COMMENTARY : Are Fans Going for the Throat Too Soon?

Is anybody else out there starting to choke on the word “choke”?

Once, the worst insult you could hurl at a serious athlete, especially a professional, was that he or she had “choked under pressure.” It was akin to saying that a fighter pilot had lost his courage or a surgeon his nerve. If courage was grace under pressure, then choking was disgrace under pressure.

Gradually, however, that harsh word “choke” has moved from the fringes of our talk about sports to the center of casual discussion. If you don’t win, no matter why or under what circumstance, there’s a pretty good chance that you will hear yourself called a “choker” who “blew the game in the clutch.”

Next time Shaquille O’Neal takes two crucial free throws, watch the crowd. The word they’ll be screaming, because they think it’s the word that will upset him the most, is “choke.” These days, you can’t just be a lousy free-throw shooter. You get a scarlet letter, too. It’s a “C.”

My attention might have been drawn to this unsavory trend by the sight of a Madison Square Garden fan like Spike Lee, who likes to wrap his hands around his throat, look at an opposing player bug-eyed and pretend he’s gagging.

Or I might have been alerted to this issue by all the flak Michael Jordan took in Florida after Nick Anderson stole a ball--and a game--from him a couple of weeks ago. Just because he’s a little older and a little rusty, Jordan supposedly can’t stand late-game pressure anymore? Isn’t anybody safe?

My personal alarm bells might have gone off after Mighty Mary lost a four-minute lead on the final leg of the America’s Cup trials. Or after a longshot won the Kentucky Derby from his heavily favored stablemates. It’s not enough that the wind can change or that every horse can have his day. In 1995, somebody has to be guilty. We can’t seem to convict anybody of anything in court anymore, but at least we can still convict everybody of everything on court.

Unfortunately, my tipoff to this ugly choke-mania trend came from rereading my own columns on the Washington Capitals last week. “A hat trick of chokes” was my description of the way the Caps became the first team to lose three different playoff series in which they’d led three games to one. Maybe the Caps choked. Maybe they didn’t. But it certainly has become easy to make such vague mean-spirited charges--which seem to impugn character as well as performance.

(Was I choking on deadline pressure?)

Now, I can’t watch a close game without hearing that drumbeat of subtle denigration just below the surface. When Patrick Ewing missed a layup to lose Game 7 of the Knicks playoff series with the Pacers, New York wasn’t happy. Postgame accounts of Ewing’s blunder seemed to imply it had been caused by pressure or some flaw of personality. It couldn’t just be that the ball hit the back rim too hard. We don’t like to think our Big Games can be decided by a little luck.

When Coach Pat Riley dissected the defeat, he also discovered sweeping problems with his team’s character. “You can blame finger rolls being missed, you can blame free throws, a lack of rebounding. . . . . But we should have been on the upswing this year as a team that was totally together. For the majority of the season, we were pulling apart. And you can’t put that stuff behind you.”

Just once, why can’t a big defeat be caused by the silly finger rolls and free throws, rather than some absence of cosmic team chemistry? Of course, then the Knicks might not have to pay a fancy coach so much money to grasp and fine-tune all the nuances of group psychology in the locker room.

We’ve reached a point where we may have, unconsciously, set the bar too high for our athletes. On a national radio show this week, the announcer said Jack McDowell had taken a no-hitter into the eighth inning before “first blowing the no-hitter, then blowing the shutout, then blowing the game.”

Seven no-hit innings aren’t enough if you run out of gas in the eighth. What a bum. He “blew it.” And look at all the money the Yankees pay him. Let’s boo him next time we’re at the park.

Granted, it’s harder to make allowances for people than to mock them. The Dizzy Dean approach is easier. Asked what he thought of Bill Terry, Diz once said, “Could be he’s a nice guy when you get to know him, but why bother.”

As athletes become richer, more famous and more gifted, we have a tendency to objectify, rather than personalize our response to them. They have so much; do they really deserve common decency, too? Besides, they make such fine comic props. It’s fun to turn the Bills, Broncos, Red Sox, Cubs or Caps into cartoon buffoons who, we pretend, deserve their embarrassments because they lack some vague virtue that “winners” supposedly possess. But it’s fairly nasty fun.

Ernest Hemingway liked to make a fuss about a mysterious quality called “duende.” If you had “duende,” you were the opposite of a choker. In a crisis, your heart beat slower, not faster. The judgment of others did not rattle you. Under pressure, you performed difficult tasks slightly better than you normally might, rather than subtly worse. You could count on yourself. So, of course, you were the person that others sensed they could count upon too.

That’s all very wonderful, no doubt. But we seem to have gotten carried away. Sports appropriated the imagery of warfare and installed the Clutch Player in the old role of calm, courageous hero. However, we’ve come to expect such heroism on demand, as though duende were a commodity.

Now, we expect everybody to be The Flying Dutchman. Every night on cable TV, endless highlights show us film of countless superstars with truckloads of duende who sink long shots at the buzzer and hit ninth-inning home runs. We don’t see the hundred failures, only the moments of grace spliced together.

Somehow, the maximum that we hoped to see has become the minimum that we expected as the price of admission. Now, if you’re not a hero worthy of fiction, then you’ll probably hear yourself castigated as a choker.

We certainly expect a lot. No wonder our games--even the best of them, played at a level of skill we’ve never seen before--don’t always seem to satisfy us as they once did. The Indy 500, the Belmont Stakes, the Stanley Cup, the NBA finals, golf’s U.S. Open--all of them will be upon us within days. But, now that we have grown so hard to please, will they seem as rich?