This week in Philly history: Eagles fans pelt Santa Claus with snowballs
On Dec. 15, 1968, Philadelphia Eagles fans threw snowballs at a man dressed as Santa Claus during a holiday show held at halftime of a game against the Minnesota Vikings.
Snow fell early on that cold and windy December day. By game time, the temperature at Franklin Field sunk to 28 degrees, and the wind chill hit 15.
And the Philadelphia Eagles were a bad football team. They started the 1968-69 season 0-11, and by the last game they were sitting at 2-11.
By halftime of that last game, on Dec. 15, 1968, they were tied with the Minnesota Vikings, 7-7, ahead of a Christmas pageant for fans.
But the guy they booked to don the gay apparel that fateful year was a no-show in the snow.
Eagles staff spotted 19-year-old Frank Olivo in the stands at the 40-yard line.
The South Philly native had a tradition. He attended the last game of the year and dressed up as old St. Nick.
He was short, and his suit wasn’t pristine, but he was an imperfect solution to an unfortunate problem.
So the staff members asked the recent Bishop Neumann High School graduate to save their annual Christmas parade, and be Santa Claus.
All he had to do, they told him, was to walk and wave.
But the fans in the stands were in such a bad mood about the Eagles' terrible year that the last thing they wanted to see was Christmas cheer.
The boos came first.
And then angry Eagles fans let loose what a cousin later described as a “tsunami of snowballs” when Olivo walked the length of the field with the cheerleaders as loudspeakers played “Here Comes Santa Claus.”
As he was dodging and ducking as scores of the 54,000 fans in attendance launched snowballs at him, Olivo focused on one fan who carefully molded the snow and launched the projectile at him.
He pointed up at the thrower and said: “You’re not getting anything for Christmas.”
The Eagles lost to the Vikings, 24-17, and would end the 14-game season with a 2-12 record. They were bad, but they weren’t the worst, and lost the opportunity for the first overall NFL draft pick, which went to the Buffalo Bills.
The team selected USC running back and future hall of famer, O.J. Simpson.
In 2008, the Eagles hosted a 40th-anniversary celebration of the incident at Lincoln Financial Field.
That’s right, the Philadelphia Eagles hosted an anniversary celebration of one of the most over-dramatized incidents in American sports history.
“I’ve gotten my 15 minutes of fame for the last 40 years,” Olivo told an Inquirer columnist.
Olivo died in 2015 at the age of 66.
Former Gov. Ed Rendell, who was at the game, was quoted in Olivo’s obituary in The Inquirer: “He is indelibly etched in Philadelphia sports history.”