IN WHAT WORLD IS A 9-YEAR-OLD GIRL THREATENED FOR SCREAMS AT A GAME?
Diar DeRozan thought she was helping her father when she disrupted Toronto players at the free-throw line, but unwittingly, she exposed the darkness of problem gamblers as her shrieks went viral
She’s my early nominee for Sportsperson of the Year, if not a Nobel Prize. With her persistent and exquisitely timed shrieks — which managed to disrupt the free-throw rhythms of NBA millionaires who, by now, should know how to ignore crowd noise — Diar DeRozan did more than help her father win a play-in game against his former team.
She exposed the darkest underbelly of sports, the ever-lurking gambling psychos who see life and death when the rest of us see fun and frivolity.
Diar is 9 years old, a fourth-grade student. She wouldn’t know a point spread if it was mentioned on “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.” This was a kid having a blast at an arena and supporting her daddy, Chicago Bulls star DeMar DeRozan, by screaming almost every time a Toronto Raptor stepped to the foul line the other night in Canada. Depending on one’s allegiance, she was either adorable or obnoxious in a scene that went viral once it was covered on the ESPN telecast. And unwittingly, she unleashed the demons who feed the revenue streams of a booming, $800 billion sports industry.
The leagues won’t acknowledge the lowlifes. Nor will affiliated sportsbooks and broadcast networks, which run problem-gambling disclaimers only to avoid liability while making the print so tiny that extra-strength magnifying glasses are required to decipher it, like the fuzziest row of letters on an eye doctor’s screen. But when the irrepressible Diar rattled the Raptors into missing 18 of 36 free-throw attempts — the difference in a 109-105 defeat that ended their season — the fallout was predictable, swift and disturbing.
Wearing a letter jacket in Bulls team colors, red and black, with a large “D” on the front and references to “DADDY” on the sleeves, Diar suddenly was led out of Scotiabank Arena after the final buzzer by Chicago security personnel. The NBA office had alerted the Bulls that “severe online threats” were directed toward DeRozan’s little girl, who was escorted to a team bus with her father by her side. Such hostilities aren’t conveyed by fans merely upset about a loss. No, they are enraged about losing their wagers. Just as sports gambling is legal in the U.S., thanks to hasty Supreme Court justices who didn’t devote enough thought to potential consequences, betting is legal and live in the province of Ontario. The doors have been whipped open to unstable behavior, and while the league will move on without a comment, commissioner Adam Silver would be wise to investigate the circumstances privately for future reference.
What kind of creep stoops to the level of threatening a 9-year-old girl? Has the gambling element pushed sports toward the ugly world we’re trying to escape, a world of online hatred and gun violence?
“What’s crazy is it’s just the world that we live in,” DeMar DeRozan was left to say two nights later, after the Bulls were eliminated from the play-in event by the Miami Heat. “No matter how good something could go, how good something could be, you still got miserable people out here who just don’t have a life. It’s sad. We see it every single day.
“But more than anything, all that I care about is my daughter enjoying her moment and enjoying her time. We keep that within our circle. I don’t get caught up in all the negative stuff that gets caught up on the outside. That’s just me being a protector as a father. But me knowing what it’s like on the other end of being famous and everything, it’s just sad that some people just sit up and use their fingers to make idle threats to any children.”
For now, DeRozan has succeeded in shielding his daughter from headlines about the threats. “I guarantee you nothing will ever happen when I’m with my daughter. It’s just idiotic people at the end of the day,” he said. “Obviously, it’s frustrating when you hear any type of threats — you don’t want to take anything lightly. But my thing is, my daughter don’t know nothing about it. She just knows the good side that we won the game. As long as she’s happy with that, I’m not worried about nothing else.”
There will be those who say she shouldn’t have turned her screams into an all-night crusade, that DeRozan should have dispatched a Bulls representative and told her to pipe down. Why? If assclowns are allowed to remain in their seats while peppering players with slurs and curses, why can’t she make noise before free throws? Couldn’t Raptors fans, quiet when one of their players was shooting, have drowned her out with supportive cheers? She had begged her father to let her attend the game in Toronto, her birthplace, where he spent nine seasons with the Raptors. He relented and has no regrets about her behavior in the stands. “She's still a child, you know what I mean," DeRozan said. “I don't let her get caught up in the outside fix of it. She just came there for one reason and one reason only and that was to support her dad. She had the most fun with it. I never would have thought it would go to that extreme that it did. But, you know, it did. Maybe later down the line when she gets older, she will look back at it and realize what really happened.”
And what if she spawns a new wave of courtside screamers hoping to go viral? Next time, ESPN and other networks don’t have to manufacture a star and create a viral showcase. Otherwise, they’ll be responsible for inspiring a new generation of Diars … and, possibly, more rounds of online threats.
Of course, if the Raptors had made a few more free throws, they’d have avoided a fourth-quarter collapse and won the game. All-Star forward Pascal Siakam, who once helped his team win an NBA championship, was positioned to tie the score with 12 seconds left when he was fouled on a three-point try. In his career, he has made 78 percent of his free throws — also the Raptors’ percentage as a team this season. But before each of his three attempts, Diar screamed. He missed two of three, and six of 11 on the night. Siakam was wise not to blame a 9-year-old for his struggles and the loss, but teammate Scottie Barnes knew the truth.
“I just heard somebody screaming, and I was like ‘Who is that?’ (We) went 18-for-36, so it had to have an effect,” he said. “She did a great job.”
Actually, she earned a place in sports history. Not only is Diar DeRozan the youngest person ever to influence the result of an NBA game, she reminded some sick puppies about the troubled condition of their lives.
When you bet on sports, you’re inviting a wide range of saboteurs. Who knew one was scratching her nose, then directing a torrent of decibels at grown men who didn’t have the wherewithal to overcome her? “I owe her some money, for sure,” said DeMar, once known as an All-Star, now formally introduced as Diar’s Dad.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.