Hecklers Are Important Part of Home-Court Advantage

They typically are loud, nasty and obnoxious. And those are their redeeming traits.

Their purpose for buying a ticket to a home game, or so it seems, is to unleash their poison tongues at players and coaches from visiting teams. Game officials, of course, are standard targets.

At Cal State Northridge, they turned Cal basketball coach Todd Bozeman into Rocky, hammering away until the guy went ballistic.

In colleges and universities around the country, they paint their faces and torsos in their school colors, attracting television cameras like magnets.

Some people consider them spirited and harmless, just boys--and some girls, too--having fun. Others think they are vicious.

You know them as hecklers. Robert White, the Hancock College men’s basketball coach, has other names for them, none printable here.

Just last Saturday, White came across some of them when the Bulldogs played a Western State Conference North Division game at Ventura.

Early in the second half of his team’s 104-77 loss to the Pirates, White asked Ventura Coach Philip Mathews to clear the three rows of bleachers behind the Hancock bench because fans were ragging him and his players.

“It was just general heckling,” White said a few days later. “I just asked for us to have our appropriate space. . . . When your team is not going so well, you don’t need to concentrate on that kind of situation.

“If Ventura had had their baseball or football team there, it could have gotten out of hand.”

White cited a conference rule that supposedly says several rows of bleachers behind visiting teams in basketball games must be empty or occupied by partisan people. Mathews, who later could not find such a rule in the conference bylaws, quickly told those sitting behind the Hancock bench to move.

“Bobby was just frustrated,” Mathews said. “It’s the first time anybody has ever made that request (at Ventura).”

White, whose club dropped to 5-17 that night, praised Mathews for his quick response. But he didn’t think much of the Ventura followers.

“They paid their three bucks to go to a game but I don’t think it’s right to heckle an opposing team from that close,” White said. “I don’t need a running commentary on the game. I don’t need Johnny Announcer right by my ear telling me what’s happening.

“They run a class act but that’s wrong.”

Now, anyone who has ever gone to a Pirate game at Ventura knows that the crowds can rock the place. They pack the gym to the rafters and are fervently territorial. A visiting player or coach who tunes them out can survive the experience with little more than a bruised ego, but one with rabbit ears and thin skin is mince meat.

If they make the mistake of even making eye contact with the hecklers, as Cuesta guard Colin Bryant did three nights before the Hancock game, it’s all over except for the post-mortem.

They scream and holler and don’t handle nail-biters well because they have been spoiled by Ventura’s 56-1 home record over the past four seasons. But Mathews says they are harmless.

“We have a large fan base,” said Mathews, who has the Pirates ranked No. 1 in the state again. “It’s part of college basketball. I don’t think our fans go overboard. . . . I’ve been to places where it’s really bad, where if they think they’ve gotten to you, they’ll really go after you.

“I remember one year when I played at (UC) Irvine and we played at Florida State. We were the Anteaters. They (Seminole fans) threw a dead possum on the floor.”

No dead creatures fly out of the stands at Ventura games but most visiting teams leave looking like corpses. They get pummeled physically by the Pirates on the floor and verbally by the bleacher bums.

It’s called the home-court advantage. It’s called Americana. And it’s something they do better at Ventura than at any other junior college in the state.