Canes, Sabres fans face off; 6 arrested, 1 hurt

The Stanley Cup playoffs have brought the Triangle a taste of major-league fan violence, as some Caniacs are finding out.

Raleigh police arrested four unruly fans Saturday at the RBC Center, and two at the arena Monday, on charges that include assault, fighting and damaging property. That's half as many arrests as in a typical full regular season.

A Carolina Hurricanes fan was hospitalized after he, like his hockey team, came out on the losing end Saturday against the Buffalo Sabres.

Raleigh surveyor Nathaniel King said he needed doctors twice after fighting with several belligerent Sabres fans.

The alcohol-fueled clash started between periods of the opening game of the Eastern Conference finals, in a smoking area outside Section 108, police said.

"We were talking back and forth," King recalled Monday. "Pretty soon there was pushing and shoving. Next thing I knew, I was on the ground and they were punching me."

King said he suffered a broken nose, a split lip and a cut under his right eye. He required 18 stitches.

Raleigh police charged two Buffalo fans with misdemeanor simple assault in the incident: Adam Joseph Cahill, 23, of Charlotte and his brother Philip James Cahill, 24, of Hamburg, N.Y., a Buffalo suburb. King, 27, was charged with fighting.

In another incident, police said they charged Jeffrey Parker Thomas, 26, of Raleigh with being drunk and disruptive and resisting a police officer. Thomas yelled obscenities at other fans and refused to leave a parking lot after the game, police said.

Monday, before the start of the second game between Carolina and Buffalo, Raleigh police charged Sean McNaughton, 20, of Perrysburg, N.Y., another Buffalo suburb, with damaging property. He was accused of jumping onto and denting the hood of a Hurricanes fan's flag-adorned car.

After the Canes' win Monday, Canes fan Michael Lee Pettit, 34, of Smithfield, was charged with assault for hitting Robert D. Richardson, 27, of Raleigh, also a Canes fan, in the head with a closed fist as the two fought in the parking lot.

Most of the men were banned from the arena for the rest of the playoffs, authorities said.

As arena officials noted, the young men arrested Saturday were only four of more than 18,000 fans who watched Buffalo beat Carolina 3-2.

Of the almost 2 million fan visits a year at the RBC Center, typically 10 or so people are arrested, said Dave Olsen, the arena's general manager. No fans were arrested at the arena during the first two rounds of the National Hockey League playoffs, he said.

"The environment here is safe," Olsen said. "This is nothing. What happened here happens every night up north. Welcome to the world of professional sports."

Other Hurricanes fans complained to arena officials during and after the game that some visiting Buffalo boosters were boorish, obnoxious or threatening.

Raleigh police and arena staffers pulled several troublesome fans aside during the game Saturday and told them to tone it down, police Capt. Don Overman said.

Though rudeness might be uncivil, it's not against the law.

"Some people handle it better than others," Overman said. "I saw some Hurricanes fans say, 'That's all right, we'll get your team next time.' "

King said trouble brewed Saturday long before the game in the RBC Center parking lots, where opposing fans were eating and drinking in the ritual of tailgating.

"Every time the Buffalo fans walked by, they talked trash," King said.

That will come as no surprise to longtime fans of NHL teams, college football and other sports.

As entertainment, sports thrive on conflict. Fans who love their team find it easy to hate the opponent -- not just the team, but also its fans. Sometimes the chauvinism goes too far, often with the help of beer, wine or booze.

Humans evolved as predators, says Aaron White, a psychiatry professor at Duke University who has studied fans' behavior and the ties between sports and alcohol.

And sports, he says, are modern outlets for ancient predatory instincts, such as working together to attack prey or to fight enemies.

Fans aren't as involved in the battle as the athletes, White says, but they're still part of the group the players represent.

It could be far worse.

At the Meadowlands sports complex in New Jersey, the basketball arena, football stadium and horse track each have two holding cells for fans who are arrested, said Larry Perkins, who helped to manage the complex before he became assistant manager at the RBC Center.

"This is a piece of cake compared to what happens up there," Perkins said of the incidents of the past three days.