Arrest Artest

The season ending penalty NBA commissioner David Stern handed down on Ron Artest is not only a strong rebuke of the player’s actions, but also to the chucklehead ESPN announcers (John Saunders, Tim Legler, Greg Anthony, and Stephen A. Smith) who all but excused the Pacers’ players for going into the stands to pummel Piston fans.

How many other viewers were aghast as I was that the ESPN quartet blamed the fans for provoking Artest et. .al and thus getting the beatdown they they deserved while downplaying the possibility that innocent fans were being wrongly attacked. Anthony and Legler in particular took pains to explain that NBA players are so intense during regular season games that Artest’s reaction was only the natural response. Perhaps more than the actions of the Pacers themselves, the comments of these former jocks --- the “jockocracy” as Howard Cosell decried it --- perfectly illustrates the distance and divide that now separates professional athletes and the media that covers them from the regular sports fan.

Even the usually level headed John Saunders came down firmly on the side of the players with numerous comments about alcohol being the catalyst for the melee of players and fans in the stands. A comment to which my brother retorted, “is he suggesting that Ron Artest is drunk?”

What was lacking from the ESPN broadcast – aside from good judgment, which goes almost without saying – was a sense of proportion. Someone gets doused with beer and, while not excusing it, let’s be realistic it was a half empty cup of beer and not a “bottle” as most of the press called it, its ok to physically attack him. Under that type of thinking, would Saunders and Co. have excused the fan who Charles Barkley once spit on to rush the court to duke it out?

Saunders and Co. blamed the fans, they blamed arena security, everybody, it seems but the Pacers themselves who escalated the incident from a boorish fan throwing a drink on someone to a full blown national sports controversy. Thankfully, the person whose opinion counts most, Commissioner David Stern, had the perspective and judgment that was so sorely lacking on ESPN.

Now if someone can only answer the question of how the heck Jim Gray found himself in the middle of this entire ordeal. Whether it be the Holyfield-Tyson fight to Pete Rose, Gray always seems to find himself in the thick of things, even if it appears to be only on the surface an early regular season basketball game cum riot.