There’s No Place For Loyalty In Poisonous NBA Culture

This has been the week of unhappy returns in the NBA.

On Tuesday, Dwight Howard played in Orlando for the first time as a Laker, torching his former team for 39 points. On Wednesday, Carmelo Anthony played in Denver for the first time as a Knick, turning in one of his worst games of the season (nine points, 3-for-12 field goals) before leaving with a sore knee. And this Sunday, Chris Bosh will play in Toronto for the fourth time since he left the Raptors to sign with the Heat in 2010.

While there’s no telling today how Bosh will perform against his former team (although in his first three return trips to T-Dot he’s averaged 27.6 points), I can guarantee right now that he will encounter the same reception ‘Melo was met with in Denver and Howard heard in Orlando: Insults, taunts and boos that cover the spread from mildly bitter to threateningly hostile.

Bosh will be the next in a long line of athletes to be convicted and executed in effigy by a disloyal fan base on the charges of… being disloyal.

It’s an ugly side of sports that I cannot understand or justify.

Now here’s where I do like the big-time writers and use my favorite TV show to make a sports analogy: On the flawless FX series Justified, the collective criminal element of Harlan County is constantly at odds with Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens, himself born and raised in Harlan County. But who do those outlaws hate even more than Raylan? The “carpet-baggers,” a.k.a. the criminals who roll into east Kentucky from places like Detroit and Miami trying to make money off the self-proclaimed hillbillies.

[RELATED: Smack – Dwight Howard Dominates The Magic In His Return To Orlando]

Although Raylan essentially turned on his own people by becoming a lawman (even his father was a career crook), the seedy-underbelly types give him much more respect than they give the carpet-baggers and other cops. Why? Because Raylan is one of their own. Whatever honor exists among thieves might even extend to the law if you were bred to be loyal.

Sports fans, whether they reside in the hills of east Kentucky or The Hills of Southern California, operate under a different set of values.

Sports fans will eat their young. They will love an athlete to death one day, then wish him dead the next; hometown discounts be damned. They will root against the bad guys, but reserve a stronger, special kind of venom if the bad guy used to be one of their good guys.

Keep reading to hear why Orlando’s booing of Howard was despicable…

In the hours leading up to Howard’s return to Orlando, some Magic fans on Twitter stated it was their goal to ride Howard so hard during the game that he’d cry. This is their team’s all-time leading scorer, leading rebounder and leading shotblocker. This is the man who came to Orlando as a boy fresh out of high school, then grew up to lead the Magic to the 2009 NBA Finals just five years after they were sorry enough to earn the No. 1 pick in the draft. This is the man who should have his No. 12 retired by the Magic. And he deserves to be verbally abused by fans in the very arena his talent and marketability helped build?

Fans in Oklahoma City will boo LeBron James because he’s the main reason their Thunder didn’t win the 2012 NBA championship. And that is their only connection: LeBron storming into town with his Miami squad and crushing OKC’s title hopes.

But fans in Cleveland? They hate LeBron, even though he single-handedly revived the dying Cavaliers, even though he led a perennially losing franchise to several deep playoff runs, even though he was unquestionably the best player the Cavs have ever had. OKC boos LeBron because he is nothing but a villain to them. In Cleveland, he was a hero. Their best hero. So now they hate him more?

And we wonder why athletes are supposedly disloyal.

[RELATED: Smack – The Nuggets Ruin Carmelo Anthony’s Homecoming]

When their greatest crime against these angry fans is – more often than not – simply exercising the same free agency that every employable citizen has to live and work where they want for the best offer they can get, loyalty should have no tug on an athlete’s heart.

Why should any athlete be loyal to a franchise that will trade, bench or fire them the moment they’re no longer deemed useful? (Ask Kendrick Perkins how loyal the Celtics were to him.)

Why should any athlete be loyal to media who will praise them when they’re high and just as suddenly rip them when they’re low? (Ask Kwame Brown about going from the apple of many draftnik’s eye in 2001 to being a standard of ridicule by 2011.)

Why should any athlete be loyal when they live in a world swimming with sharks and leeches who know exactly how many millions of dollars they could potentially bleed from that athlete’s account? (Ask anybody who has seen the ESPN documentary Broke.)

Why should any athlete be loyal to fans whose loyalty is only as strong as the fabric of the jersey he wears?

This isn’t a plea to turn NBA arenas into campfire sing-alongs. While I don’t accept the credo that buying a ticket gives a fan license to act sub-human, I believe elite athletes are strong enough to handle hecklers and boo-birds and still perform at the highest level. Intimate interaction between fans and athletes – both negative and positive – is part of the appeal of sports, and is particularly entwined in the heart and soul of basketball rooted in the playground. But even on the playground, there is most often an undercurrent of respect between player and spectator.

On the organized, allegedly more sophisticated levels of basketball – be it college fans versus a recruit who shunned their school to sign with a rival, or NBA fans versus their franchise’s former star – that undercurrent can be poisonous.

And you can’t blame any man if he has to become cold-blooded to survive in a pit of snakes.

Should Howard, Anthony, LeBron and others be vilified as cold-blooded and killed for not having loyalty?

Follow Austin on Twitter at @AustinBurton206.

Follow Dime on Twitter at @DimeMag.

Become a fan of Dime Magazine on Facebook HERE.

×