For the third straight year, the final NBA game of the season has been followed by looting and violence.
Psychologists and other experts said the arson and looting that followed the Chicago Bulls' second NBA title and similar violence elsewhere is becoming an expected part of the victory party."Fans become overly identified with their teams, especially during hard economic times," said Dr. Jim Taylor, associate psychology professor at Nova University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who has studied sports-related violence. "When the team wins, that boosts them unbelievably.
"And people will just follow along - you look around to see how everyone else reacts, and if no one else is calling the police, it's not really an emergency."
Revelry turned riotous Sunday night and early Monday morning after the Bulls beat the Portland Trail Blazers 97-93 in Chicago to clinch their second consecutive title.
More than 1,000 people were arrested. Two people were burned after looters set fire to a South Side store where the two were trying to hide, authorities said. Two police officers were shot, but not seriously wounded, and more than 90 other officers suffered minor injuries, police said. About 100 other people were injured.
Cindy Schanstra, 23, is in fair condition at the University of Chicago hospitals suffering from smoke inhalation and burns on 5 percent of her body. Khalid Ali-Risagee, 33, is in serious condition with burns over 15 percent of his body and smoke inhalation.
The pair were trapped in a South Side food and liquor store by looters who set the shop ablaze.
Schanstra, in an interview, said police did not respond to four calls for help.
Twenty-five businesses were looted on the West Side, 11 stores were damaged on ritzy Michigan Avenue and scores of other businesses elsewhere were raided by revelers.
The police bomb and arson unit reported eight fires were set in shops and abandoned buildings. Vandals damaged 61 police vehicles, 52 buses and 68 subway cars.
Thousands of celebrants poured into the streets from a strip of nightclubs in the Rush Street district and some jumped atop two unoccupied taxis, flattening and flipping them.
It was only the latest in a series of post-championship celebrations in the United States that turned violent.
After the Bulls won their first NBA championship in 1991 over the Lakers in Los Angeles, more than 100 people were arrested during celebrations in Chicago. Two teen-agers were injured in 1991, though not seriously, and stores were looted at scattered sites.
In Detroit, seven people died and widespread looting erupted in the 1990 celebrations after the Pistons beat the Portland Trail Blazers to take their second NBA title in a row. In 1984, 100,000 poured into the streets after the Detroit Tigers won the World Series; one person died.
"When you celebrate something in America, you break a window and grab something. When people have an excuse to loot, they loot," Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said at a news conference Monday.
Psychologists said sports celebrations turn violent the same way as riots sparked by other causes: citizens set a different standard of acceptable behavior during the event and use the anonymity a mob presents.
"After a victory like that, people deserve a celebration. But people set the boundaries at different places, and only after it gets really out of control do people think this is wrong. By then it's too late," said Dr. Dan Landers, former president of the American Psychological Association's Division of exercise and sport psychology.
University of Illinois-Chicago professor Darnell Hawkins, who is at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta studying black-on-black violence, described the Chicago violence as a series of unconnected events.
"We might need to come up with different explanations for the different incidents," Hawkins said. "The middle-class kids on Rush Street were looking for a little antisocial behavior - that's why they're at a bar."
Psychologists were not surprised that Chicago, which remained quiet in the wake of the Rodney King police brutality verdict that plunged Los Angeles into riots, erupted after a basketball championship.
"You would think you'd get it in both instances. But I think people were a lot more aware of the game than with the verdict. You couldn't help knowing in Chicago that the Bulls were playing for their second title," Landers said.