FAST BREAK
Basketball, politics, and anger
By Greg Olear
November 23, 2004
On Friday night there was a brawl at a professional basketball game. At the Palace of Auburn Hills in suburban Detroit, a harmless tussle between opposing teams escalated into a near riot when players from the visiting Indiana Pacers stormed into the stands to confront some of the more odious members of the Piston fan base.
Which, in the wake of the so-called Battle For Fallujah and the death of Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat and President Bush's myopic cabinet appointments, seems like not a big deal, even to a rapid pro hoops fan like myself.
But it was a big deal. The networks and cable outlets ran and re-ran video of the melee, clips were available to download on the Internet, every newspaper in the country reported the ugly scene, sports pundits waxed philosophical on its sociological implications. Even the most benighted sports fan knows about the NBA brawl.
When I first read about the incident, it made me sick to my stomach -- literally. I couldn't figure out why right away. Was it the sheer brutality of the scene? Did the fact that I'm not only a big fan of Ron Artest, the principal combatant, but also have him on my NBA Fantasy team have something to do with it? Was I sad for Artest? Embarrassed for my beloved NBA? Angry at the despicable Detroit fans? Or was there something more going on?
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For those of you who didn't follow the play-by-play, here's what happened: the Indiana Pacers were playing the arch-rival Detroit Pistons. These are the two best teams in the East, and there has been bad blood between them since at least last year's playoffs, which ended when Artest -- last year's Defensive Player of the Year -- elbowed Detroit's Rip Hamilton (also on my fantasy team) in the face.
With the 42 seconds remaining in the game Friday night, a game the Pacers had wrapped up, Piston All-Star Ben Wallace moved in for a dunk and was fouled, physically but quite legally, by Artest.
Wallace, upset that his signature Afro was ruffled, went at Artest, who backed away from him. Officials attempted to hold back Wallace in vain, and he pushed Artest in the throat as players from both teams met at the scorer's table and scuffled. The scuffle was mostly pushing and shoving and looked more like a mosh pit than an actual fight.
Artest removed himself from the fray and laid on his back on the scorer's table. Some drunken jerk-off hit him in the neck with a plastic water bottle, and all hell broke loose. But before I describe All Hell, you need to know more about the guy on the scorer's table.
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Ron Artest is from the Queensbridge housing projects in Queens, New York, not far from my Astoria redoubt. He attended St. John's College in New York for two years, then declared for the NBA draft in 1999. (The hometown Knicks could have had him at pick #16, but opted instead for Frenchman Frederic Weis, who never did play in the league). He was scooped up by the Chicago Bulls the very next pick, and Knicks fans have pined for their prodigal son ever since.
Artest quickly earned a reputation for himself as an excellent, tenacious defender. Have you ever played pick-up ball with some guy who is in your face so much the game isn't fun? That's what Artest is like, but he's a pro. He's the sort of player you like to root for, a blue-collar guy who plays hurt, plays hard, and cares deeply about the job he's doing. He earns his money, in other words. He's the kind of guy who has maximized his God-given talents, a rarity in a league of lazy prima donnas (see "Carter, Vince"). He was traded to Indiana a few years back in a deal involving Jalen Rose.
He's also nuts. Got a screw loose. There's a history of mental illness in his family, specifically, an inability to deal with anger. But it's more than that. This is a guy who, his first year in the league, took a weekend job at Circuit City because he was buying family members so much new electronic equipment, he needed the employee discount. Could you imagine Michael Jordan doing that? And yes, he's been suspended before, a game here and a game there, for erratic behavior.
Part of what makes him such a great player is his ability to harness his hostility, to direct it at the other team. Every once in a while, he blows a gasket. But never like he did on Friday.
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Back to the Palace at Auburn Hills.
Artest, who has issues with anger management, has walked away from a confrontation, just like he's supposed to do. It's odd to lay on the scorer's table, yes, but like I said, he's an odd guy. And if it calms him down, why not? So there he is, flat on his back, and wham!, a water bottle whacks him in the face, in effect knocking a screw loose in his head.
Artest leaps over some people into the stands and starts manhandling a dude in the stands with brown hair, glasses, and a black shirt -- a guy who looks kind of like me, actually. (That he's manhandling the wrong guy is one of the many sad ironies of the debacle). So other fans start whaling on Artest.
Seeing this, Stephen Jackson, the new Pacers shooting guard, leaps into the stands himself. Instead of retrieving Artest, as he should have, he punches the me-looking guy's friend. (The guy who actually threw the bottle is a few rows up, high-fiving his loutish pals, safe from the mess, like the rapist in Irreverisble). There is much punching and pushing and shoving and object-throwing and beer-spilling.
When the smoke clears, Jackson and Artest are removed from the stands by Pistons forward Rasheed Wallace, Pacers center David Harrison, and former Piston player and current announcer Rick Mahorn, the dirtiest player of his era (another of the aforementioned ironies).
There's an older man on the ground. There's a baby crying. There's bloodlust in the air. These people want Artest dead.
