December 21, 2006
Sports of The Times
As Times Change, Fighting Remains Part of the Game
By GEORGE VECSEY
Go figure. That nasty brawl at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night — which evinced such major hand-wringing all around — has worked wonders for both teams.
The Denver Nuggets not only pulled the trigger on the Allen Iverson deal, but they also managed a snow cancellation until A. I. is good and ready to carry the load while Carmelo Anthony serves his 15-game suspension.
The Knicks, the other party in the fight, have now won two straight games with stunning plays at the buzzer, including last night, when David Lee tipped in a perfectly lofted pass by Jamal Crawford with one-tenth of a second left in the second overtime for a 111-109 victory over Charlotte.
After all the gloom and doom following their four suspensions, the Knicks have won by using only eight players each time. There is no logical explanation.
“Chuck Daly used to say,” Isiah Thomas said, invoking his coach and mentor on the old Pistons, “that if you stick around long enough you will see everything.’
Thomas volunteered that he fully expected some of his players to be dragging for their games tomorrow and Saturday.
“These guys will absolutely die at this intensity,” he predicted, after 58 minutes of basketball, with his five starters all going over 46 minutes.
The main thing is that the league just may have survived Saturday’s brawl, which reminded me of battles I witnessed decades ago, sometimes at the “old” Garden and sometimes at the 69th Regiment Armory, a dismal barn over on the East Side.
One constant was fisticuffs — the wild flailing of elbows, guys in tight little shorts poleaxing each other for the sheer fun of it. The league was smaller then, and teams played each other over and over again, with enough frequency to exacerbate hard feelings.
There was no such thing as “hard” fouls or “professional” fouls. Pat Riley had not invented the concept of the Inner Clothesliner. Men just walloped each other: “That’s for what you did to me last week in Fort Wayne.”
In my mind’s eye, the Knicks are always playing the Syracuse Nationals on Saturday afternoon, circa 1953. Syracuse’s resident tough guy was Wally Osterkorn, a nasty-looking dude with dark sideburns, long before Elvis and the Fonz made sideburns effetely stylish. Known as the Ox to Syracuse fans, Osterkorn later did four years for burglary before admirably straightening out his life.
In a 1995 interview with The Post-Standard of Syracuse, Osterkorn recalled how he used to harass Bob Cousy: “Hey, Bob! C’mon down the lane! I’ve got something for you!”
And some people thought Thomas invented the tactic of deciding who should go down the middle and who should not.
There was very little tsk-tsking about those ancient ruffians. Pro basketball was what it was, a struggling refugee from the dance halls and gyms of the inner city, giving employment to lanky types.
If their brawls spilled over into the sparse crowds, well, that was somebody’s hard luck, much like getting creamed with a foul at the ballpark. The players were rough but the ambiance was gentle. At Knicks games, a little old organist named Gladys Goodding played mellow chestnuts like “The Skater’s Waltz” and “In Old New York.”
There was no killer sound system, no message board, no dancing girls, all the irrelevant show-biz trappings of today — just organ music and guys in short shorts pummeling each other. I’m here to tell you, it wasn’t bad.
One day in the laboratory, David Stern invented Bird, Magic and Jordan, and all of a sudden pro basketball became too valuable to allow another case like Kermit Washington leveling Rudy Tomjanovich, or the brawl in the stands in Auburn Hills, Mich.
Stern acted wisely the other day in doling out the penalties. Anthony can complain about his 15-game suspension, but the fact is that he went looking for trouble, throwing a sucker punch, then retreating. Now an in-flight magazine with a feature article on Anthony has been withdrawn by Northwest Airlines. This isn’t a sport anymore. It’s a brand.
•
I have trouble with the perception that the public is somehow turned off by fighting in the N.B.A. because the players are predominately African-American. The brawls I witnessed back in the early ’50s involved predominately white players, and I don’t remember there being any outcry about white violence.
What is different is the manufactured noise and artificial fury these days. When the lights dim and the loudspeakers blare and the laser spotlights rotate, the league is more or less prodding the players — and the crowd — into a heightened state, people expecting more thrills, more muscle, for their buck.
Stern, quite sternly, has put everybody on notice that they must know when the anger must stop. It isn’t that easy, when 10 large men operating at close quarters, with testosterone and tempers high.
Sometimes the game has eerie reflections of other generations. The Iverson trade could produce one of the best pairings in the league since Oscar Robertson joined Lew Alcindor in Milwaukee, to help win a championship. Now the decimated Knicks have won two straight. Go figure.
E-mail:
[email protected]