About a month ago SI wrote a piece about how far NCAA men’s basketball fans go http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/grant_wahl/02/26/abusive.fans0303/when taunting opposing players these days. In the next issue of SI, a father of an Oregon student shown giving UCLA’s Kevin Love the double bird in the crowd wrote in and explained what he did to the kid because he was so embarassed by his actions:


“I was shocked to see, in a photo of the Oregon student section, my son partaking in the harassment of UCLA’s Kevin Love. When he came home the following weekend, his car was taken away and he headed back to school on a bus. I am embarrassed and wish to apologize to Kevin and his family.”—Armando Navarro, Clackamas, Ore.


By the way, having lived in Portland, the ride to Eugene is about 2 hours and having riden a Greyhound, it’s about 4 hours.


If you don’t want to read the entire piece via the link, here is the part about Love who spurnned the home state Ducks for the Bruins and the abuse leading up to the game in Eugene:


“Kevin Love knew it would be bad. But not this bad. Sure, he’d chosen UCLA over Oregon after being the consensus national player of the year as a senior at Lake Oswego (Ore.) High—but what happened to his home state’s rep for peace, love and understanding? On Jan. 23, the day before the ­Bruins-Ducks showdown in Eugene, Love found more than 30 voice-mail messages on his cellphone when UCLA stopped for a layover in San Francisco. He listened to the first one: If you guys win, we’ll come to your house and kill your family. He played another: We’ll find your hotel room and blow your f------ head off with a shotgun. He ­didn’t bother to check the rest. “I mean, these were death threats,” Love says. Shaken, he called his mother, Karen, and had her cancel his cellphone service.
Robert Husseman knew it would be bad. But not this bad. A sophomore math and business major, Husseman is a member of the Pit Crew, Oregon’s rabid, 1,500-strong student fan club. He had attended the weekly Pit Crew meeting that Monday, heard that Love’s cell number was circulating among members, but did not dial it himself. While nobody has ever called the Pit Crew PC—its members once printed a thousand copies of an embarrassing picture posted on Facebook of Stanford’s Fred Washington at a party—Husseman ­couldn’t believe the chorus of homophobic chants directed at Love from the McArthur Court student section after UCLA took the floor. “I ­didn’t even bother with [saying] the chants,” Husseman says. “I hoped they would die quickly, but they ­didn’t.”

Stan Love knew it would be bad. But not this bad. Stan, who is Kevin’s father and the sixth-leading scorer in Oregon’s history, arrived at his alma mater that night in a party of seven including Karen, Kevin’s 13-year-old sister, his grandmother and his uncle Mike, a cofounder of the Beach Boys. But good vibrations were in short supply. Stan says his family was pelted with popcorn cartons and empty cups, as well as a barrage of profane ­insults ("every filthy word you can think of"), including screams of “whores” that made Kevin’s grandmother cry. “There were six-year-old kids with signs saying KEVIN LOVE SUCKS,” says Stan, who ­endured a hail of one-finger salutes to snap photographs of the worst signs. “It was the grossest display of humanity I’ve ever been involved with. To think I’m sitting at the school where I played ball, and just because my kid ­didn’t pick Oregon he gets abused like that? I’ll never go back there.”