NBA players have always got abuse from fans. But is it getting worse?

Former NBA champion Jim Chones, who won a ring with the 1980 Showtime Lakers, believes the relationship between fans and players has changed since his era. In decades past, the NBA was purely a sports league, one that provided entertainment to those in the seats or watching on television. Now, though, he says, it’s an entire “social network.”

“This fan is different,” Chones tells the Guardian. “If you’re basing what a fan is on traditional values and issues and character, you’re going to miss the whole boat.”

Today, Chones says, fans have access to just about anything they want. With smart phones, fans can stream multiple games, surf the web, gamble, chat with friends, work or even watch a movie while attending a game. With these splintered attentions, Chones believes the NBA must cater to what fans want or else risk being left behind. Yes, we’ve now hit the fan empowerment era.

“It becomes a thing of access,” says Chones, who played in the pros for 10 years. “It becomes a thing of ‘This is what I want and if you can’t provide it, I have other choices.’”

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Fans have more leverage than ever, he says. But that change isn’t always positive. While social norms have changed since the harsher (read: more racist) mid-20th century, there remains a tendency for fans to treat players more and more like objects and less like human beings. To highlight just one example, during an NBA game earlier this year, a white fan called Russell Westbrook “boy” repeatedly (it wasn’t the first time the guard had heard the slur from fans either). Of course, these stories have, sadly, long been part of a league in which most players are Black, and most fans are white. It’s happened as far back as the 1960s when Bill Russell had his bedroom smeared with feces or later when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar overheard vile and degrading remarks or when Vernon Maxwell punched a fan for talking about his wife’s miscarriage. So, access isn’t always a good thing – and social media means that fans can now pour scorn…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba-players-always-got-abuse-080035607.html

Author : The Guardian

Publish date : 2024-05-15 08:00:35

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