Motor City Madmen
I have mixed feelings about the Pistons-Pacers-fans brawl last Friday night in Detroit.
On the one hand, Ron Artest is a troubled young man and probably needs to take a year off and get his head screwed back on, if he can. I don't say he's a "thug" -- his behavior is less gangsta and more like a cry for help. He needs some therapy. Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal of the Pacers also deserve long suspensions, and if anything their behavior was more reprehensible because no one threw a beer on them. And enough crap about how they were sticking up for their teammate -- they could have done that by pulling him out of there and trying to calm him down. Instead, they went up into the stands looking for white faces to punch.
(Artest... I don't know, if you take away the fact that he is playing a game that he gets paid $6 million a year to play, on national TV, and just put him in a bar or on the street, and someone throws a beer on him... hell, it's practically an unwritten rule that anybody who throws a beer in another guy's face gets his ass kicked, or at least should. My dad, who's pretty old school, would probably agree that people acted a lot nicer when they thought they might get punched in the nose if they didn't act like gentlemen in public.)
On the other hand, I'm also consistently amazed at the boorish behavior of young men at sporting events. Where are the adult men -- not at the end of the game, but at the beginning of the game, or at the beginning of the first game they went to as teenagers -- who will tell them to be quiet, sit down, tone down the language, act like gentlemen? It's not just the NBA either, it's baseball games and football games and hockey games (hockey might actually be the worst)... young people think they can use what Tom Wolfe calls (in his otherwise atrocious new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons) the "Fuck Patois" of youth. When I have asked young men to tone it down when I take my son to a ball game, they immediately apologize and then generally do tone it down. I've even overhead them correcting each other afterwards. Young men want to be led by adults. But you have to do it in the first inning, you can't do it in the ninth when emotions are running high and the beer has been flowing for a couple of hours. I guarantee: if the grown up men in the audience at Auburn Hills had put the hammer down in the first fifteen minutes of the Pacers-Pistons game, nothing like what happened would have happened.
Finally, I don't know quite what to make of the almost unspeakable fact that the players fighting were all black, and the fans were all white. The Man from Mars who didn't know better would look down and see a race riot. But the oddity, of course, is that it wasn't poor blacks or poor whites fighting, a la gang wars. It was millionaire players fighting middle or upper middle class fans (the type who can afford courtside seats). Weird. What makes all of them so angry? What makes that a fun thing to do on a Friday night?
I bet David Stern doesn't like that last question.
UPDATE: I posted these comments on Polipundit.
Not necessarily in this discussion, but throughout the media discussions in various places, it seems that one must blame the players, Artest, Jackson, O’Neil & Company (aka, the “thugs"), or else blame the fans (the “beer throwers,” the “hooligans") for what happened. But it’s not two problems, it’s one problem – the general degradation of societal standards for behavior. And that’s not the fault of the Pistons arena for not having enough “security” or enough police. Whatever happened to self-policing?
The Pistons-Pacers situation would have been defused if, in the first quarter of the game, the first time one of the hooligan fans shouted the “f-word,” a half dozen grown men in suits (preferably former military men) would have given them the “let’s not have any more of that talk around the womenfolk” talking-to. That’s what used to happen. My dad is fond of pulling out pictures he has of St. Louis Blues hockey games from the 1960s and noting what seems astonishing from the vantage point of 2004 – every adult man is in a coat and tie. Did that make them have less fun at the games? No. Did it make them act more like gentlemen? Obviously. Does a critical mass of adult gentlemen in an arena make it less likely that adolescent males will act like thugs or hooligans? You bet it does.
On the one hand, Ron Artest is a troubled young man and probably needs to take a year off and get his head screwed back on, if he can. I don't say he's a "thug" -- his behavior is less gangsta and more like a cry for help. He needs some therapy. Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal of the Pacers also deserve long suspensions, and if anything their behavior was more reprehensible because no one threw a beer on them. And enough crap about how they were sticking up for their teammate -- they could have done that by pulling him out of there and trying to calm him down. Instead, they went up into the stands looking for white faces to punch.
(Artest... I don't know, if you take away the fact that he is playing a game that he gets paid $6 million a year to play, on national TV, and just put him in a bar or on the street, and someone throws a beer on him... hell, it's practically an unwritten rule that anybody who throws a beer in another guy's face gets his ass kicked, or at least should. My dad, who's pretty old school, would probably agree that people acted a lot nicer when they thought they might get punched in the nose if they didn't act like gentlemen in public.)
On the other hand, I'm also consistently amazed at the boorish behavior of young men at sporting events. Where are the adult men -- not at the end of the game, but at the beginning of the game, or at the beginning of the first game they went to as teenagers -- who will tell them to be quiet, sit down, tone down the language, act like gentlemen? It's not just the NBA either, it's baseball games and football games and hockey games (hockey might actually be the worst)... young people think they can use what Tom Wolfe calls (in his otherwise atrocious new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons) the "Fuck Patois" of youth. When I have asked young men to tone it down when I take my son to a ball game, they immediately apologize and then generally do tone it down. I've even overhead them correcting each other afterwards. Young men want to be led by adults. But you have to do it in the first inning, you can't do it in the ninth when emotions are running high and the beer has been flowing for a couple of hours. I guarantee: if the grown up men in the audience at Auburn Hills had put the hammer down in the first fifteen minutes of the Pacers-Pistons game, nothing like what happened would have happened.
Finally, I don't know quite what to make of the almost unspeakable fact that the players fighting were all black, and the fans were all white. The Man from Mars who didn't know better would look down and see a race riot. But the oddity, of course, is that it wasn't poor blacks or poor whites fighting, a la gang wars. It was millionaire players fighting middle or upper middle class fans (the type who can afford courtside seats). Weird. What makes all of them so angry? What makes that a fun thing to do on a Friday night?
I bet David Stern doesn't like that last question.
UPDATE: I posted these comments on Polipundit.
Not necessarily in this discussion, but throughout the media discussions in various places, it seems that one must blame the players, Artest, Jackson, O’Neil & Company (aka, the “thugs"), or else blame the fans (the “beer throwers,” the “hooligans") for what happened. But it’s not two problems, it’s one problem – the general degradation of societal standards for behavior. And that’s not the fault of the Pistons arena for not having enough “security” or enough police. Whatever happened to self-policing?
The Pistons-Pacers situation would have been defused if, in the first quarter of the game, the first time one of the hooligan fans shouted the “f-word,” a half dozen grown men in suits (preferably former military men) would have given them the “let’s not have any more of that talk around the womenfolk” talking-to. That’s what used to happen. My dad is fond of pulling out pictures he has of St. Louis Blues hockey games from the 1960s and noting what seems astonishing from the vantage point of 2004 – every adult man is in a coat and tie. Did that make them have less fun at the games? No. Did it make them act more like gentlemen? Obviously. Does a critical mass of adult gentlemen in an arena make it less likely that adolescent males will act like thugs or hooligans? You bet it does.
posted by PDB at 1:05 PM
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