Stern knew that visiting teams had been moving chairs onto the court during timeouts at the Capital Centre. NBA commissioner David Stern had heard more than enough by then, and set out to neuter Ficker and his imitators. Among them: "Hey, Michael: How much do you want to bet on the game?" Inevitably, Ficker also yelled wagering taunts. ![]() Ficker waved a copy of Michael and Me: Our Gambling Addiction, My Cry for Help!, a book by onetime Jordan hanger-on Richard Esquinas that alleged the Bulls icon was a compulsive gambler. When Charles Barkley heard that Ficker got under Jordan’s skin, he paid for Ficker to come to Phoenix to taunt Michael Jordan from behind the Bulls bench during the 1993 NBA Finals. Isiah Thomas threw a shoe and Jordan threw a ball, both in anger. Portland’s behemoth center Kevin Duckworth tried attacking Ficker behind the bench but was restrained before what promised to be an extremely grisly murder could happen. Indiana forward LaSalle Thompson spit on Ficker several times. Utah coach Frank Layden threw water and spit at Ficker once. Some of the biggest names and biggest people in basketball went after Ficker for yelling at them from his seat one row behind the visitors bench at the Capital Centre, the home of the Washington Bullets from 1973 to 1997. “This gives me more time to campaign!”īy now, those who follow him-and I’ve been a perpetually awestruck observer of his for four decades-realize that no news is bad news for Robin Ficker.įicker’s heckling also used to make lots of news. “I don’t have to show up for court now!” he said. ![]() Yet Ficker seemed more amused than upset by the latest sanctions. He says that the powers that be can't stand that his campaign platform is built around the attention-getting if hard-to-keep promise to reduce the state’s sales tax by $.02. “There’s no way they should punish an attorney so much for something like this,” Ficker told me, “but they decided to make a statement because it’s me, and because I’m running for governor.”įicker says the state’s established political machine is out to get him. What makes this disbarment noteworthy is that Ficker happens to be in the middle of the most ambitious campaign of his life. As the Washington Post reported, the judges held that “Ficker has been the subject of a long history of complaints of professional misconduct that expand over three generations of the bar counsel.” Ficker has lost his law license several times over the years, but always succeeded in getting it back. ![]() The ruling revoking his license accused Ficker of various not-especially-significant malpractices as an attorney, including occasionally not showing up for court hearings, and in truth seems like more of a career achievement award than anything else. Last week, just weeks short of his 79th birthday, Ficker was in the news again when a Maryland Court of Appeals panel disbarred him. ![]() But he’s always liked getting attention, and is still getting lots of it. He’s also a lifelong politician, one whose conduct in the political arena to this day remains at least as disruptive as his screaming in the basketball arena ever was.įicker has never gotten attention for doing anything anybody liked. Ficker was such an ass at NBA games in the 1980s and 1990s that the league promulgated a fan-behavior rule and then named it after him. If the name rings a bell at all, it's almost certainly because of the renown Ficker earned in his role as the most relentless heckler in pro sports history-a guy who so pissed off Michael Jordan that Charles Barkley literally hired Ficker to heckle MJ in the NBA Finals. That is, Ficker has never wasted a damn day. But he’s surely lived a life, well, spent. Some might say Robin Ficker hasn’t lived a life well spent.
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