around the seventh inning or so, the mascot began interacting with the fans -- a procedure he (it?) calls entertainment but some call harassment.
Unfortunately, the redbird found the one fan who was a littler drunker than most, and started annoying him.
The guy, enraged, flips out and shoves the redbird, who gets pushed into some empty seats and is flipped over them. He goes ass over head and looks to be actually hurt. Meanwhile, the guy, who by this point I guess we can call "the asshole," looks like a guy who was roughhousing with his friends but got a little too enthusiastic and knocked out someone's tooth.
By now, everybody in the stadium is booing the crap out of this guy. Security is coming in to escort him out. People are whisking peanuts at him.
To us Cornellians, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to bring in a little Lynah flavor to the South.
So, naturally, we start a chant.
"That guy sucks! That guy sucks! That guy sucks!"
Within seconds, the entire stadium has turned on us.
"You can't say that!"
"You can't bring that kind of language in here!"
"Shhhhhhh!"
"There's women and children around!"
It actually took us a couple of seconds to realize they were shushing us, and became thoroughly confused.
"You can't say sucks?" I asked a guy, bewildered.
"Of course not," the guy said, as if I asked him whether it was OK to fart during Thanksgiving dinner.
Apparently, "sucks" is a pretty bad swear in the South. Maybe if we said, "That Guy Stinks!" we would have been OK. "That Guy Blows,' probably would not have been OK.
What prompted this story? Last week, a woman -- and, I guess, fellow sucker -- tried to wear a "Yankees Suck" t-shirt to a game in Texas. Despite its factual accuracy, such a shirt is of course prohibited in public.
So the authorities made her take it off, turn it inside out, and put it back on.
Because it is less offensive for children to read the word "Sucks" on a t-shirt than it is for them to see a stranger's boobs.
Boy, can you imagine what would have happened if she had worn a "Jeter Swallows" t-shirt instead?
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