COLUMN: Sports is not like real life

From Jeff Wieland's, "Peanuts and Cracker Jacks," Fall '95 But a Penn fan perched in the front row of Yale's Payne-Whitney Gym felt the need to say a little bit more. A split second of disbelief dissolved into anger and frustration. He exploded from the bleachers and chased the official 20 feet up the sidelines, bouncing insults off the striped shirt like he was dribbling a basketball. "Ref, that sucks!" he screamed. "Who gained an advantage? Who gained a [expletive] advantage? Was that professional? You're doing a helluva job tonight, zebra! A fine job!" The incident might have passed quietly, but on this occasion, the official turned his head to acknowledge his heckler. Poised at the point of no return, the fan powdered him with a few more choice words. Was the Penn fan wrong? But the sports world is not the real world. Rather, it is a fantasyland created by men and women to untie those knots of conflicting emotions tangled by the complexities of the real world. Or can you? What about the Quakers fan who abused the referee? Was that any different from Yale fans who chanted "C.B.A." at Jerome Allen as he shot free throws? What authority governs a person's actions in the sports world? Just as baseball in its romantic role as America's national pastime is specially exempted from our antitrust laws, so America's stadiums and ballparks have de facto become vacuums in our civil code. When you step through the Palestra turnstile before a Penn basketball game, you might as well be Alice stepping through the looking glass, because the world beyond is a similar but twisted version of the one outside. At the Palestra, you can spit. You can scream like a banshee if you like. You sprinkle your dialogue with a healthy dose of profanity during anxious moments. When you don't like the ruling, you can ridicule the judge. You can even taunt the poor sap in orange and black three rows down, and safely pelt him with a kernel or two of popcorn from time to time. Sports fans have collectively established their own unwritten code of conduct as simple as the sports world itself. When have you gone too far? It's when the guy next to you says, "Shut up, you're being an ass," or an usher paraphrases it more politely. The consequences of those actions are neatly uniform -- you break the code, you leave the building. It is understandable that people who treat a trip to the Palestra as casually as a trip to the circus might be disinterested or offended by the vulgarity they find there. It's not always easy for someone to suspend his carefully contrived sense of morality as quickly as he can find section 215. In the sports world, right and wrong are stripped of their trivial nuances and applied in broad strokes, allowing the grey area to fade into right. A certain degree of verbal abuse becomes a legitimate part of that simplified world. Fans understand it, players understand it and officials understand it. And as often as they bleat about cleaning things up, they all have come to accept it. At what point was the Penn fan wrong? He was only wrong after his final string of profanity, when the usher finally came over and politely asked him to stop while the referee returned to the game. Or as the guy two rows behind him paraphrased, "Shut up, you're being an ass." Jeff Wieland is a College sophomore from Aptos, Calif., and a sports writer for The Daily Pennsylvanian. Peanuts and Cracker Jacks appears alternate Thursdays.