Garrett Wait
Sports Editor
I’ve seen the darkest side of sports. It’s something I hoped would never happen, something I thought probably couldn’t happen at any event I would ever attend. However, trouble follows me around like a shadow, so maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Anyway, on with the story.
Two weekends ago, I went to San Diego with a few friends from here. The original intention was to watch the Pepperdine-San Diego basketball game and take in Super Bowl XXXIX from my friend’s parents’ house. We did those things, but a different event trumped the other two.
After dinner on the first night in San Diego, we were bored. And boredom leads to ideas most would usually think of as suspect, possibly even lame. Well, our bright idea was to attend a Scripps Ranch High School basketball game. Little did we know that decision was the first in a surreal series of events.
When we got to the high school, we noticed that the gym went dark as we were walking up to the ticket table. The school was having a problem with the breakers, but we were assured that the games would continue as scheduled once the lights came back. So to pass the time, we walked around the campus as my SRHS alumni friends pointed out all the things that had changed since they graduated.
Eventually, the lights came back on, and we bought our tickets. The girls’ game was scheduled before the guys’ game, so we sat through it and felt awkward as any college students should when watching a girls’ high school basketball game. Then, around 9:15 p.m., the boys’ game began.
The game was going smoothly, with Scripps on top of La Jolla High School by two with seven minutes remaining in the fourth quarter. That’s when things got out of control, as the late Bradley Nowell would say.
There was a scramble for a loose ball under the Scripps Ranch basket and two players got tangled up, one La Jolla player and one Scripps player. The La Jolla kid came up swinging for some reason that escapes me to this point. The Scripps player fought back, and then all hell broke loose.
Both benches cleared, players on each side were exchanging punches. A 6’7” Scripps Ranch sophomore was throwing haymakers like Patrick Swayze in “Roadhouse.” Then, it escalated more than I could imagine. The father of the La Jolla kid who started the whole mess came out of the stands and began to swing at the players and coaches from Scripps.
From that point on, it was a complete fracas. Fans poured out of the stands on to the court. Two police officers were trying to break up the riot, and administrators and referees were in the middle of the whole thing trying to restore some semblance of order.
As all of this was happening, all of us college-educated kids stayed in the stands like good citizens in decent society. After everything calmed down, they announced that the game was forfeited by both teams.
We cleared out of the gym in an orderly fashion, unable to really make sense of what we had just seen. We all had questions as to how it could get out of hand so quickly, why the refs didn’t stop the original fight faster, and why in the world a simple basketball game would become a riotous life or death situation for the fans and players.
I’m not going to lie; I laughed and joked about the scene after we got out of the gym. But stuff like this is no laughing matter, as I reach into my never-ending bag of clichés. It took me several days to understand the depth of the situation I had just witnessed.
It immediately reminded me of that ugly incident in Detroit, when the Indiana Pacers went into the stands after a drunken fan lobbed a beer at Ron Artest. It was strangely intriguing, yet we all knew that it was wrong. I felt like I was passing by a horrific car wreck. I knew what I was looking at was terrible, but I couldn’t look away.
Needless to say, I have a much better understanding of human instincts. The animal in us takes over when we see something like that. It’s funny to see how the more advanced we’ve become as a species, the more we crave those moments of visceral entertainment.
It explains why any time somebody yelled “fight!” in high school, 700 kids started running in the direction of the scream. Once we get caught up in the mob mentality of a situation like this, there’s no fighting it.
You become instantly engrossed in the violence and want to see more.
Scenes like this are all too common in sports these days. From Detroit to the suburbs of San Diego, fans believe they’re more in the game than they actually are. This is a dangerous and very disturbing phenomenon that I certainly don’t know how to fix.
Hopefully somebody knows how, because I would hate basketball fans in America to be put in the same category as soccer hooligans in European countries. Basketball isn’t a game of violence. It’s a game of beauty. Please, don’t let this beautiful thing be desecrated by fans whose actions border on insanity.
That’s not an answer to the problem, it’s just an honest plea for help.
02-17-2005