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There’s only so much you can do to avoid ending up on television when you attend a sporting event in person, and the same can be said for controlling how people react if you find yourself at the center of a moment that manages to gain some traction online.
However, one fan who recently attended the College World Series championship game has highlighted a particular type of crowd shot that it seems women are disproportionately subjected to, and she’s calling out the network in addition to internet weirdos with the emotional maturity of a fifth grader.
Crowd shots are a staple of virtually every sports broadcast, and the people working the cameras are constantly on the hunt for spectators with the potential to inject some extra entertainment into the proceedings.
As a general rule, if you don’t want to end up on television, then it’s probably a good idea to suppress the urge to engage in any unorthodox eating habits that are going to leave people scratching their heads.
If you ignore that advice, there’s a chance you’ll get a taste of the online fame given to a woman at the U.S. Open who was caught dunking a chicken tender in her soda or the Braves fan who captivated the guys in the broadcast booth with his approach to a cone of soft serve ice cream.
That second clip has a fair amount in common with the one ESPN aired when Texas A&M and Tennessee faced off in the College World Series last week, which featured two female fans licking their ice cream as the broadcast team discussed the 93°F heat in Omaha.
However, there are a couple of key differences: there was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the manner in which they were eating ice cream, and the genders were obviously reversed—a reality that has sparked a larger dialogue about that particular type of crowd shot.
The woman on the left (whose name is presumably Annie based on her TikTok profile) has made it very clear she’s less than thrilled with ESPN for fixating on her and the fellow spectator she identified as her best friend in a video where she put the network on blast while implying it had an ulterior motive for featuring them.
@.anniej4 Replying to @a we choose the bear ❤️ @ESPN #mcws #collegeworldseries #hawktuah #womeninsports
She noted “We all knew what direction that video was going to head in” while noting she’d previously gone out of her way to duck down while eating a hot dog to avoid ending up in a similar situation only to find herself targeted by the “creeps of TikTok” who made suggestive comments and compared her to “Hawk Tuah” Girl and the video started to make the rounds.
While the people who made those comments obviously shoulder the vast majority of the blame, Annie still asserted ESPN is culpable while claiming it has a history of featuring similar shots during games, saying it “can keep it vague enough and the ambiguity is what protects them.”
At the end of the day, there’s only so much ESPN can do to avoid airing situations that might be twisted by viewers who have their minds in the gutter, but when a woman goes out of her way to call attention to a sentiment that others seem to share, it may want to be a bit more deliberate when it comes to filming fans.