GESTURES OF ILL WILL
HOW DOES one seek asylum from an asylum? The games typically start with the house lights turned way down, searchlight beams sweeping the floor like a supermarket opening or a nighttime prison yard inspection.
Next, pounding, menacing music fills the arena, like war drums, bellows fanning the flames.
Then the public address voice takes over, screaming an hysterical welcome that’s one part ready-torumble, the other part shrieks to join him in committing bloody murder.
Then the combatants are introduced, starting with the hate-worthy, contemptible visitors, followed by the loud, elongated, exaggerated names of the home team’s players, the uniformed mob prepared to storm the Bastille. The assembled crowd is incited to frenzy.
It’s unnerving, illogical, uncivilized and increasingly ugly, if not dangerous. It’s an NBA playoff game.
The NBA, perhaps as part of its marketing plan, has invited all — PA announcers, patrons, players and increasingly gamblers — to exhibit their most actively visceral low instincts.
The crowd is urged to demonstrate, audience participation that simmers then boils as per the prompts. And there’s no prompt to the sober or inebriated more anticipated than the guy who has made a bet that he’s losing or lost — especially at the urgings of the NBA, its teams and arena-signage sponsors.
Even the exchanges between players and fans on antisocial social media have become vulgar and misanthropic as a matter of course. At the games, the exchanges between patrons and players have grown profane, fanatical and occasionally physical. Basketball games as holy wars.
Crude chants inspired by group obedience, weak wills and infusions of profit-soaked alcohol have become more common than a giveand-go.
A civil conversation, perhaps even one about basketball, with the person seated next to you has become difficult, if not impossible, due to obligatory blaring music and other sensory deprivations from the huge arena speakers. Enjoy!
Hardly a game is played that doesn’t include an ugly hassle between and among players or between players and customers. They’re quickly disseminated by social media, then on to YouTube, along with recurring messages: “At any price, aren’t you glad you weren’t there? Would I take my kids to this? Where is the sport in this sport?”
And it’s well beyond time for Adam Silver, a decent and intelligent man who knows right from wrong, to be doing all he can, privately and publicly, to save the NBA from becoming a pro wrestling spectacle orchestrated by Mr. and Mrs. Vince McMahon.
Tone it down, turn it down, demand better from the players, especially on social media, and make it abundantly clear that those patrons with misconduct in their self-entitled, booze-triggered minds, will no longer be welcomed. They didn’t pay for the privilege of abusing players or the senses of customers nearest them.
Treating the transgressors with fines “for inappropriate language [or gestures] directed at fans” or “referees” or “opponents” doesn’t cut it. Bad continues to grow worse. Not everyone is as privileged as Spike Lee.
And it’s time for TV’s NBA voices to stop ignoring what they and we can’t miss. Silence is pandering to people’s most vulgar actions, it’s tacit approval. All of them — all of them — must stop playing pretend. What are they afraid of, the rancor of desensitized dimwits, players and fans?
They hear the chants, they see the near-brawls, they read the tweets. They see fans close to the court screaming hatred in players’ faces. They know what’s going on and it has no upside. The compromise in trying to enjoy such spectacles as delivered by TV can only lead to greatly diminished returns.
Save the NBA from what it has allowed itself to become. Return selfrespect, dignity and decency to the sport.