Overzealous Pittsburgh police arrested a Nashville Predators fan for throwing a catfish onto the ice at Monday’s Stanley Cup Finals opener in Pittsburgh, as is tradition at Predators games.
- Disorderly conduct (I mean maybe, but still, come on)
- Possessing an instrument of crime (the catfish … seriously)
- Disrupting a meeting (lol)
The man, Jake Waddell, is now a celebrity in Nashville, where people have offered to pay his citations and help him in court. Waddell, who describes himself as a “dumb redneck with a bad idea,” described how the plan went down in a radio interview, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette got some great quotes.
Here’s how it all went down:
- Waddell was at his in-laws’ new Pittsburgh for Memorial Day weekend and thought it would be fun to throw a catfish at the game.
- He bought a catfish in Tennessee and brought it to his in-laws’. It was too big, so he ran it over with his truck: “The head was too damn big,” Waddell said. “No matter how much I ran it over with my truck, the head was too big.”
- Waddell vacuum-sealed the fish and put it in compression shorts.
- He went to the bathroom and put it under a free shirt that the’d received at the gate.
- After he threw the fish, Waddell admitted he was taken aback by all the Penguins fans yelling at him. But when he was taken back by overzealous stadium security, he made a joke (that wasn’t received well): “They’re all staring at me, trying to make it real serious. I know nothing is gonna happen here. So the guy’s like, ‘I hope you’re satisfied.’ And I said ‘Yeah, I do too.’ So that really ticked them off.”
- He thinks the charges against him are dumb: “Now they come out with a couple other trumped-up charges, which are BS. I mean, a catfish isn’t an instrument of whatever-the-hell-they’re-saying-it-was, and I didn’t disrupt a meeting. It was an athletic event.”
Make sure to check out the whole piece—Waddell appears to be a good sport, and the city of Pittsburgh seems to need a chill pill.
