No doubt anyone who follows the NBA (or news in general) has heard about or seen the fight that went down between Ron Artest & company and the Piston fans. If you haven't seen it, here's a torrent of the video for your downloading pleasure.
Of course what Artest, O'Neal, and Jackson did was wrong, dumb, childish, and unsportsmanlike, but I can't help not sympathizing with them at least a little bit. Today's sports fans are getting worse and worse in terms of civility towards the players on the court. Wait, I should clarify, when I say "today's sports fans" I mean the subset of fans that think it is their duty to harass, heckle, and annoy the players they came to watch.
It's amazing that a fan would do something so ridiculous. What made him think it was a good idea to throw a beer on a player from the opposing team? What was the rationale that he used to justify doing something like that? When you go to see a movie, you don't throw your drink on the screen if you don't like the movie. When you go to an art exibit, you don't toss your slurpee on the tapestries on display. When you go to a high school volleyball game, you don't toss a hotdog at the girl who's serving. Why should it be any different for watching a basketball game? They're all forms of entertainment that someone pays to watch.
What paying to watch a basketball game doesn't give you is the right to treat who you're watching like crap. They're out there performing their job (a highly overpaid job, yes, but a job nonetheless). Their job is to entertain you. Now how would that fan like it if someone who he was working for didn't like his work so they verbally berrated him or threw a drink on him? I'm betting he'd be thinking, "What the hell? Why did I just get crap thrown on me? That isn't right or acceptable." That same person, however, has no trouble going to a game and lobbing beer on someone they must have thought wasn't doing their job as best they could.
The more and more I think about it, I sympathize more with Artest & company than I do the crappy ass fans who think they can do whatever the hell they want to simply because they paid for a ticket. People don't verbally degrade you and throw shit at you when you're doing your job Mr. Beer Thrower, so grow up and show the same respect to athletes you came to watch for your entertainment. If you dislike them so much, then don't buy tickets to their games. Stupid ass fans.......
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