Crowd Behavior: Worth Policing, Worth Doing The Right Way

People pay good money to attend tennis tournaments and every other kind of sporting event. Yet, tennis has a well-established culture of manners and etiquette. There are unwritten expectations for the ways in which tennis fans can and should behave at an event.

The problem: Unwritten rules aren't written.

American readers of this piece who have a basic working knowledge of other sports are probably aware that baseball owns a lot of unwritten rules. When these "unwritten rules" are violated, two baseball teams often engage in a brawl (or at least an angry argument), usually because a pitcher attempted to throw the ball at the head of a hitter. As is the case in tennis, these "unwritten rules" have a long history in the culture of the sport.

A plot complication: What happens when modern versions of a sport, wrapped inside new cultural pressures and tensions and points of awareness, clash with the unwritten rules of the past? New generations of players and fans often clash with the stodgy conceptions and beliefs of the older set, or not even the older set, but the traditionalists. 

Even young people can be traditionalists. Consider this the "counter to the counterculture." That idea -- with a faction carrying its banner -- exists in sports, not just politics or religion or the arts. (An alternative phrasing: the backlash to the backlash. You get the point, regardless of which camp you inhabit.)

How to reconcile old virtues with new-age excitement? How to marry traditional understandings of etiquette with modern appeals to energy and enthusiasm? It's not as easy as it seems.

It also must be attempted.

Let's hold those two points together instead of believing (or emphasizing) only one.

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First things first: Controlling crowd behavior isn't going to be fully solved or fully contained all at once. It will be a gradual process. Insisting on or expecting dramatic (total?) success right off the bat probably isn't situationally or politically realistic.

Let's start at a small level and work toward steady evolutionary change.

Point-blank: If fans yell or whistle or make other noises during points -- beginning when the server initiates his or her service preparation with the ball-- they must be kicked out of the stadium.

For those who say that fans -- as a result of buying tickets -- have the right to do whatever they want, a reminder: In baseball, if fans lean over the railing to catch a baseball which is live and in play, they get tossed out of the stadium. Buying a ticket earns the right to do a lot of things, but this is not quite carte blanche. Limits on behavior always exist. This is not a 100-percent "do what you want" card.

Tennis ought to have no problem being strict in enforcing the simple policy: Don't disrupt points.

If we can start there, we can improve the sport for the players and avoid situations which continuously resurfaced during the Nick Kyrgios-Roger Federer Miami semifinal on Friday night.

Either with a piece of paper in each seat or through an announcement from a tournament official (not the chair umpire -- s/he should not have to be inserted into a match before it starts), paying spectators must be informed before a match of the consequences of disrupting points.

Ushers, security guards, and many people paid to create a safe and respectful environment for the players and everyone else in a tennis stadium can enforce this policy.

Athletes are busy trying to compete. They are also people whose prize money depends in part on tournaments drawing crowds and earning the level of revenue which keeps purses high.

Much as a coach of a team should not be the person in charge of deciding whether one of his players (who is charged with sexual assault or some other crime) plays the next game, athletes should not be placed in the position of lecturing fans, the people who pay to see them and thereby provide the basis for their income. Administrators, executives, presidents, and university leaders should decide if a football player plays in a situation. Law enforcement should handle the matter. The coach is paid to win games -- a conflict of interest exists in terms of his ability to make the right decision in such matters.

It is not that different with solo-athlete performers in tennis and in golf. They are promoters of the sport they play. Their livelihoods depend on encouraging attendance and involvement at matches or competitions. 

Plenty -- PLENTY -- of other people are paid to enforce behavior.

Let them do their jobs. We should all want them to.

A final reminder: Tennis struggles mightily with self-governance. It has for a long time. 

We should all be upset with the way the crowd behaved in the Kyrgios-Federer match. A constructive way to address the issue: Write to or contact ATP or Miami Open officials. In your favorite writer's mailbag column, submit questions about the topic -- not blistering invective, but helpful and nuanced explanations of why crowd control matters and needs to be a bigger priority.

I'm on the side of anyone who wants to produce a better and less disruptive environment for players at tennis matches.

That means I'm intent on building reform the way reform should be built -- through the proper channels of authority and paid responsibility, reaching the people in position to effect change without any conflict of interest. A sense of proper jurisdiction matters here. 

There's no need to make athletes even more messianic, even more kingly or deified, than they already are. Merely ask tournament officials to be a little more direct and detailed in terms of getting their personnel (ushers, security, etc.) to police crowd behavior.

Let's achieve the reform we all want.

Demanding that Roger Federer must be the hall monitor for crowds of 13,800 people (the capacity of the Miami Open stadium court in Crandon Park) won't achieve that reform.

He's busy trying to win tournaments and thank fans for appreciating his tennis.

Everything in its place -- let's start and end in the right place when discussing crowd control, an important and necessary pursuit for the global tennis community.