Responsibility for effect of cheers

Some thoughts on the relationship between fan behavior and althete behavior in the contex of last Friady's NBA brawl.
[www.chicagotribune.com]
You can decide whether you think it is relevant to the atmosphere in Lynah.

The guy in the crowd who threw the cup was wrong, but once you (the player) walk in to the crowd you are fair game, especially when you are just swinging at anything that moves. He's lucky it wasn't at the old Gahden, he would have been in for quite a fight.

Just a reminder to guys like Age who think they are above the law. Even if you do something that you think is relatively harmless (i.e. throwing toothpaste at a player), it could end up in disaster.

I was only giving the toothpaste back to the player who shot it at me.

[Q]CowbellGuy Wrote:

I was only giving the toothpaste back to the player who shot it at me.[/q]



too bad i couldnt do that with the puck i caught in the brow since i was bleeding all over the floor next to the zamboni

I think another important distinction needs to be made between getting hit in the head with soda and ice and hitting someone in the face with the force of a 200 pound ripped basketball player body behind that fist. a bit different...

The Sports Illustrated cover piece on the Pistons / Pacers donnybrook was a sobering, if deadline-driven, indictment of both the goons in the audience and the ones on the playing court.

It may be time even within Lynah to reconsider the line between supporting the team and being out of control. Cheers, of course. Witty and even rude but funny insults, why not - we need to keep pace with the cunning linguists of Duke and Stanford and Wisconsin. But shouting out a player's (or player's parent's) phone number, or insulting his girlfriend by name, running a George Carlin seven-dirty-words litany of cheers (knowing there are kids and townies in the audience), or calling someone with an arrest a jailbird, does that start you down the slippery slope toward something dark and possibly violent?

(Maybe some of it is situational: When Penn was being blown out by Magic Johnson's Michigan State in the NCAA semifinals (quarters? it's been a while) and the Penn fans shouted, "That's all right, that's okay, you're going to work for us some day," okay, that's funny, but what if a white suburban high school gets rolled over by an inner city school and changes it to, "That's all right, that's okay, you're going to pump our gas some day" ... )

SI notes that with the organ music and T-shirt cannon and dribbling contests during timeouts, the game is just one part of an entertainment package in pro sports and maybe in some big time college sports. Maybe that creates an atmosphere where the fans feel less restrained about any behavior.

Interesting how the early TV commentary on the Ron Artest punching competition on places such as ESPN took the players' side. Are they too used to seeing the players' side because more than a few are ex-players?

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

But shouting out a player's (or player's parent's) phone number, or insulting his girlfriend by name, running a George Carlin seven-dirty-words litany of cheers (knowing there are kids and townies in the audience), or calling someone with an arrest a jailbird, does that start you down the slippery slope toward something dark and possibly violent? [/q]

So far this year, we've been lucky that our "fans" have yet to dive down to that level once more. The better fans know there are better ways to intimidate the opposing team without having to be like that, or to throw things on the ice (aside from newspapers, fish, and toothpaste at the appropriate times).

> But shouting out a player's (or player's parent's) phone number, or insulting his girlfriend by name, running a George Carlin seven-dirty-words litany of cheers (knowing there are kids and townies in the audience), or calling someone with an arrest a jailbird

In the first three instances, no reconsideration of the line is needed -- all of those actions were always clearly over the line of Lynah Faithfulness and well into Clueless, Classlessness. In the case of the jailbird (cough "Wrong piece of wood!" cough), it's fair game. If the guy was idiot enough to get himself arrested and the coach was lax enough to reward him with ice time, then they reap what they sow.

[Q]Greg Berge Wrote:
In the case of the jailbird (cough "Wrong piece of wood!" cough), it's fair game. If the guy was idiot enough to get himself arrested and the coach was lax enough to reward him with ice time, then they reap what they sow.[/q]

Hear, hear. Similarly, UVM opened themselves up for all the elephant walk jokes.

The columnist, Eric Zorn, does a nice job delving into the pschye of beyond-reasonable sports fanatics:

>>> Just enjoy with me the transformation of the slightly built fan in the dark golf shirt--several media reports have said his name is Mike Ryan--from punk loudmouth idiot jerk to terrified little wimp.... Police later say that Ryan didn't throw the beverage; it's still unclear exactly why Artest rushes past at least one other fan to get to him. But at that instant on the tape, he is every moron who has ever cursed out opposing players from the safety and ostensible sanctity of the sidelines. ... He's every coward, every drunk, every Big Man phony bully who thinks a ticket to a game entitles him to say whatever abusive, contemptuous belittling thing that pops into his head without risking the everyday consequences of such remarks.... his eyes widen and his mouth forms a startled O in an instant as Artest's scrambling approach makes it clear he's about to smash through the imaginary protective barrier behind which obnoxious fans hide.

