Player whining insults fans

Hunting season has opened in the Delaware Valley. It's open season on all those hapless critters out there, namely, Philadelphia sports fans.

Some athletes in this town have run to their walk-in closets, grabbed the crossbows, and, like the Brits who fought William Wallace, filled the air with bursts of pointy tips, all meant for the torsos of the folks they blame for their failures: us.

A couple of weeks ago, Jason Kelce, the Eagles rookie center from Ohio, where I assume they never criticize sports teams, lectured fans after he and offensive-line buddy Evan Mathis interrupted a protest in front of the NovaCare Center. A sign there said that it was time for Andy Reid to go, or something like that. Kelce foamed at the mouth afterward, saying that this was a time that the fans should be behind the Eagles and that divisiveness among the fans was out of line. The center would have had a little more credibility had he avoided getting blown up not once, but twice, when the Eagles were trying to score near the goal line a couple of games ago. But I digress.

Then Mathis, a journeyman who's now with his fourth NFL team, piled on a couple of days later regarding the fans' treatment of Reid: "The way things are done around here and the way Coach Reid handles this team is far superior to many other places in this league. That's the one thing the fans and the negative media in Philadelphia don't realize - how good they have it, how good they have had it."

Of course, the Kelce-Mathis Doctrine was uttered after the Jimmy Rollins Address, via Twitter, in which the Phillies shortstop kind of blamed the Phils' NLDS Game 2 loss to the Cardinals on fans who were too quiet.

Racked with guilt over the rants of Kelce, Mathis, and Rollins, I decided to seek spiritual guidance on the matter. The closest I could come to that was to watch an HBO documentary on former Beatle George Harrison. But I was able to discover a truth: These players are out of their gourds.

I'm constantly amused by the perception pro athletes have of the fan's role. Most jocks want and need unmitigated love from their fans without regard to their own responsibilities. To that end, they refuse to acknowledge the hard truth that sports, just like a movie or a Broadway show or an opera, is paid entertainment.

All right, sports is a little different. We live day-to-day with these guys, and have a much more personal stake in the outcome of an event. But ultimately, what fans pay for is performance. And if we don't get that performance, it is not our primary job to urge it from players who already are being paid to give it. Do players really not get the financial and emotional commitment fans already have expended?

In Rollins' world, if the fans were not so quiet during Game 2 at Citizens Bank Park, the Phillies may have come back to beat the Cardinals. But Rollins doesn't consider that the crowd was jacked until Cliff Lee (who, by the way, will make $25 million next year because of, in no small part, wonderful ticket sales) shockingly gave up a 4-0 lead. Fans were stunned silent by that development.

Summoning phony - "Don't worry about it, boys, we'll get 'em" - excitement is simply not to be expected of fans in the Northeast Corridor, and especially not in Philadelphia. Hey, fellas, after losing a 4-0 lead with a stud on the mound, how about you give us something to cheer about?

Kelce and Mathis have been here about half an hour, and they lecture on the way Eagles fans should act? The Eagles haven't won an NFL championship since 1960, and 12 years have gone by in the Andy Reid regime without a title. Within that dirty dozen, the Birds have lost three NFC title games as the favorite. And this year, with the front office chirping that it was "all-in" after a free-agent spending spree that prompted one backup quarterback to call them the Dream Team, they got off to a 1-4 start mainly because of coaching misjudgment and player error. And a man can't hold up a sign to express his displeasure?

If Kelce or Mathis would sit down with me over a beer, I'd explain to them that this sports thing is pretty much an unfair bargain. Players, coaches, and owners have us stretched over a turnstile. If one pays a good buck to see a highly touted opera singer hit the high C, and she doesn't, the patron can walk out, go down the street, and pay to see another opera singer. With sports teams, we have to take what they give us and like it. Sometimes we don't like it. But we can't go anywhere else, and we're simply incapable of staying away since sports is our outlet, an escape from our everyday lives. Win or lose, the hefty paycheck of the pro athlete comes every two weeks. And when they lose a Game 5 at home, they feel so bad about our suffering that some of them tweet photos of themselves playing golf.

And they wonder why a guy would hold up a sign.

The new 76ers owners introduced themselves to us last week. Let's see, there's Joshua Harris, Adam Aron, David Blitzer, Art Wrubel, Jason Levien, Martin Geller, Travis Hennings, David Heller, Marc Leder, James Lassiter, Michael Rubin, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, and two guys from Indonesia. That's 15 owners, if you're counting. That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen. And none of them is a true sportsmen. They are mostly the nouveau riche, financial wizards with Ivy League degrees who have made careers of turning distressed assets into profitable, resalable ones. With no ownership of the building or a television network, I doubt they'll be able to do that with the Sixers. So I can only presume these guys desired an expensive toy, much like a high-end Bentley for their seven-car garage. Harris told me in an interview that he was excited to get the Sixers at a "reasonable price." My idea of a reasonable price is when my grocery store sets Honeycrisp apples at $1.99 a pound.

I appreciate the full-page ad they took out in The Inquirer and their slash of ticket prices and the website soliciting suggestions from the fans where the first 1,776 entries get free ducats. (I warn the boys that at least 1,775 of those entries will plead for them to get rid of Andre Iguodala.) But surely they know that success in the NBA can come only from getting superstar players. With the Sixers way behind several other more successful franchises in the Eastern Conference and an even more prohibitive collective bargaining agreement on the horizon, change isn't going to come anytime soon. How long before the Philly 15 decide that this distressed asset may have to be resold at another distressed price?