In an ongoing effort to insure fair and balanced commentary, I want to take a moment to give a shout-out to the Southlake Police Department. There were numerous incidents Saturday night that could have resulted in over-zealous response from the Southlake PD. Directed at us, the fans. One of my greatest fears, from the moment the deal was announced in January, up through the first couple of games, was that the Yokel Factor was going to land someone, possibly me, in jail. For those that don’t know, enough time has passed that I can talk about it without exploding. I got thrown out of the Dallas Cup U-19 final 8 minutes in because I fought for our right as USian supporters to stand, just like the 1000 Tigres supporters on the other side of Lake Highlands stadium. When our Rights as Supporters, as sanctioned by the Soccer Gawdz, clash with the consensus reality paradigm of the police of any municipality, I am prone to not back down. However, not since the PK on Pollard in ’96 against City have I felt like I might go to jail before the Dallas Cup incident. So, in the lead up to Saturday night, I hinted to the Wife that I might be very very late getting home, due to a possible detour to the Stacyland holding tank. But I was extremely surprised at how well things went. Before the DC game, we had a few instances of free speech violation, but with the makeup of the Dragon crowd, that was not unexpected. Last Saturday, the Southlake PD let us scream and taunt DemaGoon, StoichGoon, and InnocuousRay repeatedly, incessantly, and at high volume, even while they were exiting the field to the locker rooms behind the Proletariat stand. Most importantly, during the 45 minutes outside the DC team bus, they let us do our thing without intervening. And based on the level of tension, they could have easily found justification in their minds to intervene. Well done, Southlake PD. Now, about your Athletic Director’s hard-on for his precious gridlines…… -bs
Good point. The police and DMZ security have been very good. There have been occasional times when they wanted the language toned down (mostly f-bombs) but they approached the individual and explained without going into macho posturing. We are not able to do a few things we did at the Cotton Bowl but the security there was awful and these are very professional. A lot of officers and security folk even look like they are enjoying things. Hopefully DMZ gets first dibs at Frisco.