Vohra's View: Getting close to the action isn’t always fun

Bikram Vohra 08:07 24/12/2015
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  • Crashing out: LeBron James.

    Courtside tickets in the NBA are hot property, but maybe no longer for Australian golfer Jason Day after 130 kilos of LeBron James collided and injured his wife Ellie as the couple watched the Cleveland Cavaliers against the Oklahoma City Thunder this week.

    A ‘sore and exhausted’ Mrs Day compared it to a minor car accident when LeBron couldn’t stop his momentum from chasing a ball going out of bounds and slammed into her. Ellie was carried off on a stretcher but the incident has once again brought attention to the issue of spectator injuries.

    Flying hockey pucks, golf balls raining from the skies, cricket balls and baseballs whizzing into crowds, these are some of the most dangerous things (sung by Julie Andrews).

    Remember Tiger last year at the World Golf Championships in Doral hitting a German fan with his tee shot and then clonking a spectator a little later in the same round. Rory McIlroy struck a shot that bounced off a rock and whacked a bystander who then tumbled into a cactus plant in what gave double jeopardy a whole new meaning.

    In the United States more than 100 people are injured watching ice hockey every year on an average. One study showed that more people join the ‘walking wounded’ after being hit by foul balls at a baseball game than are injured on incidents on commercial flights.

    Acts of prowess can often be trumped by acts of petulance. Former England cricketer Matt Prior was so upset being given out at Lord’s in 2011 he flounced back to the pavilion, flung his glove and a bat violently. The willow hit a window pane and the shards injured a female spectator.

    Perhaps the most people hurt in a single incident was in 2013 at the Daytona 500 when a car pile-up injured 28 spectators. In 1955, at the legendary Le Mans racetrack in a largely forgotten horror, 83 people died when a car lost control. The list is long and varied and there has been a de facto acceptance that it is a risk you take when you go to a stadium to watch a game.

    It goes with the territory, so to speak. Technically, unless the ticket or invitation issues you warning that you could be injured by participants or equipment and that you are willing to take the risk, you do have legal grounds to sue.

    Hardly anyone issues the warning in print but if Ellie Day wanted to sue the NBA she could. They placed her in danger without sharing the risk factor and the possibility of injury with her.

    In 1930, a woman watching her first ice hockey match was hit by the puck. She took legal action. “At trial, she argued that “[t]he defendant gave no notice of the danger from flying ‘pucks’” and that the arena “failed to perform the duty which it owed to her as its invitee to use due care to see that its premises were reasonably safe for the intended use or to warn her of dangers which were not obvious.”

    In turn, the arena argued that “persons attending such a game must be presumed to know where they are going, and that the risk is in effect an obvious one which the patron must be held to have assumed.”

    She won the case because the court upheld her compensation on the grounds that she had no information alerting her to the possibility of pucks whizzing around and the fact that a three foot netting was in place was not an indicator to her that there was a risk.

    The case hinged on the fact that there was no written caution. With VIPs now nudging themselves closer to the playing area and players increasingly flinging victory memorabilia into the stands, the odds on someone being hurt in the eye or suffering concussion are pretty good.

    With that warm thought for you to ‘mull’ over, Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year. 

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