April 06, 2017
Baseball is back, which means so is one of my favorite pastimes: Flipping on the Phillies game and my roommate syncing it up with the radio broadcast to enjoy the playful back and forth between Scott Franzke and Larry Andersen.
By about the sixth inning of Wednesday night's stinker of a game, I went from peacefully enjoying some weeknight baseball to ripping my hairs out individually. That's thanks to the number of Reds fans who were doing the unoriginal, insufferable Ric Flair "woo" throughout the entirety of the broadcast.
Please, @Reds fans, for the love of Pete, stop the wooing.
— Joey Slovin (@joeyslovin) April 6, 2017
Listen at the very beginning of this clip of Joey Votto's home run last night:
It continued happening, nonstop, throughout the entire freaking game.
This has been a problem at sporting events as of late. Last fall, some Flyers players expressed irritation at the periodic "wooing" during home games. You can hear it faintly in the background during a fight in a game against the Calgary Flames:
Flyers forward Jake Voracek was understandably annoyed, asking fans if they were "*bleeping* 10 years old."
But doing the "woo" — the calling card of a man who played a fake sport — is at least semi-appropriate for hockey, a fast-paced, noisy and violent sport.
3 days into the 2017 season and if the Ric Flair "Woo!" is a Thing this season like it is in the Reds stadium right now, I'm DONE.
— ugh whatever 😶 (@MilfParade) April 6, 2017
Baseball? Yeah, not so much. In a game defined in large part by its tranquility, doing the "woo" is equivalent to the "jackass" heckler in "Happy Gilmore."
Reds fans have apparently been "wooing" for a few years now; one Reddit thread from 2015 asks fellow Cincy faithful to please "stop f***ing wooing."
Luckily, after Thursday afternoon, the Phillies won't be back at Great American Ballpark for the rest of the season. But so help me God if I hear a fellow Phillies fan obnoxiously "wooing" at a home game I’m at this year, I won’t physically confront you (considering I have the physique of Gumby), but I will report you to stadium staff and write about how awful you are on the internet.
