Are fans the worst part of sports?

It has happened again.  An incident of bad athlete behavior is in the news.  And an accompanying incident of bad fan behavior is not.

If only this were the worst of it.

An incident over the weekend at a basketball game in Lubbock, Texas got Marcus Smart, star point guard for the Oklahoma State Cowboys, suspended for three games for shoving a Texas Tech fan in the stands.

So Smart's the real sports thug now, right, replacing Richard Sherman?

What Smart did was, well, not smart.  You don't go into the stands.  You don't let the fans get to you. Those are almost mantras for athletes.  You can never win in that situation.  All the public outrage and sanctimonious tut-tutting about privileged athletes and "thugs" is going to come down on you.  The fan, typically, will remain anonymous, and most likely go untouched no matter what that person said to provoke the reaction from the athlete.  You can't win.

According to Smart, the fan, one Jeff Orr of Waco, Texas, used a racial slur against Smart.  Orr, naturally, denies it, the fans around Orr claim to have heard no such thing, and Texas Tech has conducted its no-doubt thorough investigation and concluded that no racial slur was used by anyone.

Right.

Let us, for the moment, presume that Orr is telling the truth.  NO n-words happened.  Not saying I believe it, but for now let's go along.

One of the more interesting sidelights to come of this is the reaction of a number of former Big 12 opponents of Texas Tech, who remember this same guy talking trash years ago.

So what we have is a grown man, who takes extreme measures even to go to Texas Tech games (Waco and Lubbock aren't particularly close cities), and who has made a reputation for yelling vulgarities at twenty-year-old athletes.

Pardon me, but why in hell am I supposed to think of Orr as the offended party here, even if he didn't use the n-word?  Apparently this person works as an air-traffic controller.  I pray to God I don't ever have to enter Waco airspace when he's working.

In seriousness, why in the world does a supposedly civilized culture not hold the likes of Jeff Orr (or Robin Ficker, the borderline-psychotic heckler who made a nationwide reputation for himself at Washington Bullets games years ago.  The first line of his Wikipedia page calls him an "American attorney, real estate broker, political activist, and sports heckler."  Apparently he was also a member of the Maryland House of Delegates for a few years.  My opinion of Maryland just cratered) up for as much public shame as the country can dish out?  Why would such a person be trusted with any  position of authority?  Why indeed would any such person be approached with anything other than raised eyebrows, a wary "uhhh, yeahhhhh....riiiiight," and as wide a berth of safety as possible?

For all that, Smart's experience (even if we flip the previous presumption and assume Orr did really drop the n-word) can't really rank with the most vile example of fan abuse in my lifetime, at least.  The victim of that one was Steve Kerr.

If you remember Kerr it's most likely as the guy who made three-point shots on Michael Jordan's bulls teams.  Kerr played his college ball at the University of Arizona.  One evening during warmups for a game at rival Arizona State, Kerr was going through his shooting drills when he (and pretty much everybody in the arena) started hearing some of the most disgusting fan behavior ever:

"P-L-O! P-L-O! P-L-O!"

"Hey, Kerr, where's your dad?"

"Go back to Beirut."

You see, Kerr's father was Malcolm Kerr, an academic who was assassinated in 1984 in Beirut, while serving as president of the American University in Beirut.  (In fact it was an organization called Islamic Jihad, not the PLO, that claimed responsibility for the assassination.)

So, the best and brightest of Arizona State University pulled up an intense tragedy in an opposing player's life from four years before, and used it to taunt that player before the game even started.

Kerr, as it happens, responded "the way you're supposed to respond."  After being shaken during the warmups, he recovered enough by game time to drop six three-point shots on the Sun Devils as Arizona put a twenty-eight point decimation on Arizona State.

The notion that such behavior by fans is so commonplace, and somehow so acceptable, that there is such as thing as "the way you're supposed to respond," is reprehensible on its face.

It isn't just fans in the stands who do evil in the name of sports.  Fans behind their computers are fairly scuzzy too.  Look in the comments section of most any sports news site stories.  I'm not about to link there.  It gets way too vile out there.

It's easy to look at the likes of Jeff Orr and say "I'd never do that."  (Orr, by the way, will "voluntarily" avoid going to any more Texas Tech games this season.  How holy of him.)  And for most folks that would be true.  Thankfully the Robin Fickers of the world are pretty rare.

Still, us normally "sane" folks have our blind spots too.

