Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook
Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.
At this point, blame for Friday night's Indiana Pacers-Detroit Pistons-Pistons fans brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills is irrelevant. Not that blame won't be pinned by the emergency droplift of lawyers that was already descending on the arena, seeking any fan who got so much as a dirty look from a Pacer. Or by the Oakland County prosecutor, who — when on ESPN talking about whether he will indict Pacers players who hit Detroit fans — had a look in his eye that said, "This case is going to make me governor!"
It's hard to blame just one person or group because the Pistons-Pacers brawl was an escalating series of shouldn't-haves. With his Pacers up 15 points with less than a minute to go, Artest shouldn't have fouled the Pistons' Ben Wallace on a layup. Wallace shouldn't have pushed Artest. A fan shouldn't have thrown a cup of beer at Artest. Artest and the other players shouldn't have jumped in the stands to fight whomever they saw. The Detroit fans should not have rushed to the fight, or onto the floor seeking one. Indiana's Jermaine O'Neal shouldn't have hit a fan with that sliding coldcock punch. The fans shouldn't have thrown anything that wasn't nailed down at the Pacers' players as they exited the floor. The arena security shouldn't have been so thinly staffed or responded so slowly.
As a Pacers fan, of course I looked for reasons not to blame my own team, or to minimize its impact. For example, one could argue that the Detroit Tigers' Ty Cobb, a noted nutcase of a baseball player, going into the stands in 1912 to fight a guy with no hands was a much more uneven matchup than Artest, the Indiana Pacers' 6-foot-7, 250-pound noted nutcase of a basketball player, vs. Mike Ryan, a bespectacled Pistons fan from Clarkston, Mich. It was Ryan that Artest first attacked after getting hit
with a cup while lying on the scorers' table as the
Pistons-Pacers scuffle was looking like it had died down. By the way, Ryan is now known as "Mike Ryan Face" because of his sudden facial adjustment from arrogant jawing to scared shitlessness, kind of
like what you'd see from victims in the Friday the 13th movies when Jason Voorhees was about to plunge a skewer into them.
Also, somewhere in Greek history there has to be a case of ancient Olympic fans who went over the top with their jeering ("How's your heel, Achilles!"), and were suddenly and summarily disemboweled, then strung up by their penises.
However, those incidents didn't take place live on ESPN, nor were they reshown as often as the Janet Jackson Boob II incident known as the "Desperate Housewives" intro to
"Monday Night Football." So the Pistons-Pacers brawl becomes the flashpoint for anyone who wants to argue, with thinly veiled racial references, that the NBA is nothing but thugs, or even for people, such as generally rational Chicago Sun-Times columnist Rick Telander, who want to argue that this is the stuff that happens when you let the kids play "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas."
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So with my favorite team at the center of what is becoming the most notorious brawl in American sports history, one with such a quick-strike impact it was lampooned twice on "Saturday Night Live" the day after it happened, Pacers fans are asking whether we should be truly embarrassed and ashamed of our team and our allegiance to it.
After all, Pacers fans during the Reggie Miller era prided themselves on having teams that, if they didn't always make it deep into the playoffs, played good, sound, fundamental basketball, reflective of the Hoosier basketball way. Presumably, having your team go into the stands to fight fans, no matter how justified, is not part of the equation, even if Hoosiers did have a couple of scenes in which players and fans brawled.
Alas, we innocent Pacers fans, during the brawl and its aftermath, learned two things. One, your team is your team, no matter what, especially when it appears there's a whole arena ready to bring its wrath upon it. Two, the nice guys of the Miller era in the 1990s — OK, I know there's a lot of basketball fans who would never consider the taunting, flopping Miller to be a nice guy, but I'm talking about Pacers fans here — didn't win squat. Watching the Pacers coming to each other's defense against hostile Pistons fans, in a perverse way, made it clear Indiana has the inner unity and, yes, fight, necessary to win a title.
Does that mean we celebrate the Pacers-Pistons fight that ended with fans and players going at it with the throwing of fists, beer, popcorn buckets and chairs? Well, no, even if two dozen cheering fans did greet the Pacers at the Indianapolis airport once they arrived back from Detroit.
Despite our own knowledge that Artest and Stephen Jackson committed a major no-no in leaping into the stands to fight fans, we Pacers fans are feeling a little put-upon. The NBA suspended Artest for the rest of the season — 72 games. Heck, Latrell Sprewell only got 68 for nearly choking his coach to death. Jackson is out for 30 games, Jermaine O'Neal for 25, and right now, with injuries riddling the team, they only have six healthy players on the roster. Speaking selfishly as a fan, it makes it kind of hard to win a title when your best players can't play.
But it's more than the mere loss of players. After an early spin on how scarily out-of-control the Detroit fans became, and whether fans were increasingly over-the-line, the spin on your local TV news is now that crazy Ron Artest — you know, the guy who wanted to take a month off during the season to promote his rap album — mercilessly attacked innocent people. I realize punching out the customers is bad for business, but it feels a bit out-of-whack to put everything on the players, and none of it on the fans. After all, the NBA can't suspend fans.
Definitely, there will be an element of Pacers fan that is disgusted by their team's actions during the brawl, and it's hard to blame them. On the other hand, perhaps the reason we Pacers fans feel some sense of injustice, and why many of us are sticking by our team, is because even though there's plenty of blame to go around, it appears that so far the consequences are only being felt by our guys. It's not rational, but then again, throwing a cup of beer at a guy much larger and stronger than you isn't rational, either.
E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.
— graphic by Andy Ross
