BS Roundtable: Sports Fandom & Respect

(Feature image from @BoilerFootball)

After DT Lorenzo Neal's late-game personal foul sealed Purdue football's season opener versus Northwestern, Carla Delpit, Lorenzo's mother, posted this message to Gold and Black Illustrated's Knucklehead Central board. It spurred a lot of behind-the-scenes Boiled Sports discussion, so we wanted to post a BS Roundtable about the way the Purdue fanbase treats Purdue athletes.

From the Knucklehead Central board at Gold and Black Illustrated, posted with permission from GBI, Carla Delpit, and Lorenzo Neal.

Aneesh

Sports fandom is a weird thing, for good and for bad. There's truly nothing that binds people together like a sports team can, a community rallying around a plucky group of underdogs who triumph over every challenge that comes their way. It's the classic movie plot, I'm sure you can hear the standard inspirational music in your head now.

Purdue fans, with that chip on our collective shoulders, clearly see every Boilermaker team in this romantic way. The only people that root for Purdue have a Purdue connection, and all these kids chose to play for Purdue, so we fiercely support those teams at every turn.

Sports can also bring out the worst in people, with that KHC message as all the evidence you need of this poisonous behavior within our own Purdue community.

If there's one common thread throughout Boiled Sports' 12 years on the interwebs, it's that we want Purdue to have higher standards than the average school; as an institution of higher learning, with its treatment of its students and employees, and (least importantly, though it's BS' main focus) as a winning athletic program.

It's why Purdue President Mitch Daniels' column railing against transparency seemed so tone-deaf to me. This is not the message you want to hear from an institutional leader, as other Big Ten institutions are covering up spousal abuse, sexual assault, and rape under the banner of athletic departments' powerful protection. It's not the message we want coming from Purdue leadership, because it's the kind of thing we hope to be incompatible with the way Purdue functions.

That responsibility also rests with Purdue fans. We cannot treat players who proudly represent our community in the way Ms. Delpit described, and we cannot stand by silently if we hear others act like this. We have to force each other to be better, because that's the only way we get better as a society. We fiercely root for these players, these 18-to-23 year old young adults, when they're on the field. We need to start protecting them, just as fiercely, from nonsense like this.

Dave

One of the worst things about the internet is that it gives every jackhole with a brain cell a direct pipeline to the vast majority of athletes these days, and since there has always been a percentage of every fanbase more than willing to shit on anyone associated with the program that doesn't get the results they want, those jackholes no longer have to resort to mistyped letters, but can direct their vitriol squarely at kids whose "crime" was not playing to the best of their ability, or whip up an internet mob to do the same, since they know there are other like- (and empty-)minded idiots out there. They're the same group that scream obscenities when a teenager decides to make a different decision on Signing Day, or even to soft-commit to a school.

A lot of these players are born into situations that expose them to more of this garbage than most of us will ever see. Becoming athletes puts them on the receiving end of even more of it, especially given the size of the crowds they play for and the anonymity those crowds lend to the assholes. (Yeah, Purdue does this thing before every game/match/etc that you can be ejected for words. Ever seen anyone ejected for words? Me neither. Not enough security people and way too many other things to sort out, even if it's just overdrunk teenagers puking wherever they're facing.) Not many sites have the gumption to ban people who do that stuff; few even have enough moderators on hand to consider doing it, and that's a shame.

It would be nice to tell people like the ones that Carla Delpit had to caution that we don't need them - go root for Ohio State or some other cesspool, don't come to the games, don't buy tickets, don't post on forums, just go away. It's usually not that simple, though. Being a moderator means exposing yourself to that same level of toxicity and sometimes more, since people who don't think twice about telling a young man to go kill himself aren't going to say how-do-you-do to someone who takes away their precious internets. And there are always those people who are eggs on Twitter, knowing enough to get a new account in whatever system is necessary just so they can shit on other people.

I wish we had a better way to screen them out. I'd like us to be a better fanbase...or better yet, I'd like to use some small portion of the billions of dollars college football is spraying everywhere (except to the kids who are the only real reason it happens) to clean those people out of every school's fanbase. I don't know how to put that kind of money to use even if I did have it. Maybe this will be one of the things that a generation down the road will solve in a way that makes them wonder how dumb we were for putting up with it as long as we did.

Michael

This whole insanity of getting overly emotional about players and their performance is an outgrowth of a sports culture that has enabled institutional abuses at places like Maryland, MSU, OSU, Baylor, and many, many other. Too many to name.

Over time, that culture has lessened my ability to really enjoy sports. Like many people, sports as a hobby is a release from the stress of daily life. It's nice to pour emotion into a game, to have something else to project our troubles onto. But "real life" has wiggled its way into "sports life" in many ways that are far from positive. While there are very public instances of the good that comes from sports - the recent video of a trainer from IU who's battling cancer getting a game ball on the 1-year anniversary of his father's death, for example - the rot across the board overshadows all of that. And overshadows it to the extent where I start to wonder if merely being a fan is akin to being complicit in perpetuating a culture that goes against my core values.