And we enter Phase Three of the fracas. Two fat inbred-looking Piston fans, clearly hammered, tubthump onto the court as menacingly as two fat inbred-looking dudes can tubthump. They make for Artest, who promptly fells one of them. Teammate Anthony Johnson punches the fatter one, as does All-Star power forward Jermaine O'Neal, who runs across the floor, slips a bit, but still connects hard enough to knock him unconscious.
More fighting ensues. Ben Wallace's brother, who is not a player and shouldn't be on the floor, sucker-punches Pacers back-up guard Fred Jones. Referee Tommy Nunez, standing at center court, gets cut when a bottle hits him in the head. The game is called, the first time that has ever happened in the history of the league. And as the Pacers make for the sanctuary of the locker room, they are pelted with beer, water, popcorn, plastic bottles, and anything else not tied down.
Judgment was swift and Draconian. Artest was suspended for the rest of the year, Jackson for 30 games, O'Neal for 25, and Ben Wallace for six. The three Pacers also face possible criminal changes.
"To watch the out-of-control fans in the stands was disgusting, but it doesn't excuse our players going into the stands," said NBA Commissioner David Stern, widely regarded as the best commissioner in professional sports.
"One of our boundaries, that have always been immutable, is the boundary that separate the fans from the court. Players cannot lose control and move into the stands."
Indeed, the consensus of Stern and the sports pundits is, had Artest not broke said boundary, none of this wouldn't have happened. No argument with that. Hey, having some drunk fuckhead throw a plastic bottle at you does not give you license to beat the shit out of that person, the thinking goes. (Assholes are, lamentably, still a protected class in this country -- another irony). There is no excuse to ever go into the stands.
Oh, really? What if the fan had thrown a nine-volt battery? A cell phone? What if Artest had been struck in the eye and injured? What if that same drunken lout drew a switchblade or a Glock? There is a line at which it's permissible to break that boundary. Not this time, true, but there is a line. And if there's a line, this toes it.
According to Stern, O'Neal -- an all-around nice guy who, unlike Artest, has no problems with anger management -- drew the penalty for punching that fat waste of life that was assaulting his teammate on the court. To my mind, the boundary works both ways. Once you're on the court and threatening violence, you should be fair game.
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What the pundits, and Stern, missed is the negative effect this could have on fat, drunken, violent, ugly fans across the nation (Detroit, contrary to popular belief, has not cornered the belligerent-drunken-lowlife-fan market).
Because the net result of Friday's game, an ostensible Pacers victory, was this: there were two good teams in the East. Now that the three best Indiana players are shelved for all those games, there is only one.
Forget about Artest for a moment. What happened on Friday night was, a rival team came to a hostile stadium, a stadium with about as much security as a crack den, and some of those fans were able to goad the rival's three best players into a fight that in effect ruined the Pacers' season. In other words, the Detroit fans altered the shape of this NBA season. Their violent behavior was rewarded: no more rival team to worry about. What's to stop belligerent fans in other cities from doing the same? If some rapid louts in Sacramento, say, can take out Kobe Bryant, their team will benefit. I understand Stern's thinking, and I applaud his swift judgment. But what he has not taken into account is that the Pistons will benefit from their own poor security and loathsome fan base, and that is patently unfair. I think they should have made Detroit forfeit every game against Indiana the rest of the season, at least.
(Another irony is that Artest, a good guy if a bit of a space case, is now out for the entire season, and out four million bananas, while a certain rapist still patrols the parquet in L.A. But that's a column for another time).
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So why did this sicken me so?
Look, I'm sick of thinking about the state of the union. It makes me depressed, angry, anxious, scared. I want more than anything to stop, to zone out, to focus on something innocuous. What I like to do to relax is watch basketball. And now I can't even do that without getting pissed off.
At the risk of reading too much into this, violence in sports -- between teams, and also between fans and players -- is on the rise. This wasn't even the only sports-related violent melee this week. In the Clemson-South Carolina college football game, players on both sides brawled during the fourth quarter of Lou Holtz's farewell game.
The fact is, there's a lot of anger in this country right now. And a lot of that anger sprang from, or was manifested in, the way Bush ran his campaign. Instead of focusing on the issues, Karl Rove instead preyed on the uglier emotions of the Christian right, who voted in record numbers mostly because, as exit polls suggested, they hate gays and straight people who fornicate before marriage. As Timothy Gay pointed out in the Washington Post last week, those negative emotions will not just go away now that the election is over.
So what made me sick wasn't what Ron Artest did, or what Artest is supposed by sports pundits to represent. What made me sick is that, much as I'd like to bury my head in the sand the next four years, I know that I can't. The base emotions swirled up by the Great Uniter (yet another irony) are too ubiquitous to ignore. I'm not saying Bush was to blame for Artest's behavior. I'm saying that the usual forms of escape no longer work, because there is no escape.
—Greg Olear
Editor, LARGEREGO
Editor, LARGEREGO
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