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Top 5 Dead Or Alive: Crazy Crowd Traditions

Welcome to our third installment of Top 5 Dead Or Alive. In case you missed our piece last Friday on sports video games, we want you to know that this feature is designed specifically to make life hell for our employees. Each week, we’ll ask one of our writers to come up with a definitive list of the five best people, places or things in a particularly subjective category — then, we’ll ask you to tell him who or what is missing from the list. Feel free to be a total dick.

Today, we’ve asked our intern Evan Sporer to name the five crazy crowd traditions of all time. Anyway, tell him what he missed in the comments, email him, or tweet at him.

I’m kicking myself right for remembering we needed to do a Top 5 Dead Or Alive, and then volunteering to do it again. Was I being an awesome intern, or am I a really big idiot for making life harder on himself? I might go with the latter.

Anyway, I’ve seen some cool crowd traditions in my day. Going to a small college, I don’t get to see so many great traditions (if any) at my own school, but I’ve had the privilege of seeing some cool ones up close and personal. Gotta say, the fan element is part of what makes sports great. I’ve heckled, I’ve been heckled, and I’ve seen great hecklers. From a playing standpoint, athletes will always tell you they don’t notice a crowd, and it doesn’t mean anything, but that’s bullshit. A good crowd will always catch your attention. Now, people react in different ways. There’s two schools of reactions in terms of dealing with a crowd; you either feed off it, or you get crippled by it. All I have to say is, if you’re of that second school, I hope you never have to be subjected to any of these crowds I list.

This one was actually pretty tough. There are many great crowd traditions, some that I’m loyal to, but didn’t even make the cut (see, New York Rangers, Potvin Sucks chant). But that’s the great thing about crowd traditions. Dennis Potvin retired from hockey in 1988. Rangers fans still chant that he sucks, and won’t stop doing so any time soon, no matter which team they’re playing against. It’s what tradition is all about, and it’s really cool.

I don’t want to say I was partial to college crowds, but they’re just some much more rowdy and electric than most professional sports teams have to offer. And also, we went with crazy crowd traditions, not just crowd traditions, which sort of sealed the deal on a few determinations.

So without further ado, your top 5 dead or alive crazy crowd traditions.

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