Court Storming and the Absence of Sprezzatura

After the Wake Forest Demon Deacons beat the Duke Blue Devils 83-79 in basketball Saturday afternoon in Winston-Salem, hordes of Deac fans stormed the court. Actually, Gentle Reader, the previous sentence isn’t quite accurate. Video footage shows that several fans who had gathered under one of the baskets ran onto the court and were already at the free throw line before the game even ended.

These incidents are increasingly commonplace, abetted by television coverage of the events, even as the networks pretend to be appalled by the potential for injuries resulting from the practice. Court-storming may be part of the culture of the sport, but there are—or at the very least should be—limits. Curmie has no problem with displays of post-adolescent exuberance, but the safety of players, coaches, and officials must be paramount.

Duke star Kyle Filipowski is helped off the court
after being injured in a court-storming

The inevitable finally happened, and Duke star Kyle Filipowski was not merely jostled, but injured, in the melee, seriously enough that he had to be helped off the court. As the recipient of a degree from the University of Kansas, Curmie is morally and ethically obligated to despise all things related to Duke basketball 😉, but whereas he wants them to lose every game, he doesn’t really want anyone to get hurt.

The exact extent of Filipowski’s injury is still unclear, but it certainly could affect both the Blue Devils’ chances for the rest of the season and post-season, and, importantly, Filipowski’s future. He’s projected as a first-round draft choice, possibly even a lottery pick, in the upcoming NBA draft. He stands to make tens of millions of dollars over the course of his career… assuming he can play. There is such a thing as a career-ending injury, especially when we’re talking about knees, and that’s what this is; if this injury wasn’t severe, that’s only because of what Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms would call “moral luck.”

The video shows that at least three different Wake Forest fans made contact with Filipowski as he was trying to leave the court. Whether or not the bumping was “intentional” and “personal,” as Filipowski alleges, it was at best reckless and at worst criminal. Let’s face it: the man is seven feet tall; it’s not like he couldn’t be seen. The ethics of the situation, of course, would be the same if it had been a bench player, a student manager, a coach, or a referee who was injured. The incident attracts more headlines because it was Kyle Filipowski who needed to be helped off the court, but the rationale for banning court storming would be the same.

At least two other visiting players have been bumped into by opposing fans in court stormings this season. One of them is Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, probably the most famous women’s basketball player in the country—even more so than WNBA stars. She was “blind-sided” and actually knocked to the floor by an Ohio State fan in a court storming in Columbus.

Imagine if she’d been seriously injured. She wouldn’t have broken the NCAA scoring record for the women’s game, and she wouldn’t be closing in on the real record, held by Lynette Woodard. (The NCAA wasn’t the organization in charge of the women’s game when Woodard played, and they’re being predictably petty, narcissistic, and anal retentive about recognizing Woodard.)

Oops. Once again, Curmie indulged in a little inaccuracy. What he referred to above as “the inevitable finally happen[ing]” had long since happened, as ESPN’s William Weinbaum reports:

In a 2004 court storm, Tucson H.S. star Joe Kay suffered a stroke & was partially paralyzed. “It’s way too long that we've been putting up with this,” Kay told ESPN Sat. after Duke’s Kyle Filipowski got hurt. “I’m completely in favor of banning court storms & field storms.” Now 38, Kay said, “The police should arrest people for going places they are not allowed to go… enforce the rules as they do at other places. It's exactly the same thing.” “Hopefully people will now come to their senses.”

The only thing that’s changed is that Filipowski is known by virtually all college basketball fans across the country, whereas Kay may have been a local celebrity, but folks like me in East Texas weren’t saying “OMG, Joe Kay got hurt in a court storm!” Now, maybe, something will happen… but not unless the powers-that-be actually want it to, and that, despite the copious tut-tutting from the NCAA, conferences, universities, and the media, doesn’t seem to be the case. Indeed, statements of concern and promises of future action from the likes of ACC commissioner Jim Phillips seem very much to be what Curmie’s mom would call “balloon juice.”

Among those who have engaged in court storming this season, both in games in which their team beat Kentucky, were LSU women’s star Angel Reese and South Carolina President emeritus Harris Pastides, who even took to social media to boast about his participation. The problem isn’t going to go away, even in the wake of an injury to a star player, unless there are real, enforceable, guidelines designed both to allow celebrations and to protect the visiting team. And by “enforceable,” I mean sanctions that will be felt, not petty fines of a few thousand dollars to multimillion-dollar programs.

