Things Don’t Sit Well in the Stands

A man in his early 20s leaned toward the Laker bench one night during last June’s NBA Finals in Auburn Hills, Mich., expressing his resolute opinion of the visitors vigorously and without pause.

After enduring three quarters of harsh, bellowing commentary, a reporter sitting courtside turned and stared at the fan, who shrugged and said, “Hey man, this is my job.”

Five months later, his Pistons and dozens of their fans hosted one of the most troubling clashes ever in American sport. Players fought fans in the stands and fans fought players on the basketball court, and three Indiana Pacer players were suspended by the National Basketball Assn. for a total of 128 games. Five Pacers and seven fans were charged with misdemeanor assault and battery -- one fan also faces a felony count -- related to the brawl. The two teams will meet again Saturday at Indianapolis.

The early analysis of the Nov. 19 incident concentrated on the particulars: the seeming lack of security, the behavior of provocateur Ron Artest and his Pacer teammates and the fans’ aggressive role. More recently, some of the discussion has evolved into broader alarm over the decline in civility and widening economic gap between players and fans, and the possible chilling impact of the brawl on spectator sports beyond basketball.

“This kind of behavior only destroys and disgraces the game they both love,” said Lynn Lashbrook, co-author of the book, “Fan Etiquette: How Did Burning Desire to Win Become the Desire to Burn?”

Already, officials of the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball are being asked to assess security, alcohol policies, the images they sell and the causes of the apparent disintegration of rapport between their employees and customers.

“We [must] not allow our sport to be debased by what seem to be declining expectations for behavior of fans and athletes alike,” NBA Commissioner David Stern said after the incident. Stern has announced the NBA will impose stricter security strategies at its arenas, a task previously left to the individual teams, though the details have not been released.

The violence that engulfed fans and players was by no means the first such eruption, in the NBA or elsewhere. In a scattering of widely publicized incidents over the last 15 years, fans have hurled bottles, batteries, snowballs and racial slurs at players, who have responded with fists, chairs, baseballs, even spit.

In a shocking incident two years ago, Kansas City Royal first base coach Tom Gamboa was attacked while standing in the coaches’ box by a father and his son at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Seven months later, an umpire was assaulted in the same ballpark.

But none of these episodes tore at the nation quite like the melee in the suburbs of Detroit, where the visiting Pacers stormed over the press table to seek revenge and fans eagerly fought back, then pelted the retreating Pacers with food and drink.

Among fans, the reverence for players is declining, according to Robert Hutcherson, founder and chief executive of the Sports Fans of America Assn., a fan advocacy group.

“I think the respect for the game is still there; the respect for the athlete has diminished quite a bit,” Hutcherson said. “When you have guys crying over their millions of dollars, that they need to feed their families, it’s pretty ridiculous when everybody out here is struggling to do just that.”

The average salary in the NBA is about $5 million. In Major League Baseball, it is about half that. Once, professional athletes lived in the communities in which they played. They shopped at the same markets and sent their children to the same schools.

Now, even average players live behind gates, further shielded by entourages, agents and public relations representatives.

Fans complain about rising ticket costs, charged in part to meet escalating team payrolls, and what they consider players’ rude or dismissive conduct toward them. They also cite self-centered actions in the games, including trash talk, excessive gloating and showboating for the TV cameras.

Athletes grumble that too many fans are judgmental and discourteous, and argue that the price of a ticket does not bestow the right to denigrate them or their families. Last season, the mother of Dodger Milton Bradley said in a radio interview that Dodger Stadium had become so uncomfortable that first baseman Shawn Green’s family rarely attended games anymore.

Steve Eichenbaum, 49, works for a Milwaukee advertising firm and has held Buck season tickets for 25 years. His seats, costing $185 apiece per game, are two rows behind the visitors’ bench, and he spends many nights in full-throated observation.

Late last month at the Bradley Center, where the Lakers played the Bucks, Eichenbaum scrutinized a dunk by Laker center Chris Mihm (“That’s your range, Mihm”), a drive to the basket by Kobe Bryant (“Go ahead, keep on shooting it. Why even look for a teammate? Why ever pass the ball?”) and a possession dominated by Buck guard Mike James (“Give it up or get out of the way!”)

