COURT JESTERS:After Virginia upset then-No. 3 Duke on Thursday night in Charlottesville, Va., fans storm the court in a dangerous ritual that has become all-too common this NCAA basketball season. (AP)
It figures that in a week when TV’s sports experts finally awakened to a significant issue, they woke up … then fell out of bed.
Court-storming was an obvious, inevitable matter weeks before Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski brought it up on Thursday after his team was caught in another obligatory, audience anticipation/participation stampede following a loss at Virginia.
Unfortunately, Krzyzewski, seeing how beating Duke on one’s own court now seems to propel people in the same direction at the same time, saw the matter in a narrow light: How such events endanger his team and coaches:
“Just get our team and coaching staff off the court before students come on,” he said.
Apparently, Krzyzewski believes that go-nuts, four-sided stampedes should be preceded by a full minute or so of respectful, everyone-stand-still comportment in order to allow the vanquished to shake hands then depart.
He wasn’t alone missing the larger point: Such all-in demonstrations are, for all involved, as dangerous as they are unnecessary.
On ESPN’s “Mike & Mike” simulcast on Friday, ESPN analyst and court-storming advocate Dan Dakich repeated his take: Court-rushes are cool, apparently a right and a rite assured when tuition checks clear — even if he did acknowledge that one time …
Yep, Dakich supports such violent mass movements of bodies despite the fact that while coaching Bowling Green he lost a key player — Germain Fitch, who tore his ACL — to a home court-storming.
Perhaps Dakich thinks that was the only time such clear and present danger cost someone their health — and he just happened to be there.
Then there was ESPN’s Digger Phelps, on SportsCenter, eager, it seemed, to again play to an audience he regards as young and dumb, with shallow hipness: “I have no problem with it. … Safety? Sure, you may get one person hurt …”
On Saturday, CBS studio panelists Greg Anthony and Doug Gottlieb voted with Phelps, in favor of sustaining court-storming as a marvelous modern tradition.
Anthony was incredulous that it was even an issue: “What’s next? Are you going to outlaw tailgating?”
No, Greg: Not as long as the cars are in park with their engines turned off.
Here, fellas, try this on:
It’s a 2007 episode of ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” one begging to be re-aired, so much so that it’s already too late. Let Dakich, Phelps, Gottlieb, Anthony and all the other court-storming enthusiasts watch the piece, then tell Joe Kay’s mother, and Gerry Plunkett, wife of Stanford’s 1970 Heisman winner, Jim Plunkett: “I’m still for it.”
Kay was a high school senior in Tucson, the 6-foot-6 star of the school’s basketball team. He had a perfect SAT math score, was an accomplished musician and class valedictorian. He had accepted a volleyball scholarship from Stanford.
But after his basketball team won a big game, students stormed the court and lifted Kay to their shoulders — the same way a Virginia player was lifted up on Thursday night.
Then, in a second, everything changed. The surge of humans flung Kay to the floor. A carotid artery tore. Kay, 18, had a massive stroke.
As his mother told OTL, he had to re-learn talking, reading, thinking. A math wiz, he had to learn to distinguish the symbol for multiplication from the one for division.
That same day, at Stanford, the Arizona basketball team played. The game was tied with three seconds left when Stanford’s Nick Robinson stole the ball, then scored at the buzzer. The court was stormed.
Gerry Plunkett was seated near the court. She was slammed to the floor, then lay pinned by a crush and rush of the civilized. She didn’t have to move to be caught up in, then under, the mob. She thought she was going to die.
She beat it. Sorta. She had bruises, but is now unable to stick for the ends of games.
If that doesn’t do it for TV’s merry court of court-storm supporters, there’s always footage from the field-storming at the end of the 1993 Michigan-Wisconsin football game: 73 injured, six critically. That’s four episodes, men, 76 people injured, right there.
But gee, in the meantime — and until the next time — what fun! Besides, student stampede videos make great network promos!
Pandering gets HBO nowhere
Among TV’s steady amusements is watching and listening as networks pull punches with audiences while kissing the fannies of team owners and league commissioners — as if such pandering counts the next time money counts.
HBO, in addition to helping make Floyd Mayweather more than $100 million for nine fights, consistently produced image pieces on him that ignored or minimized his incivility and criminality, which included a three-month stretch for domestic battery.
And where did it get HBO? Mayweather jumped to Showtime/CBS for more money.
* Deadspin, the website that has a habit of defaming people with bad guesswork and childish cheap-shots, last week did an outrageous number on SiriusXM analyst and co-host Jim Miller, the former NFL quarterback.
Miller, interviewed on a Chicago radio station, said certain players, for religious reasons, would never accept a gay teammate. He added that someone being gay made no difference to him.
From that, a Deadspin regular branded Miller homophobic, a bigot. He mocked Miller’s NFL accomplishments, ignoring that he was good enough to go from a sixth-round pick to a 10-year career.
After taking heat for skewed conclusion-jumping, the author wrote he regretted what he had written — but suspects he’s right, anyway. Ugh.
* The question now becomes: Just how far can Rory McIlroy throw his new Nike clubs? By the way, will someone on NBC/Golf Channel explain how countrymen McIlroy and Graeme McDowell can be “old friends” when one’s 23 and the other’s 33.
* Mike Breen, on ABC/ESPN yesterday, pointed out early in the second half of the Heat-Knicks game, after LeBron James instigated a comeback by running the court then scoring on an inside follow of a miss: No one on either side, with or without the ball, was playing as hard.
* Steve Lavin and St. John’s sure go to great lengths — Texas, far-flung JUCOs — to recruit players who wind up in trouble. They can’t find players from around here to suspend?