The Beer Necessities

We build ballparks named Coors and Miller and Busch. At the same time, as in the disapproving Harvard report, we express all manner of beer and loathing toward sport fans, who are taken for drunken, goalpost-pillaging louts. City officials in Tempe, Ariz., last week complained that the Fiesta Bowl will, for the first time, allow beer sales, presumably necessitating increased security. Iona basketball coach Jeff Ruland last week issued a public apology for offering to provide students of legal drinking age a couple of kegs to fire them up before home games. "To alcohol," as Homer Simpson put it. "The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

As in life, so in sports. And so the question remains: Do we drink because we're at the game, are we at the game to drink, or are drink and spectator sports now so codependent that we're simply emulating W.C. Fields, who advised, "Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite. And, furthermore, always carry a small snake"?