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.

From the "Sports Build Character" (Basketball Edition) Files

There are three (count ‘em, three!) basketball-related stories on Curmie’s radar at the moment, none of them, of course, really about basketball. They’re really more about ethics and the problems with viewing sports in general as a positive force in society. 

Obviously, there are advantages to sports: the athletes are of necessity in better physical shape (apart from sports-related injuries, of course) than they’d otherwise be. Team sports—even those which feature individual performances, like high school or college competitions in tennis or swimming—build an understanding of goals greater than personal aggrandizement: most of those players who say they’d rather be on a championship team than to be the MVP are actually telling the truth. And the lessons extend past teamwork to include worth ethic, discipline, etc. 

But there’s also a downside which comes into play in various ways—sometimes when the identification with the team becomes so great that it warps ethical values, sometimes when the allure of personal notoriety dwarfs them. 

We start with what appears to be a manifestation of the former. In far northwestern Vermont, a brawl broke out at a middle-school basketball game between 13- and 14-year-old boys from St. Albans and Alburgh. There is a little cell phone footage of the incident, showing that the scuffle, largely if not exclusively among adults, by the way, spilled onto the court while players from both teams stayed out of the altercation. 

Such episodes are infrequent but not unheard of: there was a good-sized altercation after a wrestling match at Curmie’s high school, for example, and a few years later someone got stabbed for cheering for the wrong team at a high school basketball game in the small town where Curmie lived at the time. There are, no doubt, dozens if not hundreds of such occurrences every year. 

What makes this story different is that someone died, apparently (although the investigation is not yet concluded) from injuries sustained in that brouhaha. There’s one headline that identifies the victim, Russell Giroux, as a “dad,” but neither the accompanying article nor any other Curmie can find supports that claim, so proceed with that assumption at your own risk, Gentle Reader… especially since that same headline says he died “at” the game; he died in the hospital after summoning emergency workers at some point on his way home. 

At this point, it’s a reasonable guess that injuries sustained in the punch-up contributed to Giroux’s demise, but that’s still speculative. What isn’t apparently, is that he was indeed a participant in the melee. What started it all is still not clear: it’s certainly possible that the brawl had nothing to do with the game at all, but it’s certainly a possibility that something in the contest, or something that someone in the stands said about its participants, triggered the incident. So the only thing we’re sure of is that crowds intensify The Stupid. 

Story #2: Duke women’s basketball coach Kara Lawson is claiming that the first half of their game at Florida State last Sunday was played with the wrong size ball. Lawson believes the half was played with the ball used in the men’s game; the ball used in the women’s game is two ounces lighter and an inch smaller in circumference. Both teams shot well off their season averages in the first half and much better in the second half: a statistic which, of course, could be either telling or simple coincidental. 

The error, assuming there was one, is significant in part because, if Lawson is correct, Florida State’s win in that game is tainted: the home team provides the balls, so the fact that the ball wasn’t kosher is on them. Plus, the two teams are battling for position in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), and the Seminoles’ win could affect seed lines for the conference and/or NCAA tournaments. 

Lawson claims her players were complaining about the ball throughout the first half, and that the officials finally noticed the error and changed to the right ball at halftime. She attempted to appeal, but the ACC denied her request, pointing to a rule that players (players? not officials?) must confirm the correct ball size before tipoff, and claiming that “following the thorough and objective review process, there was no evidence found to support the claim.” 

One thing is certain: somebody is lying. Whether it’s Lawson, the officials, or the ACC is unclear, but Curmie’s money is on the conference, mostly because of this part of their statement: “The conference continues to prioritize and support our nearly 10,000 student-athletes in a world-class manner and conduct its 27 sponsored sports with the utmost integrity.” When you start saying irrelevant stuff, especially if it’s self-congratulatory, the chances are really good you’re ducking responsibility for something. Or, as generations of Curmie’s students have heard him say innumerable times, “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.” 

By the way, a similar phenomenon happened a while back, when the College of Charleston was docked two wins in terms of seeding for the Colonial Athletic Conference tournament for using “improperly sized” balls in two conference games in January of 2017. 

But the winner of the WTF Sweepstakes has to be one Arlisha Boykins. She was an assistant coach for the Churchland High School girls’ JV basketball team in Portsmouth, Virginia. One of the team’s players was out of town playing in a club tournament, and the 22-year-old Boykin impersonated her, playing under her name, using her uniform, and taking the floor in a game against Nansemond River. Boykins was playing with and against girls no older than 15. 

Apparently everybody associated with the team except the girl whose identity was stolen is culpable. Boykins was fired; so was the JV head coach, who had to be in on the deception, and the varsity coach, who was reportedly “encouraging the behavior” during the game. Of course, the other girls on the team had to have known what was going on. They can be forgiven, perhaps, for fearing to come forward about what was happening, but there are a lot of adults who had to have feigned ignorance. It took the parents of the girl who wasn’t at the game to point out the emperor’s déshabillément. 

That girl, by the way, has transferred to another school, where, presumably, she’ll be able to play ball for the rest of the season. Churchland’s season is over; whether this was indeed a decision by the players, as has been reported, or a decision imposed by the administration, which has decided to do its job for a change (who hired those coaches, after all?) is not clear, but failure to do the right thing can have consequences. 

We close with a quote from one of the few actual adults in this piece, the father of the girl who place was taken by Boykins: “Coaches always preach to the kids about integrity and those types of things, so I was just shocked.” Curmie was young and naïve once, too…