Growing up, I hated Kobe Bryant as a basketball player and boy did I hate the Lakers.
See, my mom and I were diehard Kevin Garnett fans, and thus we were Minnesota Timberwolves and Boston Celtics fans throughout most of my youth. This also meant that most years we ended up watching a lot of Kobe v. KG games, including four playoff matchups — three of which ended with Kobe breaking our hearts.
We were fortunate enough to go to a lot of their epic playoff battles at Target Center and we’d boo Kobe and the Lakers relentlessly. But that was the extent of it.
We never hated Kobe or any other player as a person, we never lobbed personal insults or threw things at them, and we never lost sight of the fact that every player is ultimately a human being deserving a degree of respect, no matter what uniform they wear or how they’re playing.
Now hopefully most of you read that and thought everything I just said is obvious. But I bring this up because it’s pretty clear not all of us share this mindset; there were plenty of incidents over the past week that touch on racism in fandom and a tendency our society has of forgetting that athletes are people too.
On Wednesday night alone, the NBA playoffs gave us three nationally televised displays of fans crossing the line. We had a fan dump popcorn on the head of Washington Wizards star Russell Westbrook as he was heading to the locker room after an injury in Philadelphia; we saw a fan in New York try to spit on Atlanta Hawks star Trae Young, and we heard about a group of fans in Utah using racial epithets as they verbally harassed the family of Memphis Grizzlies star Ja Morant.
Last week former Celtic and current Brooklyn Nets superstar Kyrie Irving said he hoped his first return trip to Boston with fans in the stands would be kept to “strictly basketball; there’s no belligerence or racism going on — subtle racism.”
This quickly earned a rebuke from Danny Ainge, a White former Celtic player and current President of Basketball Operations for the team, who said he never heard of a player dealing with racism as a member of the Celtics during his tenure.
That comment was either blatantly ignorant — given Boston’s well-publicized history of racism across many professional sports — or Ainge was trying to make White Bostonians feel better about themselves. Either way, it was quickly proven a dumb comment when current Celtics Tristan Thompson and Marcus Smart both said they heard fans say racist things at TD Garden.
Smart, who played on the team two years ago when a Boston fan received a two-year ban from the stadium after directing a racial slur at then Golden State Warrior’s center DeMarcus Cousins, encouraged fans to be respectful ahead of Irving’s return, according to ESPN’s Tim Bontemps.
“Yeah, I’ve heard a couple of them. It’s kind of sad and sickening, because even though it’s an opposing team, we have guys on your home team that you’re saying these racial slurs and you’re expecting us to go out there and play for you,” Smart said. “
ittedly incidents like this are probably more striking in basketball because of the proximity of fans to players during games and because it is a sport where a predominantly black workforce is essentially putting on entertainment for a crowd that is typically dominated by white people, some of whom are jeering at them.
That said, bad fan behavior is not exclusively an NBA problem, nor is it new. It’s also not just about fans going too far with talking trash — although in the past fans have heckled players about everything from their race to the death of a sibling, to a wife’s miscarriage.
We’ve heard of NFL players — including a former Charger — directing their family and friends to wear neutral colors at road games to avoid being harassed by fans. And there have been incidents of fans throwing things at players, including batteries and snowballs.
In baseball we’ve heard about fans directing slurs at players and throwing things, such as in 2001 when a Minnesota Twins game was paused after fans threw hot dogs and bottles at former Twin Chuck Knoblauch.
I know some of you are inclined to shrug this off. Maybe you feel this issue is being overblown; maybe you view this behavior as “part of the show,” or maybe you’re one of those who believe athletes make a lot of money and won the genetic lottery so this doesn’t matter and they should “just be grateful.”
I think there are issues with all three of those lines of thinking. The “grateful” one in particular tends to reek of entitlement, jealousy, racial undertones and a clear lack of recognition of the amount of work and sacrifice athletes put in to reach the heights of their craft.
I think this is all part of a larger, troubling outlook our society tends to adopt when it comes to pro athletes: we forget that they are people.
Instead of recognizing that they have families, struggles and lives beyond the game, too many of us get caught up in competition or escapism. We view them purely as sources of entertainment, commodities that can be discarded or icons that only hold value based on how they positively or negatively impact a team’s success.
This thinking goes beyond bad fan behavior.
It’s part of the reason some folks lose their damn minds when an athlete speaks out about an issue of justice that impacts them and their community. Think conservatives telling LeBron James to “shut up and dribble” or Kansas City Chiefs fans booing Patrick Mahomes and teammates for having a “moment of unity” before the season opener last year.
It also contributes to the callous, weird language we tend to use when we talk about athletes. Think of the regular social media abuse athletes endure, the “hot takes” on talk radio and sports debate shows, and how we talk about athletes being traded or moving in free agency. There is something strange about referring to a human as an “asset that can be traded” and fans siding with billionaire “owners” over the workforce and faces that actually make them care about their team.
When I put what’s happened last week in that context, I wonder if we as a society need to do some soul-searching. Because if we’re really fans of a sport or a team, we should care about the players who give those things meaning and joy — and that should ring true on and off the court.
