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Yeah, you're right - it was the running away that really sullied his rep in this fight...
Because most of them have their hair cut nicely, and their uniforms cover their tatoos.Why is it that MLB can have five times as many brawls as the NBA, yet every time there's an NBA fight sportswriters fall all over themselves pronouncing the death knell of the league, but in baseball it's just "intense compe ion".
Yeah, you're right - it was the running away that really sullied his rep in this fight...
Artest changed the way the NBA looks at this and the way the world including media looks at NBA. thats all im saying. Artest is the Bin Laden of Basketball
It's fair.
So why hasn't there been a Bin Laden of baseball?
The media has always looked at the NBA this way. Artest just gave them an excuse to pile on.
It's true, there is a quadruple standard when it comes to violence in US sport. It would be interesting to find the roots of these at udes, OTOH it may be a bit disturbing.
For basketball,
there is no major team sport where the fans are so close to players,
the players are half-naked, exposed,
the players have no face or head covering to hide their faces/emotions,
it's traditionally a non-contact, non-violent sport.
soccer and basketball are probably closer in these aspects, except soccer pitches are huge with a long distances between fans and players, and often a high, metal fence to keep the fans in the stands, and a cage around the players' benches to keep projectiles away.
There aren't double standards. Each sport is held to its own traditional standards for misconduct.
Hockey fans feel cheated if there's no fight, brawl, no blood spilled and skulls or faces split open.
Football fans love to see the other team hit up to/past concussion or injury.
Injury from intentionally hard contact is expected and accepted.
brawls in baseball, soccer, and basketball are rare, with punishment being immediate ejection.
I know you are insinuating it, so I might as well say it.
It's because NBA players are thought by many as "ghetto", "gangsta" and "thugs" and baseball players are not.
As to why they are thought of that way, it's because some people who watch/are associated with basketball group young, black, urban males and everything they do into gangsta/thug behavior.
They changed the dress code because they didn't like to see the "gangsta" clothing. They don't want them to listen to that "gangsta" rap music through their headphones, so iPods are banned. Etc.
(And yes, I know there are young, black baseball players too)
But far, far fewer.
That was my point. Baseball is about 9% black. Basketball is about 75-80% black.
Yep - and it's an ever greater divide when you consider the amount of active players in the leagues.
In baseball, the unwritten rules are treated like a Bible and you're expected to follow them (remember when Ozzie Guillen pulled and lit into his pitcher for not throwing at the Rangers?).
The best example (and I think it was Shoog that gave it) is this: Put Frank Francisco in an NBA lineup and we're treating this story much differently.
Baseball has a weak ass leadership system. Who is going to suspend someone? Football is known for violence. So is hockey.
Basketball is supposed to be an athletic, finesse game that is fun to watch. Again, this is all about JR Smith getting a little out of control after being fouled hard. Big deal.
Again, wake me up, when a fellow Spur stops a player from posterizing it's franchise player Tim Duncan.
I can't wait.
The unwritten rule in basketball is you don't play your starters in a blow out and you don't run a slam dunk contest in Madison Square Garden.
Seems like George Karl, JR Smith and Carmelo Anthony didn't take the history lesson.
the brawl has a nickname:
"The Grapple in the Apple"
Maybe (and I can kind of see Karl's point considering I listened to them give up two of their bigger leads with small amounts of time remaining in the game this season), but you can't tell me the "rules" of baseball aren't treated with greater respect than the "rules" of basketball.
I agree. He may be friends w/ Pop, but I always thought Karl was a ! I can read his mind now "you son of ! You fired my BFF, I'm going to get you!" Like the gay he is. I'm no Thomas fan, but he did the same thing Barkley and all the others talk about... If a player keeps driving thru the lane on your home floor, put 'em on their asses! That same tactic is what allowed a less talented Heat team beat the Mavericks 4 straight games. They put Dirk on his ass a couple times and made them jump shooters.
