I Had 700-Level Season Tickets at Veterans Stadium and Lived to Tell the Tale

Shawn Wells, left, with a friend on the 700 level of Veterans Stadium. / Photograph courtesy of Shawn Wells

As part of our remembrance of the good, the bad and the ugly that was Veterans Stadium, which we imploded 20 years ago this month, we asked lifelong Philly sports fan Shawn Wells to tell us what it was really like on the infamous 700 level. Read our complete coverage of Veterans Stadium lore here.

I walked into the Eagles ticketing office down at the Vet with my checkbook in my hand. This was 1996. I told the lady behind the desk that I wanted cheap tickets. But I didn’t want to get wet if it was raining, and I wanted to be able to see the Phanavision. She put me in 725, the last row of the 700 level. The seats were under the skyboxes, so if it did rain, we were dry. I wrote out a check for $460: $23 per ticket for two tickets to each game, 10 games. Can you imagine what they’d be worth today?

We were lured to the 700 level because of the tales we’d heard about the place. We were all kids who went to a very strict Catholic school where everything was about penmanship, being quiet, and standing in a ­single-file line. But we’d heard about this place where men could misbehave and get away with it: the 700 level.

This was an entire generation ago. Today, everybody has a cell phone in their hands. Back when we were in the 700 level, nobody did. So people did all sorts of things, and nobody was ever going to go viral for “bad behavior.”

And there was plenty of bad behavior — at times, pure mayhem. Everybody was drunk. And people acted like people do when they’re drunk. There were always fights. Every game. It was a very union-roofer, blue-­collar mentality.

The bathrooms were disgusting. The whole Vet was falling apart, but the bathrooms were the worst. There were puddles of brown pee from people who’d had nothing to drink but beer since 6 a.m. People would pee in the trash cans. The women’s-room lines were so long that we’d have these cute drunk women walking into the men’s room, climbing up onto the sinks, and peeing, all while we cheered them on. It was wild.

When it came to the fights, people acted different than they did on the street. If I was walking down the street and saw somebody beating up a guy in a Cowboys jersey, I would tell him to knock it off. But up there, we were all jerks. I remember one time, this big fat Eagles fan was getting into it with some scrawny Cowboys fan at this really, really cold game. He’s just laying into him. The Cowboys guy goes to kick the fat guy, and the fat guy somehow gets ahold of his shoe. Then the bloody Cowboys fan manages to run away, but now he’s missing a shoe, and it’s wet and 20 degrees outside. The fat guy pauses, looks down at his hand, and then thrusts the shoe into the air like it’s the Vince Lombardi Trophy. And the crowd just goes wild.

I don’t know what this says about me, but it was all just so much fun. The fights. The piss. All of it. Now you have the Linc. The Linc is nice and all. But let’s put it this way: The Vet was your corner bar. The Linc is a microbrewery. I’d pick the corner bar every time.