>>> Every fan needs to have a Mike Ryan moment of realization: No matter how much you paid for your ticket or how much the athletes earn, it's gutless and disgraceful to hide behind a mob, a security guard or the protection of league rules to shout something at an opposing player you wouldn't say to his face in the parking lot.

Yes and no.

The difference is that the rules are different inside an arena than on a street corner or in the parking lot. Professional athletes get paid millions for the product on the court or field or rink. Part of the reason they get paid is to put up with heckling fans and not attack them in the stands.

When two hockey players start fighting, they get 5 minutes in the box. If they were to do the same thing in the parking lot, they'd be arrested for assault. I don't see why the same doesn't apply to fans.

[Q]Dart~Ben Wrote:

The difference is that the rules are different inside an arena than on a street corner or in the parking lot. Professional athletes get paid millions for the product on the court or field or rink. Part of the reason they get paid is to put up with heckling fans and not attack them in the stands.[/q]

True, but they don't get paid to have things thrown at them by fans while they are on the court/ice/field/whatever. Well, except for maybe Colgate players being paid via scholarships to have toothpaste thrown at them.

Can we allow progressive amounts of abuse relative to earnings? Should an A-Rod at $20M be required to put up with more abuse than Dave LeNeveu making, what, perhaps a couple hundred thousand this year tending goal in Utah? Does a $100 ticket entitle you to heckle more than a $15 standing room ticket? Does being married to someone who makes your life living hell entitle you to heckle more than someone in a good relationship?

Heckling is always part of the game whether it's something witty (give me a minute to think of an original example), or repeptitive ("Leo, you're still a bum". But there's that slippery slope where it's okay (or at least tradition) at one end and clearly always wrong at the other. The trick is finding the crossover point.

Heckling --> insults --> crude verbal insults --> physical insults (a box of popcorn scattered in the direction of a player) --> physical danger (beer bottle, thrown chair, stalking a player after the game) --> outright assault (going after Shaq in the parking lot; wait, probably not).

In the case of the Ron Artest incident or a future incident like that, I think the arena and NBA are going to wind up defendants for failure to provide adequate security. Just as the NHL would suffer lawsuits from fans concussed or killed by pucks going out of the ends of the rink had it not put up the end nets. I hate that the nets mess up sight lines (and I hate that at my kids' rink, there are nets all the way around, which I think is overkill), but that's something we have to live with. That or get seats down low behind the glass and hope the glass is new.

Security can't just be retirees in polyester blazers.

The pro sports, espcially the NBA, need to continue and expand their education efforts for the man-child types who're stepping directly into the show out of high school, or for that matter coming out of college without much education. It's already tough enough that a lot of them (most all of them) have been fawned over by fans, parents, and girlfriends. They don't have enough sense of reality. (Hello, Kobe.) Kobe for his part says Shaq spent, what, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, on parties and women for hire. That makes them more inclined to see themselves as not being affected by rules or laws.

Civility is taking a beating at all levels. A neighbor was banned from coaching and urged not to even attend youth sports events involving his child because he became abusive at refs making $20 a game (the ref's taking money for being in sports, same as A-Rod, just fewer zero's after the amount). You've got the youth hockey coach / parent killed in an altercation in EMass. Etcetera. I wonder (and hope it's not the case) that maybe Cornell fans doing the Harvard fish-tossing are close to the edge. So far it's fish not beer cans and it's before not during the game and so maybe that's okay. But are the fans cheering on our team or are we trying to force ourself into the game itself?

Maybe this is a reach, but a recent article (NT Times Sunday magazine?) says soldiers have a problem killing other soldiers, so they're trained to dehumanize the enemy, for instance thinking of shooting at the vehicle (containing soldiers) rather than thinking of killing who's inside. Maybe as players become more star-like and remote (and rich) and tattooed, they're more and more different from the fans, so it's harder for the fan to think of the player as just like yourself only a little more athletic. As SI pointed out in its article, the NBA gets blacker and brasher each year compared to the fan base. Maybe there's some depersonalization or dehumanizing at work that fans have figured out on their own.

So when I go to a game, it's fun to hear the chant " ... Screw BU," but when I'm away from an arena, I wonder how close Cornell ... or Duke ... or Maryland fans have come to the slope in college sports. That closed arena holds players, parents, girlfriends, old alumni, young alumni, impressionable kids, seniors who have to turn off their hearing aids with all the noise, maybe the university president, the other team's fans. Can everybody have their own way?

