COMMENTARY : Profanity Is Found Too Often in Games

If you attend college basketball games, you have heard the profanity and the obscene chants. You have heard thousands of spectators shouting vulgarities in unison at game officials or opponents.

Monday night’s NCAA championship game was played in Denver, home of neither Duke nor Nevada-Las Vegas. The spectators were an upscale, corporate gathering, much as a Super Bowl or World Series are. On-campus games provide the best opportunities for mass profanities.

If you see all your college basketball on TV, maybe you don’t even know what’s going on. Maybe you’re unaware of the trashy language that has become de rigueur.

And maybe you’ve heard it and you don’t care. Pity. You should.

Colleges should feel shamed by the public behavior of their students--and how much more public can you be than on national TV?

On Feb. 28 I was at College Park, Md., as Maryland defeated North Carolina State. In a scramble for a loose ball, State’s Chris Corchiani gave a Maryland player a shove. That did it. Corchiani had been targeted.

Next thing anybody knew, it seemed as if all 13,000 spectators in Cole Field House were directing an obscene chant at Corchiani every time he touched the ball.

No Maryland coach or official raised a hand in protest. This sort of thing is accepted today.

The following week, on March 6, I was at the Towson State-Lehigh game, the finals of the East Coast Conference tournament. The game was carried live on ESPN. The crowd was as vulgar as the one at College Park.

At one point, a Towson fan ran up and down the sideline behind the press table, screaming vulgarities at the referee. If he had shouted the same things on the streets of Towson, Md., he could have been arrested for disturbing the peace. I noticed the ECC’s assistant commissioner, Marie Wozniak, watching in disgust.

The following day, I was back at College Park, talking with Maryland’s lacrosse Coach, Dick Edell, who is a Towson alumnus. He had seen the Towson game on TV.

“The profanity came through on ESPN loud and clear,” Edell said. “I hate it when kids act that way, and they do it everywhere.”

It is a common practice all over the country for spectators to behave in such a gross manner. Maryland and Towson State have no monopoly on this.

I called Wozniak the other day. She remembered the jerk at Towson.

“Of course it’s embarrassing,” she said, “but it’s become part of the game. But how do you police it?

“When I was a student at Temple we played at St. Bonaventure. The things the spectators were hollering were scary -- and this was at a women’s game.”

Last year, when Duke was at College Park, the Maryland students got on Danny Ferry with a chant, a play on his surname. I asked Ferry if that had bothered him.

“How can I complain?” he asked with a laugh. “Our students at Duke are the worst.”

So it is done all over -- at elite schools, at Catholic schools. But it is not done everywhere.

“When I worked in Chapel Hill at the University of North Carolina, we didn’t have it,” said Tom Calder, now assistant athletic director at Johns Hopkins. “If it started, Dean Smith would get on the mike and tell the crowd, ‘We don’t do that here.’ And it would stop.”

Good for Dean Smith.

John Suter, a vice president at Towson State, said this:

“I think this student behavior phenomenon is a manifestation of the permissive society these kids have grown up in. If their parents grew up in the ‘60s, I wonder if they care.

“I don’t think this sort of vulgarity has any place in a university. But I don’t even like it when the crowd at the Orioles games goes ‘Oh!’in the middle of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ ”

A former Catholic chaplain at Duke told me yesterday:

“It’s sort of a tradition at Duke for the students to act that way. The president of the university would have nothing to do with the problem when I was there. College presidents tend to regard athletics and athletic departments as out of their control.”

It’s time they got them under their control. Until they do, their institutions will continue to be embarrassed.