It’s official —- the snake is dead

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This article was published 15/07/2010 (5543 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With a long face and a solemn mien, Blue Bombers president Jim Bell stood before the cameras in the Blue Bomber head office and intoned the words that fun-loving fans had been dreading.

The plastic-beer-cup snake is dead.

"There will be no tolerance of that type of activity," Bell said at a press conference to announce the snake’s demise.

Time to crush your cups: from now on, stadium security personnel will keep an eye out for "a beer snake gaining momentum" at games and concerts, Bell said, and will ask fans to desist.

The ban comes after a mammoth tendril of stacked beer cups snaked through the Canad Inns Stadium stands at a July 9 losing game against the Toronto Argonauts. That snake, as high as 30 rows, met its demise when fans tore it apart and threw the stacked cups towards the field. The lobbed cups caused some minor injuries, Blue Bombers staff said, and a flurry of complaints from fans who got sprayed with stale backwash or smacked in the ear by flailing plasticware.

Still, one video, taken from across the stadium, made the Internet rounds, racking up 7,000 views and comments such as "I was glad to be a part of this masterpiece."

Blue Bomber brass, however, weren’t so pleased. Days after the game, rumours swirled that the Winnipeg Football Club was considering banning future snakes, nipping a potential game-day tradition in the bud.

The news went national and online forums exploded, with roughly half of fans applauding the move, noting that the snake disrupted the game experience for fans in nearby stands. The other half rallied to save the snake. Some made their stand on a Facebook group called (what else) Save The Beer Cup Snake. In a Free Press poll of more than 3,500 website visitors, 60 per cent voted "hells yeah" to the snake’s survival.

"There is nothing wrong with the snake itself, it’s all in the way the cups are delivered to the stackers and how they are dispersed afterwards," wrote commenter "So what…" on winnipegfreepress.com’s story on the ban. "Stop throwing the damn things and organize it better so it can thrive."

Justin Schneider, lurking on the Save The Beer Cup Snake site, agreed. "Why the beer snake, and not the act of throwing objects… an act which has always been against the rules at Bomber games?" Bomber fan Schneider asked. "The beer snake is great. Throwing cups, or worse yet sleeves of multiple cups, is not. There is a simple compromise here."

But underneath the controversy, and despite the beer-cup beanings and boozy spatterings, why do so many people love the beer snake? "You kind of have to wonder what’s going on in the field if they like to play with beer cups," quipped New York sports psychologist Richard Lustberg when approached with the quandary of the snake-loving fans.

The thing about rowdy fan traditions, Lustberg said, is that they’re best controlled by other entertainment, said Lustberg, who runs the psychologyofsports.com blog. "You want to participate in the event, to the extent the event allows you.

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"What teams have been doing is they’ve been adding on more bells and whistles to the experience. More contests, more sing-alongs. I think that teams need to offset some of the dangerous things by organizing it themselves, so there’s something for everybody. You can ‘Tweet your seat,’ you can dance, you can get up and sing, you can shoot T-shirts into the stands."

Meanwhile, despite the hue and cry over the snake’s merits, the Blue Bombers are standing firm.

"Rather than have it gain unnecessary momentum," Bell said, "we need to take measures now.

"We have to stomp it out."

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca