Spreading the blame: A note from a newly minted Wynne Arboleda fan

OK that's a little too strong. I wouldn't call myself a new Wynne Arboleda fan after watching him briefly smother a PBA fan with assorted Hadoukens and Muay Thai knees. But I'm tired of the reflexive condemnation that follows anytime an athlete overreacts and confronts a fan, whether or not the scene becomes as grisly as it did in the Burger King/Gilas game.

Full disclosure. I like professional basketball players. I like them more than the coaches and more than the fans. They are the people who made me fall in love with the game when I was eight years old. They inspired me to become a half-decent player, and even though I was never good enough to go past truly dismal college ball, I still -- by now you can officially call me deluded -- think of myself as an athlete first and fan second. My sympathies run toward the players. I felt bad for Ron Artest when the NBA gave him a season-long suspension after the Detroit brawl. Likewise, I already feel sorry for Wynne Arboleda, because it seems like people are already calling for his head, and he'll be sitting for the rest of the conference at least and I'm guessing longer.

What gets me is that when the dust settles, everyone always points at the player and no one else. Yes, the player is ultimately responsible for his actions, but no one looks at the league, the franchises or the fans that through all the ingredients for a disaster into the pot and turned up the heat.

For starters, step back and look at the history of Philippine basketball. Over the years, fans have always posed a greater threat to players and referees than vice versa. From Yco-Ysmael to Crispa-Meralco to Crispa-Toyota to Ginebra-Tanduay to just plain Ginebra (that would be from the 1960s until about ten years ago), fans felt entitled to express their disapproval with bad calls or dirty play by showering the court with peso coins, spent batteries, Monoblock chairs, water bottles, beer cans and other projectiles. Teams wouldn't enter an arena without enough beach umbrellas to make payong over the entire bench. I've heard that PBA players started covering their heads with towels on the bench because it took the sting out of peso coins. By many accounts, crowd violence over the years was just as bad if not worse in the college ranks, with rivalries like Ateneo-San Beda and Ateneo-La Salle leading to regular parking lot brawls.

The point is that the atmosphere at big-time Philippine basketball games has always been wild and woolly, and I think it's fair to suggest that leagues -- MICAA, PBA, NCAA, UAAP -- have tolerated and even encouraged fan misbehavior. It spiced up games and brought in bigger crowds.

In recent years the PBA has more or less eradicated the air of lawlessness that once predominated in the stands at Araneta or ULTRA, but the legacy is still there. I'd argue that this tradition is especially important in the Philippines, where basketball games have been a place for people to blow off steam and act in ways that would be unthinkable in their everyday lives. Yes, American fans also get drunk at NBA, NFL, and MLB games and do ghastly things, but they don't have martial law in their not-too-distant memories. Outside of the Big Dome, martial law-era PBA crowds were forced to live by the Marcos slogan Sa ika-uunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan, and if they missed curfew or failed to live up to that standard of "discipline," the consequences could be grave. Inside the Big Dome, on the other hand, they could expect to see Jaworski knee somebody in the gut or Rudy Kutch clobber somebody, an if they were truly lucky a full-scale brawl would break out. They could pepper the referees with peso coins, skirmish with other fans, and scream their lungs out with the filthiest invectives that came to mind.

That release valve was probably a good thing. But these days, with the PBA striving to emulate the NBA's stuffiness and with the Philippines more than 20 years removed from Marcos's repressive dictatorship (OK, I'm aware of the PGMA parallels; let me skirt that issue for now), the power dynamic between players, fans and the league is changing. Some fans still want to blow off steam, primarily by heckling. The players can't be as rugged as they were in the Seventies and Eighties, because this is a modern league now, with "scientific" coaching and professional standards. The league wants the fans to have their fun and the players to remain beatific basketball machines, passionate only about scoring and defense, and impervious to whatever bedlam occurs in the stands. But if the league continues to allow fans to treat players like animals while expecting the athletes the athletes to "take it like a man," every once in a while a player will snap and react in a more primal manner.

That's what happened with Arboleda, and what might have happened last year, if Danny Ildefonso's teammates hadn't restrained him in a similar situation. Which calls into question the league and the arena and security. After the beatdown, BTV courtside reporter Patricia Hizon asked why security didn't try to get between Arboleda and the fan. Araneta security told her they're not allowed to touch the players, while PBA security said they're only responsible for the referees. This is tragically predictable. Anytime something goes wrong in Philippine society, the institutions responsible calmly explain that due to some strange technicality or forces greater than all of us, it wasn't their fault. Recently, we've seen Pangulong Gloria calling the Philippines a victim of global warming in the aftermath of Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng. Really? Global warming is a new phenomenon? It wasn't around when rains led to the 2006 Southern Leyte landslide? Or when Milenyo hit Manila? Or when Typhoon Reming caused mudslides that buried large swaths of Albay? And those are just the major natural disasters that hit the country while I was living there. In the basketball realm, when the late Sen. Robert Barbers asked government officials why suspected Fil-shams' citizenship papers were being rubber stamped, the Bureau of Immigration pointed to the Department of Foreign Affairs who pointed to the Department of Justice who pointed back to the B of I. The serial passing of the buck is as Philippine as the tinikling. When disaster strikes, it's never the fault of the people who are actually in charge.

So it's Sonny Alvarado's fault that Tanduay and the government fixed his papers, just as all the blame for yesterday's incident will fall on Wynne Arboleda. Everyone will turn a blind eye to the other factors that lit the fuse for his explosion. The bad guys get punished, everyone moves on and nothing gets solved.