December 19, 2006
As Thomas Takes Heat, Karl Escapes Scrutiny
By HARVEY ARATON
Isiah Thomas is the human piñata in New York, and little that has happened in what is supposed to be his last stand of a season speaks for the defense of his tenure running the Knicks. But he wasn’t the only coach at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night putting a personal agenda ahead of his team and the welfare of the sport. He didn’t lay all the landmines by himself.
George Karl knew what he was doing when he kept his starters on the court into the last two minutes of the Nuggets’ blowout victory. He understood he was trampling on Thomas’s increasingly fragile sense of security, taunting the inner Bad Boy, for whom Karl has a contempt that was made so profanely obvious yesterday at a news conference in Denver.
And for what? That is the question the Nuggets’ owner, Stan Kroenke, should have been screaming at Karl yesterday after the league’s leading scorer and his most indispensable player, Carmelo Anthony, bore the brunt of Commissioner David Stern’s frustrations. A 15-game suspension for punching Mardy Collins, so Karl could make his juvenile little statement in memory of his friend Larry Brown? So he could kick the carcass that Thomas will be if more games do not end like last night’s spirited eight-man 97-96 overtime victory against Utah, on Stephon Marbury’s layup at the buzzer?
“I’ll swear on my children’s life that I never thought about running up the score,” Karl said yesterday. “I just wanted to win, get a big win on the road.”
Seventeen points? Twenty-three? What’s the difference to anyone not gullible enough to believe that nonsense? Karl has been a head coach in the N.B.A. for 19 years. He couldn’t read the danger? He had no idea what Thomas, whose Hall of Fame career has been pockmarked with altercations, is capable of when provoked?
We understand this is a professional sport, not youth soccer, but we’re not talking about considerations Karl owed Thomas or the Knicks. His obligation was to his organization and to his players, to weigh the infinitesimal odds of a Knicks rally against the potential consequences of the perception he created by not clearing his bench.
Coaches are paid to protect their players, given what they know about the combustibility of the young men who play a grueling contact sport, to evaluate the moment, risk versus reward.
“He put his players in a tough position,” Thomas said after denying that he ordered the hard foul on J. R. Smith by Collins, a rookie guard, or on anyone else.
Self-serving? No more so than Karl’s child-swearing piety. Thomas said his chat with Anthony preceding the brawl was paternal advice to “show some class.” Maybe. Maybe not, but without the kind of admission the former Temple coach John Chaney made in a similar situation a couple of years ago, or without a Knick to give Thomas up, who was going to prove his intent?
Not the lawyer in the commissioner’s chair. During Stern’s conference call to announce the suspensions of seven players and the $500,000 fines for each organization, he said there was no compelling evidence on which to suspend Thomas, who was back on the bench last night for his most gratifying victory of the season.
“Even in the N.B.A., there is presumption of innocence,” Stern said.
Many people in these parts already convicted Thomas because they want him fired — today, this moment — for failing to make salad out of the slop left behind by his predecessor, Scott Layden, the Jazz assistant coach who last night shook the hand of the Garden’s president, James L. Dolan, possibly in gra ude for his own dismissal three years ago.
For Karl, Thomas’s demise is another kind of moral imperative, what he deserves for the suffering inflicted on Brown, who collected a mere $28 million for tolerating Marbury & Company for one season. Karl and Brown are members in the North Carolina true-blue fraternity.
•
Stern suggested that Kroenke, the Nuggets’ owner, rein in his coach after a Denver reporter repeated some of the invective Karl spewed yesterday. Karl was obviously pained over the suspensions of Anthony and Smith, who got 10 games. But it was hardly out of character for Karl, a blowhard from way back, who once sneeringly described the hiring of Doc Rivers as head coach in Orlando, among other black players to comparable posts, as the “anointment of the young Afro-American coach.”
Karl apparently had the idea that only white journeymen like himself, 57 games under .500 in his first two jobs but still en led to a third in Seattle, are en led to practice the brain surgeon’s skills required to teach the high screen-and-roll.
