jack’s musings

SI.com has an interesting article this week profiling the excessive nature of taunting and heckling today in college sports. While the article is limited to basketball in its scope, it’s clear that the main points could be translated to any major college sports. Essentially, the article argues that heckling has crossed beyond the realm of clever and humorous to that of profane and abusive. It chronicles stories of fans throwing cups at player’s families at games, students engaging in vulgar chants, players being abused all over Facebook and MySpace, and even one story in which Oregon fans made Kevin Love’s grandmother cry as a result of all the abuse they were receiving.

I’ve seen the best and worst of heckling on the front line at major college sporting events. And I’m all about heckling at college events, and I agree with the article on some levels and disagree wholeheartedly on others. For example, as a whole college students and fans certainly are getting too unruly. I sit at Vanderbilt games and the best heckling cheers the students can come up with is “Ref You Suck”, “Fuck You ____” , or “____’s an Asshole”. It’s unnerving, uncreative, and unfunny. I’m willing to bet every player on that field/court has heard everything of that sort a time or two. Additionally, fans harassing family members at games is completely unacceptable. I’ve never actually seen this occur, but it’s absolutely reprehensible. It’s a shame that the best a group of fans can come up with is vulgarity, and this may be a sign of larger cultural forces that have migrated themselves into sporting arenas. Strong responses from arenas and officials is absolutely necessary to curtail these extreme events from happening again. But then there’s the question, how much is too much?

As I mentioned before, I’m all about heckling at sporting events. Perhaps it was the crew I always went to games with as an undergrad, but heckling was just as important as getting to the event early to get great seats. However we had a general understanding to keep all of our tirades PG. (It would have been G, but even we use “suck”.) After all, the point of heckling is to get inside an opposing player’s head, and what better way to do this that performing some strange act that is both non-vulgar and completely confusing. They’ve heard all of the vulgar junk you have to say, but the realm of non-vulgar heckles is both wide and limitless.

Let me give you an example of what we’ve done at sporting events. At Vanderbilt baseball games, a tradition of the student section is to harass the third baseman. He’s the closest position player to the students and as such is generally subject to the most junk. One thing we’ve enjoyed doing is yelling, “RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU THINK ____ SUCKS!” We’ll generally get the entire third base side bleachers to raise their hand, and you know what the general response from a player who hasn’t seen this before is? It’s laughter. That’s when you know you’ve got a good heckle going, if the player is laughing. He’s thinking about what you’re saying and not the game. Another example. Whenever a player fouled out at a basketball game, we’d try to get the harmless “LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, SIT DOWN” cheer going. However our variation would be the “LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, RIGHT, TRIP!” chant, and every now and again we’d get either a miss-step or laughter out of the player.

However it appears that the SI article is referring to some pretty innocent stuff as “over-the-top” behavior. Take this example at a Maryland-Duke game:

Now that seems to me like a clever thing to do at a game. It probably won’t get Gary Williams to make a wrong decision or anything, but this is harmless and has been around forever. The SI article however portrays asks the question “…was it a creative dig at their rival’s ACC-lowest graduation rate or a boorish put-down?” Um creative dig. I see no way of interpreting it any other way. SI shouldn’t even put incidents like this even in the same article as the type of horrible behavior they’re describing. Perhaps they couldn’t show all the abusive stuff, but why indict the innocent jabs? Check out these other images they have posted as potential “examples”:

This kind of heckling I find clever and humorous. Sure it’s kind of abusive, but isn’t that the point of heckling at its core? Heckling can be abusive, just don’t take it into the realm of offensive. A crack-down unlike anything seen before is going to be necessary to bring unruly crowds in line, but it’s important to note that there is still good in the world of heckling.

But let’s keep this in perspective. We’re no where near the upper echelons of fan unruliness. All one has to do to see this is look abroad: