Opinion: Greek sports spiked

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If you’re heading to Greece for spring break, have a wonderful vacation. But beware of the women’s volleyball hooligans.

One man was killed Thursday and seven others wounded in a skirmish between rival Greek volleyball clubs Panathinaikos Athens and Olympiakos Piraeus; as a result, play in all Greek professional sports has been suspended for two weeks. We’ve all heard about the open warfare that can break out between rival countries in soccer matches, but seriously -- women’s volleyball?

Sports are inherently tribal (my high school/college/city is better than yours, because my steroid-enhanced gladiators can beat up your steroid-enhanced gladiators), but in Greece and some other countries it’s so tribal that the fan experience becomes something like gang warfare. After Thursday’s volleyball riot, police raided supporters’ clubs and found an arsenal of makeshift weapons like pickaxes (they probably weren’t being used for digging), iron bars and baseball bats. Repeat after me, Greek sports fans: Styrofoam fingers, good. Weapons of mass destruction, bad.

Maybe that’s just the way it is in homogeneous societies (in this country, we like to divide our gangs up by race rather than sports affiliation). Or maybe the land that spawned the Olympics just takes its volleyball a little too seriously for its own good.