King Kaufman's Sports Daily

The NBA was right to throw the book at Ron Artest, but the pent-up rage behind last week's string of violent incidents in sports remains.

Nov. 22, 2004 | Everybody's talking about violence in sports these days, but really, what's the big deal? Sunday was the fifth day out of the last eight in which there were no huge brawls at major televised sporting events. A fisticuffs-free Monday would make for two days running -- an era of peace and harmony heretofore only imagined by dreamy pacifists.

In case you've been away from a TV for the last 72 hours, the main event was Ron Artest leading various Pacers into the stands at Detroit, swinging wildly on the off chance that they might meet the person who threw a cup of ice that hit Artest as he lay on the scorer's table.

What's this world coming to when a visiting player can't lie down on the scorer's table without getting hit by more than a tenth of a pound of frozen water?

Friday's excitement was just one of three big blowups in the sporting world in the past week. Last Sunday the Pittsburgh Steelers and Cleveland Browns had a pregame brawl, and Saturday the South Carolina and Clemson football teams had a pregame scuffle that served as a prelude to an on-field riot in the fourth quarter about which Martin Scorsese plans to make his next movie.

What's going on here? The last week has been particularly bad, but this kind of violence seems to be on the increase in sports arenas over the last five years.

A not-for-fun snowball fight between the Oakland Raiders and fans in Denver and a fan attacking an Astros outfielder in Milwaukee seemed to kick off this new era, which has included Dodgers players wading into the stands at Wrigley Field, two incidents of fans attacking a coach and an umpire at White Sox games, Tie Domi of the Maple Leafs wrestling with fans near the penalty box in Philadelphia, a fight between Yankees players and a groundskeeper in the Fenway Park bullpen during last year's playoffs and the chair-throwing incident in Oakland two months ago.

And that's aside from the looting and rioting among fans that often follows big wins or losses.

"Sports reflect society," NBA commissioner David Stern told ESPN after handing down a season-long suspension to Artest and long suspensions to others Sunday, "and society has become less civil. Social norms really are to some extent breaking down across a broad array of places. What you say, what you do, how you act no longer matters based upon any old social conventions."

Next page: It's not the violence, it's the disrespect, and that's epidemic