CARUSO: Sportsmanship in pros not up to NCAA standard

Randy Moss pretending to moon the fans at Lambeau Field. A-Rod slapping the baseball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove. Lebron James and Dwyane Wade making fun of Dirk Nowitzki for being sick.

In November, Spec ran two pieces about heckling and how far is too far. While it is important to understand how fans interact with players, coaches, and referees, it’s just as important to consider how people on the field interact with each other—because it’s not always pretty.

Unsportsmanlike behavior is a common occurrence in all sports and on all levels of competition, and it comes in many forms. Some types of conduct, like fighting and taunting, are pretty obviously unsportsmanlike, but sometimes it’s not so clear-cut, like when teams run up the score in football or players guarantee a victory before a game.

To many, such behavior indicates a lack of maturity (like A-Rod) or professionalism (like Lebron and D-Wade) on the part of some athletes, and they may be right. If it’s such a problem, though, why do we see so much debate on Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption about unacceptable player conduct and so few measures taken to curb the indecency?

For one, the viewing public seems to have a fascination with showings of bad sportsmanship. Take, for instance, the bench-clearing brawl between the Yankees and Red Sox­ in the 2003 ALCS. After the incident, I remember seeing clips of it everywhere. Even as an 11-year-old, I wondered what the big deal was—what was there to say except, “We should try to make sure that this doesn’t happen again”? Outside of the vilification of Pedro Martinez, all that came out of that brawl was confirmation that the public (or, at the very least, the media) is interested by athletes behaving badly.

Additionally, there is an interest in continuing sports traditions. Baseball would never ban brushback pitches—the source of many shouting matches and most baseball brawls—because of their strategic value. In all major sports, some actions that can devolve into unsportsmanlike behavior are so ingrained that any attempt to curb them would lead to a fundamental change in the game. In hockey, for instance, a ban on checking and fighting would take away two of the sport’s proudest—and most violent—occurrences.

To that end, some debatably unsportsmanlike practices will forever remain. Barring some tragedy, like Ray Chapman’s 1920 death-by-beanball that led to the widespread use of helmets, most sports and their practices are so well-established that nothing could really change the way that they work.

Note, however, that professional sports provide the media with far more examples of poor sportsmanship than college sports do. Why is this the case? In college sports, there is more room for punishment than in the big four professional sports. In December’s game-ending brawl between the men’s basketball teams of Cincinnati and Xavier, for instance, the two schools suspended eight players for as many as six games. Schools also have the option to kick students off of the team, and they also seem more likely than professional teams to adjust playing time as a result of a bad attitude.

Because of unions and power structures, long suspensions, high fines, or—at the extreme—kicking players off of a team are not viable options in the pros. And professional sports teams have a lot more to lose—their revenue streams are based on a certain number of people attending their games, many of whom show up to see the A-Rods and Lebrons, regardless of their on-court behavior. While every college team replaces players with new talent on an annual basis, professional organizations have to keep their franchise players happy.

None of this is to say that I want to change how the NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL play games—rather, it’s to say that, from a perspective of sportsmanship, I prefer the way that college athletes play the game. Take the Light Blue’s loss to Yale on Saturday night. Despite dropping a 21-point lead in the second half, the Columbia players were still gracious after their loss and shook hands with the Yale players. That’s the kind of attitude I prefer to see on the court.

Tom Caruso is a Columbia College junior majoring in economics-mathematics.
sports@columbiaspectator.com

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