Mixing it up with the
fans isn't new in old brawlgame
By Brent Schrotenboer
STAFF WRITER
November 29, 2004
Sitting in the stadium a few rows behind the team bench, a sports fan
insulted a hot-tempered player with a constant stream of taunts and slurs.
The player responded by climbing into the
stands and beating the fan so savagely the player was suspended from the
league indefinitely.
The year was 1912. The baseball player was
Ty Cobb, who sought revenge despite the fact his heckler was missing one
hand and part of his other one. When somebody pointed out the man's
handicap, Cobb reportedly said, "I don't care if he has no feet."
Ninety-two years later, another fan provokes
a player, who responds by climbing into the stands and swinging his fists so
liberally he is suspended for the rest of the season.
"And we see it over and over
again," said Christian End, a psychology professor who studies fan
behavior at Xavier University.
That theme was repeated by sociologists,
psychologists and media analysts: We see it over and over again, and they
weren't just talking about replays of the Nov. 19 melee during the game
between the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons in Auburn Hills, Mich.
There have been more than 170 violent
incidents involving five or more fans at American sporting events since the
1960s, according to Jerry M. Lewis, a sociologist at Kent State. You could
even say fan-player hostility goes back as far as 3,000 years, when the
Mayans played a ball game on a court and ritualistically killed a member of
the losing team.
Rare though it may seem, it has been around
since the advent of stadium spectator sports. Some 55,000 Roman
"fans" cheered as Christians were fed to lions sometime after the
year 72. An umpire winced after getting hit by a beer mug thrown from the
stands in Cincinnati in 1886. Thousands of fans attacked players and umpires
at a baseball game in Cleveland on 10-cent beer night in 1974. A Colombian
soccer defender was shot and killed by a fan 10 days after he accidentally
scored an own-goal in a 2-1 World Cup loss to the United States in 1994.
The biggest difference with the
Pacers-Pistons brawl, it seems, is the television camera.
The melee has been replayed on TV
"again and again and again," said Howard Rosenberg, the former
Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic of the Los Angeles Times.
"You'd think the world is ending. I don't know how many times I've seen
it now.
"It assumes a life of its own. Soon you
don't remember why you're interested, but you're interested because
everybody is talking about it. And why are they talking about it? Because
the media is talking about it."
Another planet
On TV news shows normally devoted to Iraq and
the Scott Peterson trial, the talk last week was all about the NBA brawl.
Four days after the incident, Larry King – whose guests often include
world leaders – opened his CNN talk show by discussing the melee, saying,
"If you haven't seen this incident which occurred (Nov. 19), you're
living on another planet."
Naturally, he then force-fed his viewers
another replay.
One of King's guests, attorney Shawn Patrick
Smith, seemed a little incredulous about all the attention the fight was
getting. "This is a common occurrence in sports," Smith tried to
tell King.
Five days after the incident, it was still
receiving coverage as far away as China (the China Daily) and
Australia (the Canberra Times).
"Something that happened in a matter of
seconds looks like it took place over a matter of days and months and weeks
and hours because of the television coverage," said Joe Saltzman,
professor at USC's Annenberg School of Communication. "It blows
everything out of proportion.
"In the old days, it may have been a
paragraph at the bottom of a sports story. Now it's a nonsports news story
because the media doesn't know how to cover news anymore. News has gotten
too complicated for them to cover it well. So they go for cheap, sensational
stories every time."
The incident did have standard news value.
It was a fight involving top players in a game between top teams. Fans could
have been hurt. Players were suspended as a result. Team rosters were
altered.
But it's hardly likely to be a watershed
moment in spectator sports. "What are you going to change?" Lewis
asked. "I'm supposed to be an expert on fan violence. Yet I never would
have predicted this (NBA brawl). There's nothing you can do to prevent it if
the actors decide to do what they did."
Ineffectual incidents
As long as there are irrational fans attending
games with irrational players, the possibility for another occurrence will
remain. The legacy of the Pacers-Pistons brawl may be a little extra
security at future games, as evidenced already in Detroit.
Similar previous events didn't exactly
change the sports world, either.
Cobb's attack produced a legacy unrelated to
the violence. Teammates protested his suspension with the first players'
labor strike in pro baseball.
The outburst in Cleveland in 1974 involved
thousands more fans than the 40 or so who got pushed around Nov. 19. It
generated its own legacy: the elimination of 10-cent beer night.
In 2002, William Ligue and his teenage son
burst from the stands in Chicago to attack Kansas City Royals first-base
coach Tom Gamboa.
"Here's the question I ask,"
professor End said. "Do you know what happened to that guy after
that?"
It took some digging to find out, but Ligue
was sentenced to 30 months probation in Cook County, Ill.
"You can conjure up the images of that
attack because that also was replayed on TV all the time – but not the
consequences," End said. "For some fans, they see the person
acting that way and see the consequences of being on (ESPN's) 'SportsCenter'
every half hour. There's not enough done (by the media) to follow up on the
social consequences, the jail time and fines. Maybe the person lost his job.
But we don't see that."
It's another reason it's bound to happen
again. While the talk-show panels debate whether this event was the product
of race relations or the economy or the culture, some academics simply cite
Occam's Razor (the simplest explanation is probably the best). That is, when
two hot-tempered people are in the same room, a fight has a chance to break
out.
"Most people and players in that arena
did act in an appropriate manner," said Richard Lustberg, who operates
a Web site called psychologyofsports.com. "But the coverage of the
perpetrators is elevated. If you look it, there are 10,000 crimes similar to
it or worse (every day). The only difference is that it was the NBA."
Slow news week?
The only felony that may be charged in the case
involves the thrown chair, if police can identify who did it. In September,
Texas Rangers pitcher Frank Francisco faced a misdemeanor charge for doing
the same thing – throwing a chair in a fan melee at a game.
That incident didn't get as much attention
as this one, probably because the video footage wasn't as good and the fight
didn't last as long, End said. The NBA brawl lasted a few minutes – not
seconds – and there was camera coverage galore.
The Francisco incident also competed with
the Peterson trial and the upcoming presidential election for the media's
attention. Now that both are done, what other issues can King use to convene
a panel on his talk show?
If not Iran and Iraq, why not Artest?
"Is fan violence a problem?" End
asked. "Any event of violence is a problem, but is fan violence a
social problem? Millions of fans go to games. There were maybe 45 people
involved in this event in Detroit. The chances of being involved in a fight
in a sporting event would be like winning the lottery every night."
On average, a high-profile fan-player
scuffle of some sort seems to happen every year or so. Compared with the
number of fans who attend games in America – and the other crimes that are
committed every day – it's hardly a rising social crisis. It only seems
that way.
"Just because you have video doesn't
make it a story," Saltzman said. "It's overkill. It's what happens
when you have media that follows each other and has no idea what news is. As
long as they have something on tape, they can show it."
 Brent
Schrotenboer: brent.schrotenboer@uniontrib.com
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