Columnist Dean Juipe: Sports not exempt from violence

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, May 1, 2001 | 10:06 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

At the height of their fervor, sports fans in America might cheer wildly or weep in relative silence.

Beyond the occasional battery-as-missile act of hostility that surfaces once a year in some Major League Baseball park, fans are rarely prone to act so irrationally that someone gets hurt.

But in other parts of the world, attending a sporting event can be the equivalent of participating in a free-for-all. Whether it's excessive drinking, unbridled patriotism or outright hooliganism that prompts these disturbances, they're commonplace and inherently violent.

The spillover frequently leads to a loss of life, sometimes on a horrific scale.

Twice within the past month, for instance, riots that accompanied soccer matches in Africa led to the type of multiple deaths that ordinarily would only result from a terrible accident or an act of God.

On April 11 in Johannesburg, South Africa, 43 people were killed when "fans" stampeded both inside and out of a packed soccer stadium and the casualties were trapped against restraining walls and outside gates. The chaos developed not only when some 100,000 spectators crammed into a 62,000-seat stadium, but when the Pirates scored a goal against the Chiefs in a Premier League game between heated rivals.

And, Monday, the death toll climbed to eight in Kinshasa, Congo, after a stampede a day earlier disrupted a game between that country's top teams, Lupopo and Mazembe. That melee was prompted by the seemingly harmless act of Mazembe scoring a goal, although when fans threw bottles toward the pitch the police responded with tear gas and panic ensued.

These incidents, as well as the loutish behavior that dots soccer matches in Great Britain and other portions of Europe, are not the result of the spectators' displaced passion. Rather, it's an unruliness that reflects a lack of respect not only for the game being played but toward all of mankind.

Frivolously, it speaks poorly for soccer fans in particular. But, rationally, as these incidents escalate and appear increasingly premeditated, they may foretell a future in which sporting events need the type of armored patrol that heretofore was saved for Brinks deliveries and to subconsciously thwart Third World coups.

Inevitably, the violence (at least in Africa, Europe or South America) will reach the field and an athlete will be killed.

(It has already, albeit off the field and after the fact, if you recall Colombia's Andres Escobar being assassinated in 1994 after scoring an own-goal in a World Cup game against the U.S.)

Will the day come when chicken wire -- or, perhaps, something even more impenetrable -- needs to be installed between athletes and fans? Or when games will need to be played in seclusion and restricted from spectators, simply to avoid fan vs. fan and fan vs. player confrontations?

If so, sports, one of the great pleasures of life, will be impaled on the sword of an increasingly violent society and the world will take on a murky, Soylent Green feel.

So drink up and enjoy the freedom of earnest partisanship while you can.

And steer clear of any and all stampedes.