Pull no punches: Fans at Fault

[Evilmav2]

Pull no punches: fans at fault

DAN LE BATARD

dlebatard@herald.com


It was ugly and awful and historically staining, and now, it will get worse as the media machine cranks up and the wailing begins about how our millionaire athletes are spoiled, entitled and out of control.

But the fans are more to blame for the riot in Detroit than those players are. Not to make this too playground childish, but, Mommy, they started it.

Ron Artest doesn't lose what little is left of his mind and charge into those stands if some dope doesn't hurl a cup and hit him in the head first.

It is lazy to say it is the responsibility of the athletes to remain rational, calm and professional in these instances. But you might not remain so rational, calm and professional if someone came into your emotion-and-intensity-soaked workplace and hit you in the head with something. And you might not remain so rational, calm and professional if you saw an angry mob surrounding your scared friend in a fight, either.

Don't make the rules different for the athletes than you would make them for yourself.

You don't throw chairs and beer and ice and soda and garbage at athletes or anybody else. And, if you step on the court at any time, especially during an NBA fight, you deserve to get punched in the face.

LOOK BUT DON'T TOUCH

You are a spectator, there to watch, not participate, no matter how interactive we try to make our games or how often we try to live vicariously through our athletes. You can cheer and applaud and paint your face and feel like you are helping with your emotion, but once you stick your hand in the cage at the zoo, you aren't allowed to be surprised or outraged or hurt if it gets bitten.

The league won't come out and say this, of course. Commissioner David Stern won't step up and say, ''Our fans really need to stop being idiots.'' Why? Because they are his customers. You don't offend the customers. And that is just one of the ways money seeps into this mess. The customer is always right, even when the customer is so very clearly wrong.

Artest clouds things here -- namely, his reputation and the perception of him. He is a lunatic and deserves to be suspended for a dozen or more games, but don't go to the easy place and blame him for everything. But let's eliminate him from the equation to prove how perceptions and passions distort these things. Let's say Dwyane Wade had been hit in the head and reacted by looking for a fight? Or Shaq? Or a white guy like Dirk Nowitzki?

Are we as angry? Is it any more wrong for them to be hit in the head? Doesn't matter. Now, the players will get big suspensions and huge fines, reinforcing the notion that the customer is allowed to be an idiot while only the player-idiot gets punished. And that doesn't exactly fix the ever-expanding gulf between the people playing these games and the people paying for them -- a gulf always paved, of course, by money.

The customer, very often, doesn't believe these athletes deserve all the dollars they are paid to play for a living, even as the customer keeps paying huge sums for parking and jerseys and tickets. Sometimes, the customer envies the athlete's life and riches and youth, and the customer gets pretty angry when the athlete doesn't respect the game the way the customer does. The angrier the impassioned fan gets, the closer he is to throwing his beer.

This flammable cocktail of money, entitlement and jealousy ensures that the athlete can never win a fight like this one, even when someone else has started it. Passion is such a weird thing, the way it makes us love our athletes and our sports even as we hate them.

Indiana superstar Jermaine O'Neal is a sweet kid. With his wife's blessing, he does things like go to the prom with a high school girl who is a big fan and wrote him a letter. But you are asking too much of him if you want ''calm'' and ''rational'' when his teammates are getting beaten up in an environment that feels like 20,000 vs. 12.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

People do stupid things when the intensity gets ratcheted up in the heat of the moment. From the comfort of your living room, you may think you know how you'd react in the middle of that mess, but you don't really know until you are reacting in the middle of that mess. Would you be a peacemaker or agitator?

You can't say for sure until after you've been drenched by debris for the third time, are watching your teammates take punches in a mob and now someone is calling you the n-word.

This isn't that complicated a transaction. You don't want Artest launching himself into the stands? Don't throw anything at him. You don't want him beating you down like he did two frumpy guys in Pistons jerseys? Don't come onto the court with your arm cocked. You want things to settle down? Don't hurl object after object after object at the Pacers as they leave the court.

The video keeps getting played, over and over, of those two frumpy Detroit guys in Pistons jerseys getting wailed on by Artest. What gets lost in it is that one of them clearly raised his arm first, hopped toward Artest and got into an agitated fighting stance before suddenly realizing, ''Good, Lord, what in the name of all that is holy am I doing down here?'' You can't expect, given what Artest had just emerged from, jersey in tatters, for him to be docile when confronted with that in real speed. The incessant slow-motion highlights allow us, not him, to see how overmatched those two guys actually were. But they shouldn't have been on the court any more than Artest should have been in the stands.

At least Artest had an excuse, though. Someone threw something at him. What was the excuse of the Frumpy Twins?

But Artest is going to be blamed when one of them raises their fist at him before he does anything?

Artest, straight street, comes from one of the roughest patches of pavement on our planet -- Queensbridge in New York. He isn't going to get hit in the head, calmly point out the fan and immediately begin litigation that sues said fan for assorted damages such as intimidation in the work place.

He's going to solve his problems by putting a fist through them, and that's part of what made him the Defensive Player Of The Year in this brutal league last season. He's a bad man. Maybe even an insane one. The surprise isn't that he lost his head when a fan threw something at it but that he kept it when a menacing Ben Wallace pushed him about 20 feet to trigger this mess in the first place.

The angry fan looks at Artest, wonders why he can't just behave like athletes used to in the old days and then laments how much today's players have changed.

And that is true.

Players have changed.

But you know what?

Fans have changed, too.

They're a lot more hostile.

And when you mix misbehaving players with more hostile fans, what you are going to get is something that looks like a riot in the wasteland of a post-Apocalyptic Detroit.

Miami Herald

[Murphy3]

Sure, the fans are partially at fault...but so are the players.
Anyone that thinks differently is sorely mistaken.