Haywood, worries about ‘living in a demonic time’
Sometimes, when Spencer Haywood
watches a game at home, the loutish fan behavior takes him back more than 50 years. He sees Chris Paul reacting to a Dallas Mavericks fan who allegedly touched his mother and pushed his wife in front of his children. All of a sudden, Haywood is back in 1970, remembering the glass bottles and curse words tossed at him and the people who dared to hit him as he walked on and off the court, writes Jerry Brewer of The Washington Post.
“They called me everything but Mississippi,” said Haywood, a Hall of Famer who grew up in Silver City, Miss. “They hit me, and I couldn’t do anything.”
Haywood was the enemy then because he was a 21-year-old challenging an NBA rule that players couldn’t join the league before they had been out of high school for four years.
Paul was the enemy last week because some rascal in Dallas really wanted the Mavericks to win Game 4.
That’s how it seemed, at least. But there are too many recent high-profile cases of inappropriate fan behavior to dismiss what’s happening as heckling gone wild. Beyond the anecdotal extremes, you can’t turn on games without noticing the abundance of chippy player-crowd interactions.
It has been a little more than a year since sports and live events began reopening their doors to normal-sized crowds. At this time last year, perhaps some of the nasty behavior — Trae Young being spit on at Madison Square Garden, an injured Russell Westbrook having popcorn dumped on him as he walked to the locker room in Philadelphia, Kyrie Irving
likening the treatment of players to a “human zoo” — could be attributed to the effect of limited social interactions during the first phase of the pandemic.
It’s a combination of the emergence from silos, the reaction to an athlete empowerment era in which more players are vocal and demanding and a societal culture war hemorrhaging civility. Put all of those issues in a sports venue, and the notion of a hostile environment takes on new meaning.
“Man, we’re living in a demonic time,” Haywood said.
Haywood is 73. He was born into indentured servitude in Mississippi, the son and brother of sharecroppers. He went from the cotton fields to the basketball court. When he was trying to play in the NBA, his mother was still making $2 a day picking cotton. Haywood and Seattle SuperSonics owner Sam Schulman fought the case to the Supreme Court, won a temporary injunction in 1971 and later settled the dispute out of court, paving the way for precocious talent to enter the NBA sooner. But he suffered because of that fight, as well as the intense racism of his childhood, succumbing to drug addiction and feeling like an outcast.
Later in life, Haywood found perspective, strengthened his fame and gained the respect he felt he deserved. So if this feels like a “demonic time” to him, it’s a sobering thought that shouldn’t be dismissed.
“For sports, the most important thing causing all this is the empowerment at a time when progress and equality are meeting resistance,” Haywood said. “Whenever athletes have raised their voices and fought systems, there’s always a pushback. What’s different about now is the craziness of the discourse. You can’t be watching and listening to all this evil and hate and denial — that’s a big thing — and then go to the game or concert and not expect some of that to be in there and manifest itself during the spectating experience.”