Jay Bilas, probably ESPN’s best analyst (and a former star big man for Duke himself), is outspoken about this issue:

It’s got to stop but it’s not going to. There’s no appetite in college basketball to stop it. The SEC has a rule against it but the institutions are happy to pay the fine because they like the visual. And the truth is, we in the media like the visual too. We put it at the end of every highlight. Years ago, when people used to run out on the field or on the floor, we wouldn’t show it. That was our policy. We don’t have that kind of policies with court stormings. We like it. It’s not stopping and it’s a shame.

Duke coach Jon Scheyer said after the game that when he played, “at least it was 10 seconds and then you could storm the court. Now, it’s the buzzer doesn’t even go off and they’re running on the floor.”

Ten seconds isn’t enough, but 30 probably is. It wouldn’t be difficult to institute a rule that no fans are allowed onto the court, ever, until 30 seconds after the final buzzer. The mechanism already exists in the 30-second clock; let it serve another purpose. The home university can forbid court storming altogether, but they must enforce the ban for 30 seconds. If fans want to celebrate on the court and the home team doesn’t object, so be it, but not until the officials and the opposing team are out of harm’s way.

And if fans are on the court before the game clock has expired, that should be a technical foul on the home team in addition to the other penalties. Would it have mattered this weekend? Duke would have had two free throws and the ball with about a second left in the game. Could they have forced overtime or even won in regulation? It’s extremely unlikely, but the chances wouldn’t have been quite zero.

Whatever the exact rules become, violations must be punished severely. At present, neither the NCAA nor the ACC (in which Wake Forest and Duke play) have any specific sanctions at all in place for court storming. The home university must be responsible for enforcing the rules; failure to do so should be punishable by a significant fine even for the first offense. Curmie suggests $500,000 for the first offense, with half paid to the NCAA or the conference and the other half to the opposing school. Subsequent offenses within a 36-month period would involve stiffer fines, loss of scholarships, and perhaps a prohibition against post-season play.

Any individual violating the rules should be subject to arrest for criminal trespass, and students (after appropriate due process, of course) could be placed on probation, suspended, or even expelled. Anyone who causes physical harm to an official or any representative of the opposing school should face both criminal and civil liability.

Media outlets must agree not to replay footage of court storming, and must cut away from live coverage as quickly as possible (the way they do when some idiot runs onto the field at a baseball game). The cameras should keep rolling, however, with the video available to police and, should there be an injury, to the victim’s legal team.

Chances of this happening: I’m not quite as pessimistic as Jay Bilas, but my nom de plume is Curmie, not Polyanna.

A longer-term solution can be found in the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura, a term used by Baldesar Castiglione in Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) to describe a studied nonchalance, making the difficult appear easy. It expresses a level of confidence, something approaching but not quite reaching arrogance (that difficult task was accomplished, after all). In the basketball world, sprezzatura is Michael Jordan or Stephen Curry swishing a guarded come-from-behind buzzer-beater and offering only a wry smile and a shrug in celebration.

Fans of the truly elite programs (Duke is one, Wake Forest is not), like their players, live in a culture of sprezzatura. They don’t storm the court after a big win, because they expected to win even, if they were the underdog. It was once a cliché that high school coaches in all sports would tell their teams to “act like you’ve been there before.” The fans of the top programs have been there before, too. Wake Forest fans have not… well, not since the days of Tim Duncan, at least, and he graduated before today’s undergrads were born.

Celebrating a win by the home team is great, but it doesn’t have to happen on the court, and it certainly doesn’t involve taunting or assaulting the other team. You haven’t really arrived until you acknowledge that fact and act accordingly.

This essay is a slightly revised and edited version of one which first appeared as a guest column on Ethics Alarms.

Just What You Needed: More on Taylor Swift

Curmie has two partially-written posts, one of them soon to pass its sell-by date and the other getting closer and closer.  He’s promised Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms a guess post on plagiarism, which would also be published here.  He’s got a book review due (ahem) imminently and hasn’t finished reading yet.  But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.  So… let’s talk about Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Curmie assumes that you, Gentle Reader, know the basics of the brouhaha.  A few notes on Curmie’s position in all this:

Curmie has no interest in whatever romance may or not have developed between the two thirty-something stars of their respective industries.  He hopes they’re happy.  That’s it.

Curmie will be rooting for the Chiefs in the Super Bowl, but that’s because for seven years he lived closer to Kansas City than he ever has to another (American) city with a major sports franchise.  He never saw the Chiefs play live, but he did see a few Royals games.  Anyway, the Chiefs are a secondary favorite in our household, behind the New York Jets and the Cleveland Browns, the decades-long favorites of Curmie and Beloved Spouse, respectively.

Curmie will, however, be cheering for Kansas City a little louder than usual this year, although he has nothing against the 49ers, simply to piss off the right-wing idiots (apologies for the redundancy).

