The Cackling Magpie of Browns Stadium

So anyway, this lady (via SportsFilter) has apparently gotten herself into some hot water with the University of Tennessee for cheering too loudly at the Vols football games this season. Ordinarily, I'd say people were out of their minds to complain about something like this, but that's before I spent two seasons in the same section as the Cackling Magpie of Cleveland Browns Stadium.

She showed up about a year after we moved to the section, and her fingernails on a chalk board voice will forever be seared into my brain. It wasn't so much that the Magpie cackled "c'mon Browns!, c'mon Charlie!" before every single play and during TV timeouts, it was more her overwhelming ignorance of the game coupled with her compulsion to share that ignorance at 165 decibels that drove me insane. As far as she was concerned, every incomplete pass thrown by the Browns since 2004 was solely the result of interference, and the Browns never held, facemasked or jumped offside. Every field goal was good, every spot was bad, and every play call that didn't gain 20 yards or was a running play was stupid. (Okay, she was usually right about the play calling).

I'll admit that the fact that Ms. Magpie was coyote ugly didn't help matters, nor did the fact that she ratted smokers out to the ushers (a classic a-hole move) and insisted that they toss them out. But the most unnerving thing about Ms. Magpie was the Svengali-like hold that she appeared to have over her boyfriend, whom we learned --again at 165 decibels--actually owned the ticket that she used to find her perch in the stadium week after week.

The dynamic between her and her boyfriend was beyond bizarre. I mean, the guy didn't appear to have been the victim of an industrial accident or an illegal alien dating her for a shot at a Green Card, so I'll never understand what he found so irresistible about the Magpie. I guess it's like Woody Allen said when people asked him why he was dating his girlfriend's daughter: "the heart wants what the heart wants." Uh-huh. Well my heart wanted to get the Hell away from her, and thanks to my buddy the Starfish's sweet talking of the Browns ticket office, we did just that.

I went to my first NFL game when I was 9 years old at War Memorial Stadium in Buffalo (aka, The Rockpile). At that game, I learned that anti-social behavior and the NFL go together like beer and chicken wings. Somebody lit a program on fire and threw it down toward our section. It hit the lady in front of us, setting her early 70s hairdo ablaze. My dad used his coat to put the fire out. Since then, I've seen just about everything from foul mouthed drunks to section-wide brawls to the beer bottle bowl. I was able to take everything in stride, until I met the Magpie.