After scoring 19 points and hitting five 3-pointers in a huge Game 7 performance to beat the Denver Nuggets, Steve Blake was lauded for shaking off a 12-for-33 mark in the first six games and coming up big when it counted. But after missing an open corner 3-pointer that would have given the Los Angeles Lakers a one-point lead in the closing seconds of Game 2 — a game that the Lakers led by seven with two minutes left, a game they gave away in a manner befitting Santa Claus , according to their center — some fickle fans changed their tune on the backup point guard and, disgustingly, brought his family into the mix.
From Dave McMenamin at ESPN Los Angeles :
After the game, both the Twitter feeds of Blake and his wife, Kristen, were inundated with criticism ranging from curse word-laden rants to threats.
“I hope your family gets murdered,” read one tweet that Kristen Blake re-tweeted along with a single comment: “Wow.” [...]
Steve Blake responded to the troublesome situation after Lakers practice on Thursday.
“It’s pretty disappointing that there are a lot of hateful people out there, but you move on,” Blake said. “I just don’t appreciate it when it’s toward my family. You can come at me all you want but when you say things about my wife and my kids, that makes me upset.”
As horrendous and regrettable as this is, it’s nothing new; as long as there have been sporting matches to lose, there have been goats blamed for losing them, and pockets of disgruntled, perspective-lacking fandom whose pursuit of doling that blame out ventures far beyond the pale of reason and decency. (And let’s be clear about this: “Lakers fans” aren’t to be blamed for death threats and hate speech lobbed uncaringly at the Blakes; “awful, lunatic-fringe idiots” are. Several bad apples don’t spoil a gigantic, passionate bunch.)
What is relatively new, though, is how social media outlets — primarily Twitter, since more pros actually seem to use and manage Twitter accounts themselves than handle, say, their own Facebook pages or write their own blogs — and the immediate connections they afford fans to the objects of their obsession can factor into this mix.
May 182012