When I was a kid I had huge issues with breaking racquets. Not because the racquets were brittle, because after a loss I would smash the crap out of them. I had a horrible attitude, to a point to where my father took me off the court in the middle of a match and said to pack my stuff, because I wasn't playing anymore. I wasn't allowed to play again until I fixed my attitude.  I totally understand and respect him for doing so.  The behavior was uncalled for and pretty bad. 

And so began the long road of improving not only my temper, but also the outlook on the game. Today I have a pretty good temper. Losses really don't bother me too much, but then again, I'm not practicing and playing each day like I used to either. When I get on the court though, I want to win. I'm not there to make friends with my opponent, that comes afterwards. I do love to have fun, and I usually do, win or lose. I play because it's competitive and as such is interesting and entertaining.

Over time I've noticed that certain people have problems with other pro's (Jack, Jason, Cliff, Kane, and now Ben) behavior on or off the court. A lot of comments on how they acted disrespectfully to their opponents by taking a call, doing something mean, something they say, or how they act. I think that's all fine and dandy. In fact, I think that would be normal. Not everyone is going to please someone else. People are going to have fans and that's just how it's going to go. Certain people are going to act in a fashion that's going to make you feel that they are, an asshole.

So what? I say more power to them. If you want to act like a jerk on the court and you're getting paid for it, go for it. If you want to take calls, do it. If you want to heckle the crowd or say outlandish things to them, cool by me. I think it makes it more interesting. I don't think it will hurt racquetball, as it obviously hasn't hurt other sports.

It gets down to my reasoning that if professional racquetball is going to grow it's got to be more entertaining off the court. We (meaning the people who the watch the pro's) want to know about the rivalry. We want to people on the court that hate each other to go at it. As long as the opponents are focused on beating the ball and not each other, I say rivalry it up.

Let me go back to a match that I had the "pleasure" of reffing a few years back. The players aren't important, what is important is that after I got the scorecard, I was told that if I had problems to "come get Dave". I had no idea what this meant. I've reffed quite a few crazy ass matches before but never had a comment like that. When I got to the court, the stadium area (it was on a back court) was full. This was a first round match so I just assumed that the prior match had just finished or something.

That wasn't the case. The situation was that both players hated each other. I mean like, last time they played they almost got into fisticuffs, the police were called, the club started evacuating the area...or something like that. The crowd wanted to see what was going to happen, if anything. It was sort of like the Nascar version of, "Man these people just keep going around the track, when is a huge fantastic wreck going to happen?"

The match play was pretty unspectacular, but the crowd was really into it. Dave got called over a few times and just ended up watching the match as well. Both players essentially roughed each other up a lot, abused the ref a ton (that's me), got a few technicals, and then the match was over.

So the point of this entire story is, while I don't particularly like bad sportsmanship, I see nothing wrong with it. I think in certain cases it could be entertaining. Today's Pros are really nice, and they seem to be all friends. That's great and all but does it make for "good TV"? Every reality show producer out there would probably disagree.