SPORTS FANS WHO RUINED SPORTS

Sporting events have one thing in common with concerts: A few douchebag fans can ruin everything. They're running onto the field, they're blowing some kind of plastic horn in your ear, they're throwing sh*t down onto the playing surface.

It kind of makes you stop and wonder, who the hell started this? And why did other people decide to copy it?

Freddie "Saddam" Maake invented the Vuvuzela

            

Mankind's greatest shame.

The Vuvuzela has never had a honeymoon period, It was immediately despised by millions of people after its inception. Popularized during the 2010 World Cup, the vuvuzela is a yard-long plastic horn that produces a sound like swarm of angry wasps built a hive inside your skull. The sound is deafening and monotonous, and the vuvuzelas themselves are notorious for spreading communicable diseases across stadiums jam-packed with people, thanks to the fine mist of spit flying from the other end.

Stadiums in the United States did what they could to ban them even before the first miserable squeal from the upper decks. But we really ought to consider ourselves fortunate because before 2010, these instruments had already existed in obscurity for over 40 years.

               

FREDDIE MAAKE

In 1965, at age 9, South African soccer fan Freddie Maake created the first vuvuzela by ripping the rubber ball off the end of his bike horn and blowing into the metal tube. The sound was so loud and obtrusive he decided it would be perfect for sporting events. He played it for local soccer matches, and gradually it took off among other people eager to be as loud as possible and with as little self-awareness. Maake started selling them and finally developed the huge plastic version with the help of a manufacturing company, primarily so that they could pump more of these nightmare sticks into the world quicker and more cheaply.

Freddie Maake: The sole reason the sun is so hot in Africa,  God is punishin us for his  sins

Maake didn't just relegate his vuvuzela use to sports, either. He began taking the vuvuzela everywhere, even getting detained by airport security for trying to blow it on his first ever plane ride. He originally called it the Boogieblast but changed the name in 1992 in honor of Nelson Mandela's release (the name means "welcome", "unite" and "celebration").

While the intent is nice, Maake couldn't have intentionally picked a product more incongruous with any of those words. Honoring Mandela with a vuvuzela is a little like honoring your hero by stabbing him in his eardrums and then sneezing in his mouth. But for now the small percentage of people out there who love making noise like a 2-year-old hitting a pan are enough to keep stadiums filled with the noise pollution from these plastic hunks of "celebration."

For better for worse

 If and only if Freddie Maake dint exist, South Africa wont have been the first and only host nation in the history of the FIFA world cup to bow out at the group stages.