Curmie is not a Swiftie by any stretch of the imagination.  He could name a couple of her song titles, but only because they’ve been mentioned as obviously witty comments by friends; he wouldn’t recognize one of her songs if his life depended on it.  Curmie does, however, have a dear friend who, for a couple of years, occupied the office directly across the hall from his in the poorest sound-proofed building you can imagine.  She is far more attuned to popular culture in general than I am, and she is a Swiftie.  Occasionally, if she’d had a bad day, she’d knock on my door and say, “I’m sorry; I just need some Tay-Tay.”  She’d turn on the tunes.  She’d keep the volume low, and with both our doors closed I could tell there was music playing, but not much else.  That’s the closest I’ve ever come to knowingly listening to a Taylor Swift song.

Just because Curmie isn’t a fan, though, doesn’t mean he has anything against her or her fans.  (Let’s face it, sexagenarian men aren’t exactly her target audience.)  She is arguably the biggest pop music phenomenon since the Beatles, or at least since Michael Jackson, and she wears her celebrity extraordinarily well.  She is generous with both her time and her money: visiting terminally ill young fans, giving the bus drivers for her tour literally life-changing bonuses, contributing tens of millions of dollars to food banks in cities she performs in… the list goes on.  It’s estimated that she gave away something in the neighborhood of $100 million last year.

True, she can afford it, but so could a lot of other folks who hoard their wealth like a dragon in a cave or build shrines to themselves.  She appears to be a genuinely good person, which is pretty rare amongst the glitterati.  Everyone who’s actually interacted with her finds her, in the words of Ed Kelce (Travis’s father), a “very sweet, very charming, down-to-earth young woman.”  Travis’s mom and brother, and his coach, Andy Reid, echo those sentiments. The only people who have anything bad to say about her, apparently, are the incel crowd of babbling reactionaries.

Travis Kelce is no slouch at his job, either.  He is arguably the greatest tight end in the history of the game, and if he isn’t at the very top of that list, he’s pretty damned close.  He’s also become a sought-after endorser of everything from credit cards to insurance to vaccinations.  He isn’t exactly in her league in wealth or international fame, but he’s a multimillionaire and a legitimate celebrity, so the couple have the benefit of not being in the same business (and therefore not competing with each other) but also understanding the vicissitudes of notoriety.

Oh, and this is the fourth time in five years Kansas City is making an appearance in the Super Bowl.  They were good before Tayvis (Travlor?) even met; they’re good now.  Still, Vivek Ramaswamy, perhaps the only person in the country to challenge Donald Trump for both narcissism and stupidity, has proclaimed that the Super Bowl will be rigged to favor the Chiefs (against the team representing the city most associated with good ol’ “American values,” San Francisco) to set the stage for a big endorsement of Joe Biden’s re-election bid.  Curmie thinks Vivek, et al., need to check the calibrations on their tin-foil hats. 

The paranoia had already reached epic proportions both before and after the AFC Championship game between the Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens.  Games with the referee assigned to this game, you see, are won by the visiting team more often than games with other referees are… and (OMG!) the Chiefs were the visiting team.  QED, right?  

Well, even apart from noting the small sample size, it’s worth mentioning that the referee, out of all the officials in the game, is probably about the least likely to actually affect the outcome of the game.  Yes, he’ll make (or not make) offensive holding calls on some pass plays, but so does the umpire.  But the most significant calls, especially in the NFL (as opposed to college), are on pass interference, and the referee, who lines up 15 yards behind the tight end, is pretty unlikely to be involved in a call 40 yards downfield.

Of course, there was one no-call on a pass play in the endzone that resulted in a Chiefs interception instead of a first-and-goal for the Ravens.  Replay showed that a Chiefs defensive back made contact with the intended receiver prior to the arrival of the ball.  (NFL fans know that the surest way to know it was a bad call is that “rules specialist” Gene Steratore said it was a good one.)  But that replay also showed that there was no conceivable way the pass could have been completed.  Should it have been a penalty?  Yeah, probably, but it was a close call and the zebras will always get one or two of those wrong. 

Naturally, the biggest complainer was Ravens receiver Zay Flowers, who pretty much said he expected the officials to be crooked.  Zay…  Dude...  If you really want to see the person most responsible for the Ravens’ loss, look in the damned mirror.  Taylor Swift didn’t follow up a good play with a much deserved taunting penalty that moved the ball out of the red zone.  The officials didn’t fumble just outside the goal-line for the Chiefs to recover for a touchback.  The NFL brass didn’t prove their childishness by slamming their hand into a bench and getting injured in the process.  Grow up, bro.

