Chair toss a symptom of society

It’s fast becoming the most infamous chair-tossing incident since former Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight’s highly publicized courtside tirade.

In case you’re unaware of this latest episode, which was played over and over again on TV, it involved the ugly sight of a Texas Rangers pitcher hurling a folding chair at a group of Oakland fans who had been taunting his teammates during the game. The chair struck a woman and broke her nose. The player was arrested for his indefensible criminal behavior, of course, and charged with aggravated battery. Everyone in baseball, from the commissioner on down, is now apologizing for the incident, insisting that no amount of heckling from the stands gives a player the right to physically attack the lout who’s berating him.

They’re right, of course. Violence is inexcusable. But with a steady rise in such fan-incited confrontations in the last few years, you have to wonder whether increasingly bad fan behavior is eroding the atmosphere of sporting events across the country.

We see evidence of it at the University of Maryland, for instance, where rowdy student fans have consistently tested the limits of free speech and the tolerance of everyone around them by shouting the f-word while jeering at players during basketball games.

We see it in the mobs of drunken fans who celebrate their teams’ championships in both college and professional sports by overturning cars, looting and setting fire to everything in sight.

We see it in children’s athletics, too, where overwrought parents attack coaches they disagree with and brawl with one another as their kids look on in horror and disappointment.

“I think what we’re seeing is a nation on the edge,” the director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport commented in USA Today. “We live in a post 9/11 world, with a war in Iraq and an uncertain economy, and sometimes we see this anxiety reflected in the streets and sometimes we see it in our ballparks.”

Perhaps that’s the bigger point in all of this. If the ugliness was confined to our professional sports venues, we could escape it by watching games on TV and hurling invectives at the screen in the privacy of our own homes. But the edginess has indeed spilled over into our streets, permeating so many aspects of society with an “in your face” attitude that degrades us all.

We see it every day in the escalating aggression of drivers who blare their horns, bellow vile insults and flip the middle finger at every poor slob who happens to be in their way.

We see it in the endless shouting matches among cable TV pundits who berate and belittle one another in the guise of political discourse.

We see it in the campaigns for high public office, too, in which ruthless character assassinations have all but replaced meaningful talking points as the new matters of debate.

We see it in the hostile, low-life antics that pass for popular entertainment on the “Jerry Springer” show, and in any number of mean-spirited programs whose sole purpose is to humiliate their unwitting victims or scare them half to death as viewers laugh at their expense.

We see it in people who believe their cell phone calling plans are licenses to engage in loud, profanity-laced arguments in any public place they choose, with a sneering disregard for anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot.

Maybe a little attitude adjustment is in order, both on the field and off.