Better Karl should learn to run onto the court and tackle his best player after he has set him up for the kind of trouble Anthony sadly found. Supposedly rehabilitated after some early behavioral missteps, Anthony was turned into an N.B.A. marketing linchpin, with LeBron James and Dwyane Wade. Now he’s the guy who sucker-punched Collins and backpedaled in retreat.
Stern had more punishment to mete out, more explaining to do to a national news media always eager to excoriate his players while pro football stars pretty much get a free pass for criminality and antisocial acting out. Stern must wonder how much longer he will be haunted by an idea someone in his office came up with many years ago, an N.B.A.-produced video that christened Thomas and the Pistons of the late 1980s as the Bad Boys.
“We’re like a hockey team; everybody wants to see us fight,” Dennis Rodman said in the video introduction, and isn’t it amazing how many of the league’s image issues as a breeding ground for thugs — from the Pistons to Rodman in Chicago to the Malice at the Palace two years ago to Thomas on Saturday night — have derived from Detroit?
It’s been a continuing story for almost two decades now, coinciding with George Karl’s anointment as an N.B.A. coach. You’d have thought that a coach as erudite as Karl would have known that those who don’t learn from pro basketball history are doomed to repeat it.
E-mail: [email protected]
http://www.truehoop.com
A Blow Out, a Blow Up, and Blowing the Whole Thing Out of Proportion
The more I think about that Saturday Night fight, the more I think "enough hand-wringing already." (I know, I know, this here very blog has played a decent part in that. Mea culpa and all that.) And that's not to say that what happened wasn't terrible. It was. If I pull on my holier-than-thou hat on I could probably deliver a stern lecture to just about every player who was on that court. Not impressive, guys. Not impressive at all, and something that--in a world of common sense and basic human decency--would simply never happen.
But that's true of a million things! An hour ago I was walking with my daughter, her best friend, and her best friend's dad, to pre-school. We were at a crosswalk, and a car headed in one direction stopped for us. So we did that thing you do... you sort of edge out into the crosswalk, looking to make eye contact with the driver headed the other way, in the hopes that they, too, will stop. I should point out that at this particular crosswalk, which is comprised of huge black and white stripes and a four-foot tall neon reflector built into the middle of the street, there is a huge sign that says "STATE LAW: YIELD TO PEDESTRIANS." In addition, my friend and I each had a brightly dressed three-year-old on our shoulders. And the speed limit is 25. So we were hard to miss.
And of course, some woman comes cruising along, sees us only at the very last second, initially jams on the gas to try to scoot by, and then with a big f-you glare and wild gesticulation jams on her brakes. Once she is stopped, she fixes eye contact and starts yelling. Recap: she almost broke the law and killed us (not really--we weren't going to get hit, but it would have been close), and we're getting the lecture. Something about we're crazy yadayadayada. I couldn't even really hear it. I think I yelled something profound like "it's a crosswalk!" My friend gave a big, loud, sarcastic "MERRRRRRRY CHRISTMAS" (which was pretty good under the cir stances--seasonal and poignant--especially considering you can't bring your invective A-game with three-year olds on your shoulders).
Here's my point: I could conjure up ten thousand lectures about auto safety, misplaced priorities, state laws, etc. If I were back in college, and had an assignment to write ten pages on it, I could. No sweat.
But there would be no point. It's just a low-level regrettable little incident. You cross the street enough times, someone's going to not notice you once in a while. Minus the yelling, I have even been the driver in that situation.
It's the kind of thing that happens. Like a fender bender, keys locked in the car, a broken glass, a sinus infection, an unexpected bill, or spilled milk... Sure, yes, people should be more careful, whatever. And people can even really get hurt from those kinds of things.
All those theories about that Knick-Nugget fight--there's probably some truth to all of them. But maybe that fight, like my street crossing incident, is one of those things that doesn't really benefit from a close examination of the particulars. Maybe going into all the nitty gritty is just an elaborate exercise of the fictional notion that there's much anyone could to eliminate occasional misfortune.