Despite his critical appraisals of their play, Eichenbaum said he preferred the era when players were a familiar part of the community. He blamed the athletes for the detachment.

“The wonderful invention of headphones and Walkmans have allowed them to walk around and ignore people,” he said. “These guys live in neighborhoods and their neighbors don’t even know them.”

His real regret: that the Pacers had so many players suspended after the brawl. Eichenbaum and a friend had planned to attend a game against Indiana in suits of armor. That, he said, would have gotten him on ESPN for sure.

“There’s always a few knuckleheads wherever you go,” Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre told reporters recently. “But there’s always a few knucklehead players too. But you can’t let those spoil it for everybody else.”

Lashbrook, the author and a professor at Miami’s Nova Southeastern University, called the situation “an acceleration [of the] disconnect with professional athletes and the fans.”

The relationship that remains, he said, fans the events that occurred at Auburn Hills.

“Fan etiquette must begin with player etiquette,” Lashbrook said. “Athletes’ behavior on the field and court often is a precursor to what goes on in the stands. Players basically set an example for fans through their actions, signaling to those in attendance that certain behavior is acceptable, no matter how despicable it may be.”

For seven NFL seasons beginning in 1997, Judge Seamus McCaffery presided over the Common Pleas Court at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. On Sundays, a line of miscreants were dragged before his bench to answer a range of accusations, from throwing objects at opposing players to urinating on fellow fans.

The instant jurisprudence helped curb much of the abusive behavior, McCaffery said.

“People said for years they went to games and it was so out of control they gave up their season tickets,” said the judge, who still presides over the occasional game at the new Lincoln Financial Field. “Now that we did what we’re doing, more people come back because they feel it’s a family-friendly environment.”

Some, including McCaffery, have suggested erecting plexiglass barriers at ballparks and arenas, turning the perceived barriers into real ones.

“We don’t need to risk it happening again,” he said.

Those in the trenches, however, don’t believe it will.

A longtime NBA coach said the Auburn Hills debacle arose from a fluke convergence of factors, among them the fact that front-line players were still on the floor in the final seconds of a game between heated rivals whose outcome was clear -- a defeat for the home team. He also suggested that many season-ticket holders from the desirable courtside seats would have abandoned such a game, allowing the “riff-raff” to move in.

Though Mike Dunleavy, coach of the NBA’s Clippers, concurred with the assessment, he also conceded, “Some fans have taken it up a couple of notches.”

In any event, North America’s professional baseball, basketball and football leagues have rarely been healthier. Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig even called the last season “the gold standard” by which future seasons would be judged.

So, despite signs of a widening rupture, somewhere it is going right. Sometimes, the promise is nearby.

On a cool night in Los Angeles recently, high school students Hugo Perez and Luis Rodriguez stood alone on Chick Hearn Court outside Staples Center, positioning themselves at the top of a driveway for players, the glare of street lights reflecting off the tinted windows of top-end Mercedes-Benzes and Range Rovers.

More than 40 times a year they wait at this gate, they said, often just the two of them, shouting encouragement as Clipper players glide past. On a recent game night, just ahead of a bus carrying the Cleveland Cavaliers, Elton Brand, the Clippers’ starting power forward, slowed and lowered his passenger-side window.

Perez and Rodriguez, ticket-less, poked their heads into Brand’s car. Brand smiled and reached out to shake their hands. The teenagers wished him luck against the Cavaliers and superstar LeBron James, and Brand responded with more conversation.

Twenty minutes later, an attendant from the Clipper locker room jogged up the driveway holding two tickets, courtesy of Brand.

“They’re pretty cool. Sometimes they stop to talk to us without us really intending them to,” said Rodriguez, shivering in a white T-shirt.

Inside Staples Center, Brand held a bag of chocolate chip cookies that had been thrust at him by a fan -- a courtside regular whose name and face he knows well. Brand acknowledged he has sent game tickets up the driveway before.

“It’s satisfying knowing I’ve helped a fan out,” he said, offering a cookie. “I grew up in New York. If I was outside [Madison Square] Garden hoping to see a Knick game and Patrick Ewing sent me out some tickets, it would have made my life.”

Times staff writers Ben Bolch and Mike Terry, in Los Angeles, and Mike Bresnahan, in Milwaukee, contributed to this report.