the only thing that pisses me off about this article is now the school is gonna overreact and public safety is undoubtedly gonna come straight to me before the game Tuesday, if they don't come to me at the soccer game tomorrow, and reem me out for a chant I didn't start nor partake in (I didn't care that they chanted it, but the "u of a" chants were embarrassingly loud enough that at that point we were just adding to that noise)
Im on my phone and im tired of having this debate every single season so ill try to just keep this short and most likely wont even look at this thread again. First of all, since most of you didn't even hear the chants, you're taking lennys extreme sensationalism and treating it as gospel. There were 2 groups of arizona fans who began heckling the student section UNPROVOKED before the game even started and didn't stop all game. I would see them in my peripheral staring at us and saying stuff to us in the middle of a play! All these 30 something year old losers cared about was getting drunk and heckling us. I went to security early in the game and told them that this is without a doubt gonna escalate and to tell the arizona fans to knock it off so it doesn't get to that point, and they basically reemed me out and started to already place blame on us (this is before we even chanted anything at them, most of us were just trying to ignore them). Later in the game is when they started heckling us again, pointing and starting the "u of a" chant, at which point about half the students chanted back at this specific group while pointing at them "you are gay" (same thing goes for the suck my johnny chant, where maybe 30% of the students, if that, chanted it). So we didn't even chant "u of gay" like lenny said and we didn't just decide to randomly chant that directed towards the court or something throughout the game like he's trying to imply.
We've had this argument every season since I've been a student so im not gonna get into the moral debate about how offensive the chant is or what the intent of the chant is and whether its right or wrong. But if you think that a vulgar chant from a bunch of college kids at a basketball game is at all indicative of how educated they/we are and is a poor reflection on the student body of this university than you're just as naive and ignorant as you claim the students are for chanting things like that. Any student section in america would/do chant vulgar/offensive things in those situations and I've never once thought that any group of riled up college kids at a basketball game doing so would in any way represent the university or their education. For you people that generalize like this, you all have an open invitation to grab a beer with myself and any of the core students before a game and actually get to know us and you might be surprised to find out that we're not a bunch of classless neanderthals, and that most of us are actually pretty damn smart and a bunch of real cool dudes.
Lastly, for the people who use the same "its unoriginal and dumb, you should be more clever" argument every time and want us to be like the cameron crazies, just get a grip already and get over yourselves, we're not duke, unc, kentucky, etc, and we never will be. We're not a fan boy side show there to entertain you. I happen to think we come up with alot of clever stuff that never even gets mentioned here. The ones who keep making this argument are the ones that would criticize anything we do as not clever enough or whatever. And if you took the chance to get to know us you'd find that the majority of our student core are genuine college basketball/st johns fans who grew up watching this program, not a bunch of bro's wearing sunglasses in the dark who support their school because its the cool thing to do. There are times throughout the game where myself and many others are actually just focused on the game, not trying to think of a cool clever chant for every possession to keep all of you happy. And for the record, we've all spoken already about needing new chants on offense so we don't chant "let's go johnnies" all game and we had several new chants this past week but since there weren't many students (and since none of you showed up) you didn't hear them. And I like to chant defense more often than "ooooooo" because its easier for the rest of the crowd to participate in that and IMO sounds much better if the entire crowd chants it in unison as opposed to the students yelling "ooooo" and the crowd just making noise. But ofcourse the crowd does neither so its a moot point. Its amazing that so many of you are so quick to criticize and apparently have so many better ideas, yet the only time our fans make any noise is for a damn t-shirt toss. Maybe if we can get our crowd to actually stand/yell/chant occassionally with the students i'd take these criticisms more seriously (and this obviously isn't directed at the fans here who do actually show up and make noise). But until then, most of you should be thankful that the team is finally getting very respectable student support because without us the games would sound like a damn morgue.
