Here was an interesting passage from a piece on David Beckham's return to the LA Galaxy; he was on loan this spring with Italian soccer powerhouse AC Milan and grudgingly came back to LA after failing to buy out his contract.
The fans weren't happy and Beckham got into a trash talking match at halftime with a drunk fan from the "Riot Squad" rowdy section.
Riot Squad member Bob Ramsey, a theology professor and minister from Glendora, said he talked to fans who were closest to where the fan jumped the wall. "I haven't talked to everybody, but no one remembers hearing anything beyond 'scum,' 'traitor,' those kinds of things. Nothing about his family," Ramsey said.
Ramsey said he thought what triggered Beckham's reaction was a fan abusing a Beckham jersey, according to the report.
"We were giving him the business as soon as he came out for warmups," Ramsey said, according to the Times. "His first reaction was to give us a thumbs-up and I thought, 'OK, he's going to play along with it and just realize that we're going to kind of give him a hard time here and he's going to have to play through it.'
That's not a great Christian witness, going out of your way to "give him a hard time." I know that we can get that way in a sports context, where we'll act jerkier when were in a stadium than we're in a grocery story. However, that doesn't make it right.
I googled Mr. Ramsey, and he has a stale blog not updated since last August. He's a pastor at Garden Grove Friends Church. Friends are what the rest of us oft call Quakers; the branch of Friends that GGFC is affiliated with is one of the more evangelical branches of the Friends. They're conservative on theology but lean left on other issues, as they are pacifists and poverty-fighters, so they don't fit the Southern-Baptist style evangelical paradigm.
What's a nice pacifist Friend doing in the Riot Squad?
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