RealGM

I'm curious. I see how many haters amazing great players like Kobe, Lebron, even Shaq etc have. I'm curious for the older people around here - did great players like Kareem, Magic, Bird etc have a lot of haters back then too? Or is the whole hater thing a byproduct of the internet and actually giving fans a voice? I'm just curious, because I feel like nobody will hate Kobe or Lebron 20 years from now when they are more historical figures that did great things for the NBA, just how we view Magic, Kareem, jordan etc.

Please don't mis understand me, I'm not making player comparisons in skill level here, I'm just wondering if the stars and poster-boys of the NBA before my time (I started watching in 94) had as many haters and negative detractors, because I wouldn't be surprised if they did too. It will just make me feel like all these hater threads for stud NBA players are even more trivial than I thought.

I wish I could find it, but a Realgm poster found usenet posts from 1985 that were still online. They were hating on Michael Jordan pretty hard. However, not to the extent that people do with guys like LBJ and Kobe nowadays.

Does anybody remember that thread and have a link for it? It was great.

Oh yes they did, the hatred between team fans back then was so bad, that beer, soda battles and other hard objects had to be modified to plastic.

Players would go hard at each other, fans on the stand etc.

The only difference was, we did not have the online clown circle we do now.

The hate was there, but it wasn't as noticeable because the internet wasn't really big yet.

When I was about 11 ish, I was attending a Rams v. Niners game ( at candlestick) while rocking my Eric Dickerson jersey. Security had to escort me out, because grown ass men were threatening me, throwing stuff at me and at times pushing me*.

Now, the Rams sucked ass and the Niners were the poster team of the NFL, but the hatred between fan-bases ran deep.

Most of what you see today is an extension( online) of hate between rivals and or opponents of 2 teams that are pitted against each other via on the field or in the Media.

Example: The media and fans created this rivalry between Bron and Kobe and now you see both sides often get into petty arguments about stupid stuff and be entirely *irrational do so. Which leads to having fans shouting at each other from one across the aisles. It's pretty natural in sports.

the Internet is hater steroids