I think that's why I haven't been as engaged with the site or Twitter as much in the last couple of months; it's hard to get jazzed about the QB1 battle when most of my exposure to sports has been through the lens of all the terrible things perpetrated by the biggest names in the sports. Hearing about countless atrocities - most often against women, but as Maryland has shown, not exclusively against women - really takes the wind out of my sails. And maybe that's not the worst thing. I've lived a fairly privileged life, and reminders that not everyone has been so lucky should be a motivator to act and be the change I want to see.

What has helped me resolve my moral dilemma has been clearly defining my red lines; that which, upon being crossed, means that I can no longer support the sports I grew up loving. If Purdue were to ever experience anything remotely close to what we've seen at all these school lately (covering up rape/sexual assault, wanton disregard for the safety of student-athletes, etc...) then I'm walking away from it all and never coming back. Never thought I'd be in a position where that was even a possibility.

Boilerdowd

This is the most basic of foundational life principles- Treat others as you'd like to be treated. The problem is, for some fans, they lose sight of the fact that the super-humans, are still people. Lorenzo Neal might be a mammoth man, but he's also a student at our Alma Mater...a kid who might stay in the dorm that you stayed in and had classes in some of the buildings in which you attended classes. The disconnection, obviously, is that you and I were never on a stage like Neal, nor have we ever had millions of people watching us on TV...and most of us were never awarded a scholarship to play sports at Purdue.

This is so obvious that I hate to even type it- but buying tickets and even donating money that might go to a scholarship never gives anyone the right to make criticism of an athlete into something much more personal. Racial slurs, general name-calling, threats of violence aren't ever acceptable...but let's think for a second. If you are a fan, I mean a man or woman who just loves to support your squad, why would you think this makes any sense at all? What good does it do for something that you claim to care about? In a less-extreme example, simply addressing negative play in a direct, personal manner, with a player in the week after a game makes little sense to me, and doesn't do anybody any good. In this case, turning a lousy play into a reason to treat someone badly (much worse than badly, actually) is simply reprehensible.

I honestly don't know how anyone could see these details in any other way.

As I talked about in the recently-record Handsome Hour, I think of Purdue fans as a different group, simply better than this sort of thing. I hated reading the note from Lorenzo's Mom. Sadly, in a group of tens of thousands of people, there are more than a handful of morons...wearing our colors doesn't change that. I apologize to Lorenzo's family as a member of the Purdue family...none of the sentiment that they heard after Saturday's game reflects what Purdue is all about. None of it's acceptable.

I will say that a multi-year starter shouldn't make a play like the tackle that garnered the personal foul...especially in the closing minutes of a close game. That's a football mistake that I'm sure will improve. The coaches and Neal himself will make sure of that. I will also say that I'm glad he's a Boilermaker and will be supporting he and his teammates this coming Saturday.

Dave

We all know there are schools where football is the third most important thing on the planet behind air and...well, maybe the second most important. And yet, even at a school that hasn't won an outright conference championship since 1929, there are fans who have no problem telling a kid that the punishment - HIS punishment - for making a mistake in a game should be death.

J Money

It sometimes shocks or disappoints people when they learn that their own fan base is capable of such bile. Purdue has many logical, smart fans -- after all, as we've often said, most Purdue fans are only Purdue fans because they went to Purdue -- and so many are able to see how atrocious this kind of thing really is.

But to me its similar to when people talk about how awful Twitter is or comments sections are. Are those places really that different from the rest of society? I would argue they are simply a representation of our society and it's just now easier to see and hear the truly abhorrent people because of those mediums. This is both depressing and necessary to understand, in my opinion.

Michael notes above that he finds himself disengaging and I get that -- he finds the negatives in sports to be disgusting and part of his brain says he wants no part of it at all. I could counter with the notion that we need more good people involved in every aspect or our life and society -- just as we need more good people volunteering in youth sports coaching and we need more good people in local and national politics, we also need more good people in and around college sports. And that includes writing and podcasting about college sports -- helping shape opinions on the subjects in question.

I'm not so arrogant as to think we have some massive voice and can change culture or open warped minds. I am, however, saying that we all can make a difference because in every conversation you have with other fans -- whether it's one-on-one or to a few thousand via a podcast -- you're helping them formulate and finalize their opinions. And if that leads to even a few people being more thoughtful and considerate and decent then that's a good thing.

I often quote Aneesh when he said "It's not that difficult to not be a horrible person." No one is saying you have to be a model citizen all the time. But just don't be awful. Let's start there. And if a player representing your school and by extension you makes a boneheaded mistake, then I'd ask that you maybe keep your criticism focused on the play and NOT on the person. That seems like it should be fairly simple.

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