Changing culture in sports is hard. It’s compounded when talking about a raging emotional cauldron of 19-23 year olds cheering for their favorite team. This may be a slippery slope kind of post.

It comes in the aftermath of a surely-emotional Big West matchup in which Long Beach State squeaked by Cal Poly at the Walter Pyramid 50-48. The game was a close one — neither team led by more than five or six points.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=wihqN_ymh_Y

As a team, Cal Poly shot 8-15 from the free throw line. The Mustangs shot just 31 percent from the field, but outrebounded Long Beach State 36-28 and had a chance to win at the end.

Long Beach State’s James Ennis showed why he is an early favorite for Big West Player of the Year. Ennis turned some heads scoring 23 points and pulling down 4 rebounds. Ennis was the only 49er who scored in double figures.

Cruising twitter postgame, something else caught my eye. Long Beach State Athletics re-tweeted a tweet from an account called @MonsonManiacs. Here it was:

— Monson Maniacs (@MonsonManiacs) February 3, 2013 (update: @MonsonManiacs has since taken the tweet down).

So, I’m assuming they took a picture of Chris Eversley and Brian Bennett and paraded it around the Pyramid.

I’m a Cal Poly alum, so I wanted to give myself some time before reacting. I hate to post “sour grapes” kinds of things, especially after close, hard fought games. So, just to be clear, I won’t talk about the desire to not just be happy your team won but to stomp on the team you just beat. That phenomenon is not unique to Long Beach State, Cal Poly, or any other individual school in the country. It happens more than it should, but it happens regardless of the fan base.

Eversley, for one, was a “good sport” about it. He did the best thing he could do: retweeting it hours after the game.

I waited for the morning to actually write and post a response. And the tweet still leaves at least an awkward taste in my mouth. Here’s why.

The premise is that the (I will assume) blown-up picture of Eversley would somehow make him feel awkward or distract him from the game. I would assume that having his picture around a gym, on paper, on media guides, etc… is something that Eversley is generally used to. The assumption here is that something about the picture itself would make him feel awkward. That something is the implication of homosexuality.

The Walter Pyramid in Long Beach is one of the best home court advantages in the Big West. By Will Parris

Under the status-quo homophobic world of college and professional sports, this potential awkwardness is widely accepted, or else it wouldn’t have been a picture that Long Beach State students would have handed out, I don’t think.

I tweeted @MonsonManiacs, to ask what extent they “handed out” the photo, and hadn’t got a response as of the publication of this post.

I guess the questions I want to ask are many. Surely colleges in major conferences have worse things than this going on. What made the Long Beach State situation any different in my mind? Maybe nothing. Maybe this is par for the course. But when the assumption is that someone would/should feel bad/awkward about being gay (whether they were or not), then that’s a little sad, if not surprising. A fan group tweeting something like that is not at all surprising, but I was a little surprised that @LBSUAthletics retweeted the thing. It seems like an athletic department at a public institution would think twice before retweeting something with those kinds of homophobic undertones. I guess that shows just how institutionalized it is.

I don’t want to pick on Long Beach State here though. It’s a larger deal and it’s going to be a major story in sports for the next few years. Homosexuality was in the sports conversation when Manti Te’o stated that he was “far from [gay],” with a nervous chuckle shared with a live studio audience. More recently, 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver made headlines before the Super Bowl with his opinion that gay players should keep it to themselves.

With the sheer number of athletes, especially in college, there are bound to be lots of them that are gay. In 10 years will we look back as “how things used to be” and think of things like the picture that @MonsonsManiacs handed out as insensitive at least and possibly homophobic?

Honestly, I had mixed feelings about starting this conversation. I don’t want to be Captain Buzzkill or the PC Police. A rabid college basketball fanbase is something I respect. There’s nothing better than a loud, hot arena that seems impossible to play in as the away team. My question is where is the line and what constitutes crossing that line?

I don’t have all the answers, but I want to at least continue the discussion. What do you think? Am I making way too much of what I saw? How common are situations like this in major college basketball arenas? When is the line crossed between making opposing players feel appropriately uncomfortable in an away arena versus something more?

Photos by Will Parris

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