Suit aimed at NFL's pockets

Once upon a time, a football game was an excuse to have a tailgate party. Now it seems like a tailgate party is an excuse to have a football game.\nHang out at an NFL stadium before the game and one will find people aren't exactly in a hurry to get inside for the opening kickoff. Football is about ruggedness and revelry but not necessarily in that order.\nThe NFL is also pageantry and nuttiness -- six days and 21 hours of buildup for a three-hour game. Civic pride is often expressed in grown men and women exhibiting face paint and costume.\nNow, though, the NFL faces a lawsuit that won't necessarily limit the fun had at the game but symbolizes the social dangers that the tie-in between football and excessive partying can have.\nRonald and Fazila Verni of Cliffside Park, N.J., went to a patch on a Sunday afternoon in Oct. 1999 to pick up their Halloween pumpkin. They took their two-year-old daughter Antonia with them. On the way home, a truck driven by Daniel Lanzaro hit the Vernis.\nAntonia was paralyzed from the neck down.\nLanzaro had just come back from the New York Giants game that day. His blood-alcohol content was three times the legal limit, and a judge sentenced him to five years in prison earlier this year.\nNow the Vernis have filed suit against Lanzaro, the Giants, the concessionaire Aramark at Giants Stadium and the NFL.\nRosemarie Arnold, the attorney for the Vernis, claims that Lanzaro gave a vendor a $10 "tip" in order to get the vendor to sell him six beers at once, violating the two-beer maximum rule at Giants Stadium.\nWhile it certainly makes sense to go after Lanzaro and maybe Aramark, suing the NFL might seem like a bit of a stretch. This could be the classic deep pockets argument at work. After all, how much could the Vernis get from Lanzaro? How much could they get from the team, league or nationally known concessionaire?\nOn the other hand, maybe it says something more about the culture of being an NFL fan. "What the NFL and the Giants are doing is saying 'We're having a party, so park your car in our backyard, drink as much as you want, come into the stadium and get more wasted and then drive home,'" Arnold told The Record of Bergen County last Friday.\nCertainly the NFL isn't the only example of sports-fans drinking. Just drop by the Wrigley Field bleachers later tonight. And whose trip to the Kentucky Derby is complete without drinking a mint julep?\nAlcohol, though, seems to have a greater impact on the NFL's world. Cleveland Browns fans irate with a referee's call during a December 2001 loss to Jacksonville threw plastic bottles onto the field: not just one or two, either.\n"What happened in Cleveland was a by-product of heavy drinking, something that has become an unfortunate pro-football tradition," columnist Mark Madden wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Every weekend at stadiums across America, fans show up hours and hours before kickoff to drink themselves stupid in the parking lot. Then, they enter the stadiums and drink some more."\nIn addition, at silverandblackattack.com, an Oakland Raiders fan Web site, instructions are given on how to smuggle alcohol into Network Associates Coliseum. \nA problem could be opening the gates too early. When a team opens its stadium gates five hours before game time, they might alleviate a potential traffic crush, but they also risk tailgaters grazing forever and getting drunk to no end. Is opening the gates that early an indirect message to come in early and tailgate?\nWell, maybe the NFL is doing a service. Maybe their rationale is that if they are not tailgating and getting slobberknockered in the parking lot, then they are doing it at home and then jumping into a car and driving to the game. \nAnd who can fathom the logistical nightmare of 65,000 people descending onto one place simultaneously? So they feel they need to spread it out somehow.\nThe problem isn't necessarily beer ads, either. Ads won't turn a reasonable or social drinker into a raging, maniacal alcoholic. Becoming a raging alcoholic often involves biological factors out of one's control.\nRather, it's that alcohol for many serves as liquid courage. Football is a tough game, and fun-loving tough guys have served as its greatest characters. Booze removes the insecurities and any lingering passivity.\nSadly, though, the booze is more ritualistic than the football.