Is It All Just Part of Game?

We have had a weekend of weeping and gnashing of teeth over the Piston and Pacer pugilists, and we still aren’t clear about our weeping and gnashing. We want to know why this happened, and we don’t.

That’s because there are hundreds of whys, each probably valid and none simple. We like simple. Life is too complicated to have our sports be so too.

So I’ll give you simple.

I don’t know why. What I do know is, this will happen again.

Maybe not exactly the same, maybe not quite as bad, maybe worse. We tend to live in the present, and this is presently clanging around in the front of our brain.We forget that, in a World Series, Game 7, the Cardinals’ Ducky Medwick slid hard into third base, spikes high, got into a fight and was pelted with debris from the stands when he returned to the field. The incident was so ugly that the baseball commissioner had Medwick removed from the game, mostly for his own protection.

That was 1934.

We forget that, in the closing seconds of a Big Ten basketball game, Ohio State’s Luke Witte was fouled hard going to the basket, then was punched in the head and kneed in the groin by a Minnesota player named Corky Taylor. Quickly, another Minnesota player, Ron Behagen, stomped on the neck and head of the 7-foot Witte, who eventually was carried from the arena on a stretcher while being booed by hometown Gopher fans.

That was 1972.

We forget that the Dodgers’ Milton Bradley walked to the edge of the stands at Dodger Stadium, indignant over a bottle tossed on the field somewhat near him, and berated some fans while smashing a bottle to the concrete around the seats.

That was September.

I have offered here the cynical view. It says that the Pistons and Pacers have given us the same old, same old, with a let’s-go-into-the-stands bonus. I want to be wrong. I want to think that this time, when one of these players mutters the most disgusting and flagrantly dismissive phrase of modern-day athletes --”I just want to put this behind me” -- he can’t.

I don’t write this in a vacuum. I gathered a five-person board of experts to help with the whys. They are:

* George Blaha, 29-year Piston broadcaster. He was 20 feet away when the Palace in Auburn became Mt. St. Helen’s.

* John Murray, a Florida clinical psychologist specializing in sports psychology.

* Ailene Voisin, sports columnist for the Sacramento Bee, who covered the NBA for various papers for 15 years and still writes extensively about the league. She also has a law degree.

* John Wooden, who needs no introduction and is the wisest man I know.

* Michael Josephson, head of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey. He may be the most articulate man I know. He is also an eight-year Laker season-ticket holder.

Blaha has concluded, “This was not only fairly predictable, but almost inevitable,” pointing out that we live in an age of hip-hop and rap music, “where everything violent sells.”

He said that this first game between the teams since the Pistons knocked the Pacers out of last season’s playoffs was destined to be explosive.

“I think the Pacers felt a little like the Pistons had won a title they should have had, that the Pistons were lucky along the way,” Blaha said. “I think they came in with a chip on their shoulder.”

He also said that once something explodes, all character and predictability go out the window.

“Before the game,” he said, “Jermaine O’Neal [of the Pacers] stood in the exact same area where the fight erupted and signed about 30 autographs for the fans.”

Murray said that the sort of athlete entitlement that plays into this sort of situation might have started about 10 years ago, with the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial -- that after his acquittal, athletes thought they could get away with anything.

As for the fans, he sees the trend in reality TV shows as partly to blame. “The fans want to get more into the game directly,” he said. “They are jealous of the players making $10 million, and they will seize on a chance to get their five minutes of fame. It’s never many. Just a few clowns.”

Murray said team management would use in-house counseling of players for performance enhancement, but not for anger management.

“You don’t think anything about going to a dentist twice a year to clean your teeth,” he said, “but ... regular maintenance on your mental health doesn’t seem to be needed.”

Voisin agreed with Murray’s time frame, that things changed about 10 years ago, but for different reasons. “Now, we have a complete disconnect between the fans and players,” she said. “What happened is what I call a corporate takeover. That’s when the league lost its engaging personalities and did nothing to get back to that.”

Voisin said that the “engaging personalities” were Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Julius Erving, and that the beginning of the end can be traced to the Michael Jordan era.

“You could go into Chicago six straight trips and go into the Bulls’ locker room and never once see Jordan,” she said. “The players all hide out in the back now, even though league rules try to prevent that. The fans want more for their money, and they get no access at all to these players.

“We [reporters] are the conduit to that, but our access is so bad we end up writing about legal stuff and off-court situations. So the fans, who can’t afford the ticket prices, get little from us to help them know these players and they end up feeling totally disenfranchised.”

Wooden, who is not a huge fan of the NBA, said a source of a lot of this is our “me” generation.

“I am bothered by all the showing off, even the fans who buy tickets to be seen at games, not to see games,” he said. “It bothers me when somebody makes a tackle in a game in which his team is behind by 30 points and he starts celebrating.

“I have said it before. Television is the worst thing to happen to sports, and in some cases, the best. It makes actors out of coaches, and players and even referees. That’s the worst. It also, on a college level, is a savior for lots of women’s sports and non-revenue-producing sports, because it pays lots of their bills.”

Josephson is our optimist.

He said that the Piston-Pacer incident could be “a sports Watergate.”

“We had Dennis Rodman kicking a photographer, Marty McSorley hitting another guy with a stick, the hockey dad killing somebody,” Josephson said, “but none of those stories had the legs of this one.

“Watergate brought us, finally, a rage of legislation. Enron brought us Sarbanes-Oxley [a legislative act making boards of directors more responsible and accountable]. This one might do that. This one might have been just egregious enough.”

Josephson pointed to three elements that created “the perfect storm.”

“First,” he said, “the business side of sports has been promoting unrestrained fan behavior. It plays to the self-indulgent, pushing them to a fever pitch. For example, when we used to have hockey, they’d show pregame film on the big screen of all the violence and big hits. We get to the point where it is the Roman Colosseum thing. You have the gladiators and the mob mentality in the seats. And the mob gets to say thumbs up or thumbs down.

“Second, the players are huge stars now. They don’t mingle. When they get in trouble, they take the attitude, ‘What the heck, I’ll just pay the fine.’

“And then, there are the fans, who feel an entitlement that comes from paying large ticket prices and feeling then like they can do whatever they want in the bleachers.”

From this, Josephson says, will come reform. He sees this as the last straw.

From this, I believe, will come more of the same. I see us awash in regret and remorse for at least two more weeks.

If Josephson is right, as he usually is, we will see an extended period of calm and reason in sports. If I am right, we can only hope that the guy who finishes his end-zone dance by parading into the stands with an Uzi does not say, as they are leading him away in handcuffs, that he wants to put this incident behind him.