A Line Must Be Drawn Between Field and Fans

Maybe it’s time to start believing those football players and coaches when they talk about the playing field as a battleground.

A Canadian Football League player turns his back to the sidelines and gets attacked by a construction worker. A fan celebrating Marshall’s victory over Miami of Ohio is knocked unconscious by a Miami assistant coach. University of Connecticut campus police break out the guard dogs and pepper spray to keep students from tearing down the goal posts after the Huskies won. And those are only the incidents since last weekend.

We don’t need protective netting to keep hockey pucks from flying into the stands, we need protective netting to keep the fans and participants separated.

The sports community is blowing it. What is supposed to be a shared experience is turning into a combat zone. It was fine when transgressions were limited to guys running onto the field to congratulate Hank Aaron for breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record or a buxom woman running up to smooch players. Even that attempted flag-burning in the Dodger Stadium outfield wasn’t dangerous, it was simply a form of political expression.

But when you see someone cross the line these days you can’t expect good intentions anymore. Although it has been almost a decade since a deranged Steffi Graf fan stabbed Monica Seles at a tennis tournament in Germany, I still fear worst-case scenarios.

Even when there’s no harm done there’s an implied disrespect for the rules that govern a sporting event. Did you see that Angel fan who hit Giant outfielder Reggie Sanders with her noise sticks as he chased a ball at Edison Field? She was grinning as if she were playing whack-a-mole at the local arcade, not potentially affecting the outcome of the World Series.

“There’s a lack of civility, a lack of decorum, a lack of respect for society in a whole,” said Dr. Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies at USC and author of “Out of Bounds: Sports Media and the Politics of Identity” and the forthcoming “Young, Black, Rich and Famous: Basketball, Hip-Hop and the Redefinition of the American Dream.”

“Sports is a place where we often celebrate violent acts when it’s contained in the field of play. It’s impossible to assume at times that it might not slip out and go beyond the playing field.”

Dr. Marc Shatz, a Beverly Hills psychologist and former sports psychologist at the UCLA athletic department, has a six-part hypothesis for this trend in fan behavior.

“One is the obvious: Sometimes these people are intoxicated.”

“Two: Sometimes they’re the type of person that wants to draw attention to themselves. Some people want their 15 minutes of fame.”

“Three: Sometimes they’re just nuts.”

“Four: Sometimes they become, in their minds, one of the players, and they overly identify with the players and they think they’re on the team and they’re either going to attack the opponent or attack the referee that made the bad call. They see their players express their aggression on the field and they run on the field and think they’re one of the guys.

“Five: When they’re watching they forget it becomes a game and it becomes very personal. Notre Dame-Michigan. Giants-Jets. They personalize it and it becomes them and us.”

“Six: Sometimes, as with criminals, there are copycats. You watch a game one week and there’s a fan, six weeks later, a guy thinks, ‘I can do it too.’ ”

When that father-son tandem attacked Kansas City Royal first-base coach Tom Gamboa at a Chicago White Sox game in September, you knew someone else would give that a try. Sure enough, Jody Remple actually had other fans encouraging him to run onto the field during Saturday’s CFL playoff game between the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and the B.C. Lions. It didn’t help that Remple was drunk, as he admitted in an interview with the Winnipeg Free Press. So he jumped on Lion cornerback Eric Carter, and then was punched and kicked by several players.

“At the time I thought it must be cool, I’ll be a hero,” Remple said. “But I’m pretty ashamed of myself now.”

Miami defensive coordinator Jon Wauford brought shame to the whole university (the school president said so) when he allegedly shoved a fan who ran onto the field. Wauford was led off the field in handcuffs by police and faces a misdemeanor battery charge.

“We can’t control the fans that come to a game,” Boyd said. “We can try to, but we can’t really control them. But when it comes to coaches and players, I think there’s a higher standard. Nobody’s going to a sporting event to get assaulted by a coach.

“Oftentimes we criticize players for their behavior. A lot of times we don’t criticize coaches for their behavior. Coaches and players are representing a city, an organization or a university. They have to be on their best behavior and they have to be held to a higher standard.”

That’s why Shatz was so troubled when he saw the Lakers’ Rick Fox take off down a Staples Center hallway to continue his fight with Sacramento King guard Doug Christie during the exhibition season.

“When the jailers start acting like the prisoners, the world is in trouble,” Shatz said. “It’s bad enough to have crazy fans, but when the players start mimicking that, then we’re all in trouble because who are we going to become like?”

The extreme reaction is Connecticut’s defense of its goal posts.

If the pictures didn’t remind you of a notorious campus incident, then the Huskies’ opponent did: Kent State.

It shouldn’t take that sort of martial law to preserve order in the stadiums. But we’re in danger of losing something more valuable than goal posts: the notion that sports can be played in front of a crowd without incidents. That innocent assumption is growing as outdated as analog scoreboard clocks. Better keep those nets handy.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at: j.a.adande@latimes.com.