Hypocrisy is a fairly common blind spot in sports fans.  Take the issue of drugs (whether performance-enhancing or otherwise) in sports.  It's more or less a national pastime these days to dump on baseball for its issues with "performance-enhancing drugs" (or PEDs), and to consume the spectacle of Alex Rodriguez's downfall with the glee normally reserved for a new season of Downton Abbey.  The whole Biogenesis scandal claimed thirteen players.  Meanwhile six members of one NFL team alone (your world champeen Seattle Seahawks) have taken four-game suspensions for prohibited substances and claimed to have been tripped up because they were taking Adderall, the ADD medication normally distributed only by prescription and banned by the NFL.  (Every time this happens I have this fierce desire to hear the player saying, in Steve Urkel Voice, "did I do that?" Somebody out there with more YouTube savvy than I, please make this happen.)

Here's the odd part: NFL drug policy prohibits the league from disclosing the actual drug for which a player tests positive.  So if you hear that a player got suspended for using Adderall, that's not an NFL declaration.  So, when a player comes out and claims to have gotten "tripped up" because of Adderall, it is just possible that Adderall is merely being used as a cover for some other drug (Cue the Church Lady: "could it be...oh, I don't know...STEROIDS!!!!????); in other words, the player might just be lying.

Mind you, it is also possible that the NFL contains an unusually high number of players who suffer from attention-deficit disorder.  The Seahawks might be out front but they're hardly the only team to see such suspensions happen.

So of course Seahawks fans are concerned that there might be some possible drug abuse going on amongst their gridiron heroes and want to see things cleared up, right?

Yeah, right.

Of course not.  You get semi-literate rationalization and "your players are worse" self-justification.  Somehow, I can't help but suspect that if it were the San Francisco 49ers with all the Adderall suspensions, the above blogger would be demanding a full-scale FBI investigation.

(Oh, and the punishment for these offenses?  A four-game suspension.  The NFL might as well be saying "you cheated?  Here, take a vacation and rest up for the rest of the season.")

(If anything, this illustrates the depths to which A-Rod has sunk; even his own teammates just want him to go away, and you will have to look long and hard to find a Yankee fan willing to defend him.  But if it were Derek Jeter...)

Frankly, folks, we sports fans are scum.

Obviously I don't mean all sports fans are scum.  But an awful lot behave in ways that simply don't cohere with any claim to be a mature, even remotely decent individual.  And even otherwise good people can stoop to some depressing depths in the name of fan loyalty.

All of this leaves me with two questions I'm not sure I can answer:

Why do people do this in the name of sports?

And why do other people tolerate it?

How do you feel about having a beer thrown at you in the course of doing your job?

The above picture comes from a baseball game in Toronto where outfielder Nate McLouth got a beer heaved at him after making a pretty nice catch.  Sadly, many sports fans probably had the immediate reaction "he's lucky it was just a beer."  Worse has happened, and we somehow have come to expect it.

From a faith perspective, I can only suggest there's a line and too many fans cross it.  Cheering for your team: good.  Cheering for a really good play: good.  Expressing disappointment for a bad play or result: not strictly forbidden, but how you do it matters a lot.  Temper your tongue, folks.  There are probably kids around.

Interacting with the other team's players: probably not advisable.  Yelling vulgarities at them: when is it acceptable for a Christian to yell vulgarities at anybody?  See, there's the thing: we somehow justify doing things at sporting events, or online, that we'd be horrified to be caught doing anywhere else, and I'm not going to pretend people of self-proclaimed faith are any exception to the rule.  And maybe the worst part of it is that the other folks around such an offender support the offender by saying nothing.

What kind of abusiveness do we tolerate by our silence?

You say you don't go to games anymore because of exactly this kind of thing?  Good for you.  Did you tell team management this?  If not, well, there's that supporting silence.

You let the abusive drunk get away with it?  Why not get yourself out of there, but not before requesting security to get that person out of there and find you new seats?

You saw who threw the beer on the field? Rat 'em out.  I don't know about you, but I didn't pay for a ticket to watch a game delayed because of some fool in the stands.

And please, remember who you are and whose you are.  In the stands.  In the comments.  Even on Facebook or Twitter.

If there's enough wrong with sports these days that an idiot like me feels justified trying to blog about it from a Presbyterianish perspective, it must be pretty bad.  But what is often overlooked is just how much of that trouble can be attributed to the people who watch the games, not just the people who play them.