These things (all things) are cyclical. This is *nothing* compared to fan behavior at baseball games in the 19th century.

I agree with you and disagree with Zorn. While there are some things that fans say that are over the top, he's basically saying that fans shouldn't heckle or insult players at all unless they're big and strong enough to fight them in case the player, or thug in Artest's case, takes offense. That's total BS IMHO.

[Q]Greg Berge Wrote:

These things (all things) are cyclical. This is *nothing* compared to fan behavior at baseball games in the 19th century.[/q]

You mean like when they shot the umpire?

Steve, the gist of the full article - my interpretation - was that loudmouth fans (of all sizes) perhaps assumed they could say anything at all and get away with it because athletes don't go into the stands. You and I can bang on the glass in the zoo separating us from the tiger knowing the glass is pretty strong. Same thing with the fans, except this one time, the imaginary glass curtain was breached by Ron Artest.

Eric Zorn, the writer, did note some of the fans mouthing off in the Pistons-Pacers game were small of stature, but I think that was a tangental point. Well, maybe not. If you're small, you got stomped by big guys as a kid and perhaps 30 years later you figure the stadium is one place where little guys can talk back to big guys. (Hey, it works in publishing, too.) Some of the noisest dogs are the little tiny ones who only yap when they think they're safe from the harm of the outside world.

[Q]billhoward Wrote:

Steve, the gist of the full article - my interpretation - was that loudmouth fans (of all sizes) perhaps assumed they could say anything at all and get away with it because athletes don't go into the stands. You and I can bang on the glass in the zoo separating us from the tiger knowing the glass is pretty strong. Same thing with the fans, except this one time, the imaginary glass curtain was breached by Ron Artest.
[/q]

So you're comparing Artest to an animal?

[Q]Greg Berge Wrote:
In the first three instances, no reconsideration of the line is needed -- all of those actions were always clearly over the line of Lynah Faithfulness and well into Clueless, Classlessness. In the case of the jailbird (cough "Wrong piece of wood!" cough), it's fair game. If the guy was idiot enough to get himself arrested and the coach was lax enough to reward him with ice time, then they reap what they sow.[/q]
So a "Your goalie is porous, who can blame Morris?" sign for Clarkson would be over the line.

I didn't read the whole article because it has restricted access, so I may have missed some of the context. Zorn's quote you that published, however, carries a "might makes right" message. Based on what he said, it would be OK for prize fighters in the stands to go as far as they wanted especially if they're heckling smaller players, because after all they could back it up with fisticuffs if they said it to the player's face in a dark alley. But the geeky computer programmers and other 98 pound weaklings better keep their mouths shut, because the players might come and beat the crap out of them if they're not careful.

Yeah, the mindset of a tiger when some dumbass is beating on the glass. That Tiger would like nothing better than rip that persons head off, like how Artest reacted when he went into the stands.

I love you guys, but geez...nothing like a little rib poke, huh?

One small gesture toward civility in sports was here on eLynah: In discussing signs to hoist and cheers to yell at the Army game, a couple posters said, in effect, "Leave out the stuff about Iraq. It's our army." That would not have happened a generation ago during the Vietnam war. Back then, to a lot of people, all soldiers, even unwilling conscripts, were baby killers.

You can, as John Kerry said, support the warriors regardless of your support for the war. Or for the guy now in the White House for four more years.

Yes, but there were also those who didn't care and wanted to let them have it with everything.

I had people tell me I was unpatriotic for wanting to bring a Canadian flag for the US-Under 18 game, they're a friggin hockey team, not armed services.

[Q]Rob NH Wrote:

I had people tell me I was unpatriotic for wanting to bring a Canadian flag for the US-Under 18 game, they're a friggin hockey team, not armed services.[/q]

At the Michigan State games, an older woman screamed at us after we shouted "RED!" that we were disrespecting the country or something. Geez, it's not like we were shouting "sucks" after "Knights" or anything. We only do that once or twice a year.

[Q]Will Wrote:

Rob NH Wrote:

I had people tell me I was unpatriotic for wanting to bring a Canadian flag for the US-Under 18 game, they're a friggin hockey team, not armed services.[/Q]
At the Michigan State games, an older woman screamed at us after we shouted "RED!" that we were disrespecting the country or something. Geez, it's not like we were shouting "sucks" after "Knights" or anything. We only do that once or twice a year.[/q]
Personally, I'm far more offended by the schools that change the lyrics at the end, such as "and the home of the SIOUX!", putting emphasis on one word is far different than changing an actual lyric. And as for Clarkson, well, it's true damn it.