Having chosen to return to Oklahoma State after a bravura freshman year, Marcus Smart has gotten many things wrong. (In the cold light of hindsight, he should have gone the one-and-done route. Remember Smart’s incendiary sophomore season the next time someone decries a student-athlete’s lack of “loyalty.”) On Saturday night he got a big thing wrong and became a story not just on ESPN but on NBC’s Nightly News.
A player can’t lay hands on a fan. That applies to collegians and professionals alike. But say you’re a visiting player being pelted with verbal abuse and who felt a lit cigarette land on him? Might you be moved to take a menacing step toward the flinger? Might you be sorry you’d been prevented from proving that smoking could be hazardous to someone else’s health?
This happened to the great Bernard King when he was a Tennessee freshman. In January 1975, a patron in Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum flipped a cigarette at King, who was held back from retaliation by Vol staffers but who made a public vow to never again lose to the Wildcats. He didn’t. The Big Orange of Bernie and Ernie Grunfeld would subsequently go 5-0 against the Big Blue, twice winning in tobacco-stained Lexington.
Thirty-nine years later, a man seated along the baseline in Lubbock, Texas, made an unkind up-close remark to Smart after the Oklahoma State guard fouled a Texas Tech player on a fast break and wound up in the end zone. The Tech fan, an air traffic controller named Jeff Orr, has admitted to calling Smart “a piece of crap” and has apologized. (It was reported after Saturday’s incident that Smart accused Orr of issuing a racial slur, a claim Texas Tech said its investigation didn’t corroborate.)
For his two-handed shove, Smart was suspended three games by Oklahoma State. He apologized Sunday, saying, “This is not how I was raised … I take full responsibility. No finger-pointing — this is all on me.”
Smart’s apology had the advantage of sounding heartfelt, as opposed to half-baked. He didn’t say, “Mistakes were made.” He said, “I messed up.” Good for him. But by shoving Orr on the same day an Oregon assistant coach claimed an Arizona State student spat at him, Smart helped to raise a bigger issue: Does the right to cheer include the license to be a lout?
Considered the nation’s best returning player, Smart has had a difficult season. He has been cast, with cause, as the biggest flopper in college basketball. (Flops became epidemic in the NBA, which has taken measures to penalize the practice.) He has responded adversely to close guarding and was so frustrated during a halting performance against West Virginia that he kicked a chair on the Cowboys’ bench.
But just because you’re a fine player, even a fine player prone to flopping and acting out, doesn’t mean you’re not a human being. The human response to being called “a piece of crap” isn’t always to turn the other cheek. Sometimes the reaction is to say, “Same to you, fella!” Sometimes it’s to raise two hands and administer one good shove.
That doesn’t make such a response good or right. But as someone who has spent decades covering sports, the shock isn’t that a student-athlete pushed a fan. It’s that it took so long to happen.
Sit courtside at a college game and you’d be appalled by the language and behavior. Dick Vitale gushes over the clever Cameron Crazies, but what passes for wit at Duke can become a crude instrument in other environs. When Georgia Tech visited Michigan State in 2005, the verbiage emanating from the “Izzone” — State’s in-your-face-and-ears student section — prompted me to say to a colleague, “I’m no fan of wanton violence, but on some level I wouldn’t mind seeing Jeremis Smith clean out a row of these twerps.”
Does the cost of a front-row seat entitle a ticket-buyer to call a 19-year-old “a piece of crap”? A video popped up showing Orr directing what appears to be an obscene gesture toward a Texas A&M player in 2010. Was that OK? Should we expect every single athlete to exercise restraint in every single instance when no such responsibility seems to apply to fans?
It would be convenient and New Age-y to blame the insults being flung at someone like Marcus Smart on the culture of emboldened anonymity bred by talk radio and especially the Internet. But that cigarette was directed toward Bernard King long before either outlet was a piece of societal fabric. In the grand scheme, people have always had the capacity to act like jerks. And sometimes the jerks get front-row seats.