It's pretend, isn't it, that anyone's in a position to offer refined and effective fighting rules? (David Stern's thing yesterday is that fighting a little is bad, but re-starting a fight that has calmed down is really bad. Do we really know that?) It's pretend, perhaps, that the teams could have prevented it--other than perhaps wholly altering the corporate culture of your typical NBA team. (What were they supposed to do--reverse the violent upbringings of so many kids? Not sign feisty players--including multiple le winners like Larry Bird, Maurice Lucas, and Bill Laimbeer--who intimidate with their fists?) And it's pretend, I believe, that basketball can be played year after year without the occasional fight.
Do the math. That's 400 energetic young testosterone machines, many from tough, violent backgrounds. Counting pre-season and playoffs, there are more than 1,400 games in a season. With ten players on the court at all times, that's more than ten thousand hours of individuals pushing, shoving, and barking at each other. And it gets out of hand once a year? Less? (How does that compare to your health club/rec league/high school etc.?)
Maybe there's no lesson here at all, other than "that sucks."
(If there's anything lasting that comes out of this, I hope it will be this: let those Knicks and Nuggets who failed so terribly to turn the other cheek think long and hard before ever engaging in that athlete's ritual of lecturing those of us who don't brawl at work with pious post-game God talk. In religion, as in just about everything, actions speak louder.)
So why are we all so wound up about this fight, unlike baseball and hockey people? Because NBA players make the most money and are the most famous. Because they are not hidden away in pads or helmets. Because fans are right there on the court. And yes, because some white people think it's the L.A. riots all over again every time a black guy takes a swing.
There are probably a hundred other reasons. Dave Zirin has one: because David Stern and the media told us it was a crisis:
...we are deluged with articles about how, as a Yahoo Sports headline described it, this is really "a black eye" for the entire league. The Baltimore Sun's Childs Walker wrote that the brawl should spark a discussion "about the sociology of the NBA." MSNBC's Michael Ventre opined that "the terms 'NBA' and 'thuggery' have become inextricably linked in the minds of basketball fans the world over." The piece also calls the incident another example of "The NBA Vs. Idiots."
Young black men scuffling, even scuffling in a way that would make foxy boxing seem threatening, seem to be a catalyst for an astounding amount of public hand-wringing. Fights in the NBA happen with far less frequency than one would think. The previous one that drew a suspension occurred last season, when Keyon Dooling and Ray Allen scuffled with no punches even connecting.
Stern is responsible for this holier-than-thou atmosphere. It was Stern who last year issued the infamous dress code, banning ostentatious gold chains and medallions and mandating business casual attire off the court. It was Stern who instigated the "tough on whining" rules this season--if a player so much as sneezes in a referee's direction, he gets tagged with a technical foul. It was Stern who last year hired Karl Rove's public relations operative Matthew Dowd to give the league "red-state appeal."
This approach, in my mind, is rooted in generational and racial anxiety, and efforts to assuage that anxiety among the folks who can afford the pricey tickets at Madison Square Garden. When Stern feeds the myth that players somehow are out of control and undercivilized, it gives confidence to the apostles of fear--like New York Post columnist Phil Mushnick, who wrote, "NBAers are showing up to speak at schools and in airports and for TV interviews looking like recruitment officers for the Bloods and Crips."
While Mushnick and his ilk are shocked, shocked by the brawl at the Garden, they conveniently ignore the stories that place these young men in a very different light. With next to no media coverage, Anthony last week gave $1.5 million to start the Carmelo Anthony Youth Development Center in his home town of Baltimore. The center will offer after-school education and recreation programs to about 200 school-age children.
But today's Baltimore Sun has a piece led "Anthony's Star Takes a Hit." Another report on the Sports Illustrated website contends "Melo's Image Irreparably Damaged." The brawl, in the eyes of these observers, far outweighs this altogether more significant act. And in Stern's world of paternalistic damage control, it surely does.
Here's the link to Zirin's full article.
http://www.edgeofsports.com/2006-12-18-216/index.html
JB, why don't you write an article about this crap and see if the E-N will run it?
And if they won't run it, give it to me and I'll run it on WOAI.com.
Let me compose my thoughts and I'll get started.
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