Of course, the conspiracy theorists want to have it both ways: if the Chiefs win, it’s for some nefarious purpose; if they lose, it’s because Swift is a “distraction,” and therefore bad not only for the Chiefs, but for football in general.  You know, like how the Marilyn Monroe/Joe DiMaggio relationship destroyed baseball.  (To be fair, the Yankees went “only” 103-51 that year, failing to reach the World Series.)

There is at least a little rationale for the fear that Swift might endorse Biden; she did so last time, after all.  But her support of Biden, like Curmie’s, seems more to be a rejection of the alternative (see here and here, for example) than enthusiasm for an octogenarian who wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer a couple of decades ago.  And I feel confident that such an announcement, should it occur, will take place not at half-time, as some moron suggested, but after a discreet post-Super Bowl interval.  The woman is too smart and too classy to do otherwise.  

Moreover, the effect of any such endorsement is likely to be negligible at best: the same poll that said that 18% of voters would be more likely to vote for a Swift-backed candidate also revealed that 17% would be less likely to do so.  Luckily, both numbers are unadulterated bullshit.  Curmie is likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by Swift because our politics are more or less aligned, not because of the endorsement.  There’s a whole lot of stupid in the American electorate, but not this much.

The terror is real, though, amongst the red cap brigade.  James Carville has a point in arguing that “it’s massively entertaining to watch people this stupid go public.” It would indeed be rather amusing if it weren’t so pathetic. 

Taylor Swift is not responsible for the fact that every idiot producer (again, apologies for redundancy) for Fox or CBS or ESPN or whoever wants to show her reactions to whatever happens on the field; in fact she has repeatedly asked them to stop.  The only good news here is that some little girls get to share some dad-bonding when their heroine is shown on-screen for an average of about 26 seconds per 3 ½ hour game.

In MAGAland, however, this amounts to Swift’s setting herself up as an idol—this from folks who worship at the feet of the world’s most narcissistic grifter (or is it the most grifting narcissist?  Both, I guess).  Among other things, she has been called “ugly” (remind me not to go to that guy’s optometrist). 

She took her private jet to the game in Baltimore, and according to Fox News it “belch[ed] tons of CO2 emissions.”  Of course, if she’d travelled commercial, she’d be held responsible for congestion at the airport.  Moreover, Curmie isn’t so sure about those numbers.  According to a table on the Guardian website (accompanying an article urging readers not to fly because of environmental concerns, so it’s not likely to under-estimate the emissions), Swift’s short flight would generate barely 100 pounds—5% of a single ton—of CO2.  That’s still a lot, but those Fox News numbers are looking rather sketchy.  Imagine that!

Fox Chief Conspiracy Theorist talking head Jesse Waters pushed the idea that she was a Pentagon psy-op asset.  (Well, he didn’t say she was one, only that they’d considered the idea, but he said it in a tone that suggested that his nothingburger of a revelation actually meant something, and the average Fox devotee is too stupid to recognize the dissonance.)  The Pentagon shot that down, and rather cleverly, at that.  When was the last time, Gentle Reader, the Pentagon was the more trustworthy source in a dispute?  Miracles happen!

And, of course, there’s The Donald himself getting all hot and bothered that he wasn’t Time’s Person of the Year, proclaiming himself more popular than she is and with more devoted fans... and declaring a “holy war” on her should she dare to express a political opinion.  Trump proves yet again how mentally unstable he is, and that he is not even close to being an appropriate candidate for the presidency, much less actually winning the election.  But that has been clear for a long time, well before the incompetence of the Hilary Clinton campaign got him elected.  

Swift was even criticized for not mentioning her boyfriend in her acceptance speech for winning the Best Album Grammy.  It pretty much goes without saying that the project in question was completed before she even met Kelce.  Instead—OMG!—she thanked her collaborators on the album!  What is that about?

Curmie’s favorite, though, has to be this post from “Alpha Male” Nick Adams: “By being on the team that won the AFC Championship, Travis Kelce will receive a bonus check of around $70,000. For those wondering why Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce: are things beginning to make sense now?”  Curmie has a reasonable retirement portfolio and a fair bit of home equity.  That said, if you were to pay Curmie the same percentage of his net worth that $70,000 is of Taylor Swift’s, you’d get plenty of change back on a $10 bill.  To be fair, Curmie has seen it argued that Adams is really a leftie troll, similar to the character created by Stephen Colbert a few years back.  If so, he (she? they?) is brilliant.  But a glance over a few days’ worth of his X account suggests that he really is just another nasty moron.

What is this all about?  Is Taylor Swift the target of the broflakes (what a delightful term!—kudos to whoever came up with it) because she’s a successful woman who terrifies weak men? because she is precisely what their pseudo-Messiah pretends to be and isn’t? or just because she’s a decent human being and they avoid those folks like Dracula avoids crucifixes?  A little of all three, one suspects.