After UNC’s heartbreaking championship loss Monday, our town and campus had the blues. And while we have a few almost universally agreed-upon prescriptions for how we should channel our excitement when we win — rushing Franklin Street, some kind of bonfire, and likely a celebratory visit to an iconic Chapel Hill bar — we’re left with very few guidelines for how we should express our disappointment when we lose.
As the buzzer sounded and the confetti dropped, our players exhibited remarkably restrained disappointment and incredible sportsmanship on the court, shaking hands with opposing players. Later, they simultaneously expressed their disappointment and deep love for the game to reporters. But as fans watched, post-loss reactions varied.
Some expressed this by merely heading home from their watching parties and quietly commiserating with others. Others, though, more troublingly channeled their disappointment into volatile behavior — including fights, shouting matches and displays of anger and physicality — which made Chapel Hill’s streets less safe that night.
Many have looked in disbelief at instances of increased violent behavior after sports team losses and concluded that a kind of innate violence within sports is to blame.
We do not hold this view; we do not believe that the nature of the sports we watch itself is to blame. We do not believe that it is an inevitable byproduct of sports culture. However, we do see troubling trends in one element of the event — the phenomenon of sports fandom. Namely, the underlying issue is that we do not hold fans to the same high standards of sportsmanship to which we consistently hold these same teams’ players.
Why is it that when a player on a team cuts a press conference short following a loss, as Cam Newton did, it incites nationwide disgust, yet when our fellow bar-goers turn to violent language or physicality, we excuse this as a normal reaction? Why do we share chastising articles on social media when a player expresses anger on the court, and yet look the other way when the friends around us display unhealthily high levels of violent anger following a loss?
As Tar Heels, we are a part of this legacy and this team along with the players. We have a responsibility to act respectfully, even in the face of a loss. Our board has written before about the connection between interpersonal violence and sports losses; we believe the core issue is not that sports fundamentally incite violence in their viewers. Rather, too often we give a “free pass” to otherwise unacceptably violent or angry behavior because it is within the context of watching sports. It is this easily provided “free pass” that enables violence and perpetuations of toxic masculinity following losses.
We should follow the example set by our players and hold ourselves — and our friends — to the same high standards of sportsmanship. We should hold our heads high after losses, expressing our love for the UNC community in times of triumph and defeat. We should not resort to violence and aggression to express our anger and disappointment. We should not break windows, destroy property or take out our aggression on our peers.
That is the Carolina Way, and we should hold ourselves and each other to it.
