The NFL’s Arizona Cardinals, who alongside the Tennessee Titans are the team even the most diehard professional football fans are likely to forget is in the league, have issued an apology of sorts to a season ticket holder for over three decades who was ordered to remove her MAGA hat before entering State Farm Stadium in Glendale, prior to their September 15, 2024, game against the Los Angeles Rams.
Susan Rosener and her husband were making their way through the security checkpoints when she heard a female security member shout, “You can’t bring that in here.” She was referring to her black MAGA hat.
Rosener asked the security member, who works for a third-party company, why she couldn’t wear the hat to the game, she was told it violated the stadium’s policies on prohibited items.
“She’s like, ‘no political hats or shirts.’ And I said, I haven’t heard that at all. And I said, that doesn’t make sense to me. And she goes, ‘I said, Take your hat off,'” Rosener recalled.
It gets worse, KPNX-TV reported:
Her husband then posed a question to the security person, “If she takes it off, can we get in?” They were told the hat had to be discarded in a nearby trash can, or else they couldn’t enter State Farm Stadium.
“In retrospect, I wish I would have stood my ground a little bit, but I wasn’t sure what the repercussions would be, and my husband would kill me if I did something with the season tickets or that jeopardizes them somehow,” she said.
Someone needs to have a chat with the husband regarding priorities.
According to KPNX-TV, the Cardinals have issued a “who, us?” apology:
In an isolated incident at Sunday’s game, a stadium security member misunderstood a policy on prohibited items. Like most venues, “signage, posters, flags, or displays that are….political in nature” are not permitted. However, that did not apply in this instance. Moving forward we will work to provide clarity to all stadium personnel in these situations. We have also reached out to the individual involved to communicate that their experience was not consistent with our policies and practices and to apologize for that.
Susan Rosener has mentioned the incident on Twitter.
She has also discussed the matter at length with faith, sports, and culture podcast host, Jon Root.
She mentioned that while she has been contacted by a manager with the Cardinals season ticket office, who apologized for the confusion, the statement sent to a Phoenix television station by Mark Dalton, Senior VP of Public Relations for the Cardinals, has not been sent to her. Rosener also detailed that while the statement listed what happened to her as an “isolated incident,” she had heard otherwise, as have others.
A bit of cognitive thinking is suggested. It is within the realm of possibility that the third-party security guard misinterpreted the Cardinals’ stated prohibition of political signage within the stadium as applying to apparel regardless of the candidate supported. It’s possible, but it would be a stretch, given the guard’s overreaction. It is entirely within the realm of possibility that the guard received scant instruction in such matters, in which case a training failure is as much to blame as excessive aggression on the guard’s part. Or, the guard was being a rent-a-cop, power-tripping, Trump and Trump supporter-hating jerk. Now, where could one get the idea for behaving in such a fashion?
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What requires little thought is the even more minuscule amount of thought the Cardinals put into their public mea culpa. Even some stock issue, “we welcome fans of all persuasions and regardless of political views we are all Americans and members of Bird Nation” blather would have carried more weight than the featherweight, mealy-mouthed mush the Cardinals sent to a television station and not the aggrieved party. Who, having been a season ticket holder for decades, for a team boasting a whopping one conference championship in the 36 years it has played in Arizona, deserves a medal and a statue in her honor, along with a genuine apology. At a time when the NFL is reaching new heights of fan interest, such missteps are not affordable.
