There’s been a great deal of talk about crowds, crowd control, and obstreperous behavior at sporting events, particularly at college basketball games, in the news these days. That’s nothing new.

They once called basketball players, especially those in the professional ranks, “cagers” because, in the early days, there was some kind of barrier placed between the players and the fans in the stands to protect both sides.

On the good side of it all, the positive crowd energy was a prime topic of conversation after the Florida game.

Maybe Bob Neyland got it right.

Lindsey Nelson (“Hello everybody, I’m Lindsey Nelson”) reported that Neyland didn’t want spectators at Tennessee games.

“He would prefer to lock the gates and play in private,” Lindsey wrote. “He thought fans were an intrusion. A football game was far too important a thing to be threatened by the presence of outsiders.”

That was Neyland’s opinion, but fans have always been important parts of hoops contests, for better or worse.

Reports came a week or so back that Oregon had apologized to UCLA for some unsavory taunts directed at a Bruins player.

A few days before, Pat Summitt seemed to be exercised because the “Cameron Crazies” at Duke had crossed the line heckling Alexis Hornbuckle two years ago. There was the threat of canceling the series. The Lady Vols did win at Duke this year, making the issue appear moot, at least for now.

In the 1998-99 season, Tennessee defeated Kentucky at Thompson-Boling Arena, thus winning the SEC East and a share of the overall league title. Fans came from far and wide onto the arena floor to share the moment.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Vanderbilt fans at Memorial Gym pelted Tennessee players and coaches with oranges. John Ward once said that there wasn’t an orange to be had in Davidson County the day of a Tennessee-Vanderbilt game. “Fan” is short for “fanatic” for a reason.

A couple of weeks ago, Alabama fans appeared to be in their usual predatory mood at Coleman Coliseum when Tennessee orange showed up on the court and in the stands. There were the obligatory anti-Phillip Fulmer comments, e.g., “Fat Phil likes to squeal,” seen on one homemade placard, and there were the usual bursts of excitement when the ESPN cameras panned the less-than-capacity crowd.

Even in the “Dark Ages” of Tennessee football, Nov. 13, 1909, Tennessee fans chased an unsuspecting game official, a man named R. T. Elgin, away from the playing field, after a 10-0 loss to Alabama. The Knoxville Journal reported that, “Elgin was not free from his pursuers until he was safely in his room at the hotel.”

At Holston High School in the 1960s, certain students would break into a cheer made famous at Ole Miss (“Hotty, totty …”), one that made administrators and parents squirm. All it would take to stop it was principal R.E. Hendrix walking in front of the offenders with a disapproving stare, an action illustrative of a much simpler time.

John Feinstein (“A Season Inside: One Year in College Basketball”) reported one chilling example of boorish fan behavior in the 1987-88 season at the Arizona-Arizona State game in Tempe. Steve Kerr, whose father, Malcolm, had been assassinated in Beirut four years earlier, played for Arizona.

When Arizona came out for warm-ups, the chant rang out from a small coterie of students in the Arizona State crowd: “PLO, PLO, PLO, Hey, Kerr, where’s your dad? PLO, PLO, go back to Beirut!”

Arizona won the game, 101-73, after leading by six at the half. Arizona State apologized to Kerr for the “unfortunate incident.”

Here’s the kicker. Kerr later received a letter, unsigned, that read: “I’m sorry if you were upset by what we did. But there’s no way you can understand the intensity of the ASU-UA rivalry and some of the things we have had to put up with when we’ve gone to Arizona over the years.”

In the 1960s, Vanderbilt defeated Tennessee in Nashville, with a couple of questionable calls along the way. At the rematch in Knoxville, Tennessee got a couple of calls its way and was on its way to a win. During a lull in the action, a Commodore player mentioned to his Vol counterpart that he wasn’t exactly enthralled with the officiating.

The response was to the point: “These are the same guys who called the game in Nashville.”

So in basketball, just like football, events on the court sometimes carry over into everyday life, all part of the rivalries, some dating 100 years or more, with others of more recent occurrence. There are the figurative and literal lines drawn in the sand between otherwise rational and reasonable people.

With but a few exceptions, it all makes for great basketball and equally great theater.

Tom Mattingly is the author of “The Tennessee Football Vault: The Story of the Tennessee Volunteers, 1891-2006” (2006), to be published in second edition in 2008, and “Tennessee Football: The Peyton Manning Years” (1998). He may be reached at tjmshm@comcast.net. His News Sentinel blog is called “The Vol Historian.”

© 2008, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.