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I guess this guy never heard about what happened in Munich in 1972.
The ugliest moments in sports history
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Kevin Hench / FOXSports.com
Posted: 14 hours ago
There are all kinds of ugly. Ugly mean. Ugly crazy. Ugly tragic. The sports world has provided just about every kind of ugly. Just in the last few weeks we've had a pregame fight, an in-game fight and an epic fight with the fans.
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Ugliest moments in sports
Pacers-Pistons brawl
Here, in no particular order, is a list of some of the ugliest moments in sports history:
The riot in Auburn Hills
There was an awful lot of ugly to go around two Fridays ago at the Palace of Auburn Hills. The Pistons' performance in the game was by no means pretty. The cheap shot by Ron Artest was unsightly. The overreaction by Ben Wallace was homely. And when one fan threw a cup of beer, it got coyote ugly in a hurry.
In a sea of ugly, the real double-bagger of the night belonged to Artest. Struck by a cup and its liquid contents, the NBA's loosest cannon believed this en led him to select a fan of his choosing and beat the crap out of him. Maybe the fact that the guy he went after was still holding a cup should have been a clue that he had the wrong guy. But then again Artest doesn't quite rhyme with smartest, does it?
While Artest, Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal were all guilty of woefully bad judgment, the fans who doused the players with a seemingly endless shower of liquid on their way into the tunnel cornered the market on cowardice. (Seriously, do they sell 100-ounce beers at the Palace? It looked like the fans had a hose hooked up to a hydrant.) Here's hoping these clowns are identified and some lifetime bans put in place.
The punch
There have been countless fights in professional sports, but has a single punch ever wrought such grotesque devastation as Kermit Washington's roundhouse rearrangement of Rudy Tomjanovich's face?
I remember reading the endless details of the damage in a recent article about the incident: the long list of broken facial bones, the spinal fluid leaking into the brain. It sounded more like an artillery s than a fist had hit Rudy T.'s face.
The moment was ugly and the result was even uglier. The long epilogue since has been one of searing regret for Washington and grudging forgiveness from Tomjanovich.
Bowe v. Golota
One ugly sequence begat another as Andrew Golota's refusal to hit Rid Bowe above the belt led to his disqualification and an all-out riot in Madison Square Garden.
The Polish-born Golota had so totally dominated the champ through six rounds that he led comfortably on all three judges' cards despite two deductions for low blows. In the seventh, Golota, ignoring the ref's warnings, unloaded a three-punch combination on Bowe's cup, earning himself a DQ.
As Bowe was helped to the locker room, members of his entourage confronted Golota. When Bernard Brooks taunted Golota, the fighter took a swing at him, prompting Brooks to crack Golota in the head with his walkie-talkie, drawing blood. And it was — as the kids say — on.
The riot spread from the ring throughout the Garden in a melee that was actually much more out of control than the nonsense at the Palace last week.
The two fighters hooked up again five months later and, yes, Golota was once again disqualified for low blows. One silver lining: Golota's antics gave us one of the great nicknames in sports history, the Foul Pole.
McSorley bashes Brashear
Marty McSorley hitting Donald Brashear in the temple marked a new low for hockey. ( / AP)
Where to begin when it comes to hockey, a sport that certainly merits its own top 10 ugliest moments list.
For sheer violence there is the two-handed attempted decapitation of Garrett Stafford by Alexander Perezhogin in an AHL game last season. For total gross-out factor there is the near decapitation of goalie Clint Malarchuk by a skate blade. (My buddy Schu was at the game and said people were fainting and throwing up.) There are, of course, horrendous cheap shots by Todd Bertuzzi, Tie Domi and Dale Hunter. There's the bizarre scene of the Boston Bruins going into the stands in Madison Square Garden and Mike Milbury beating a fan with his own shoe, which somehow seems quaint in comparison to the Pacers' thuggery.
But for all-time ugly, the winner has to be Marty McSorley hitting Donald Brashear in the temple with his stick. The cringe-inducing images of an already-unconscious Brashear falling helplessly, his head bouncing off the ice, are a kind of requiem for a goon.
Joe Theismann
There have been many ugly sports moments that have made us recoil in horror or wince in embarrassment for humanity, but when it comes to making us want to vomit, one stands out above the rest: Joe Theismann breaking his leg on Monday Night Football.
It seems like it became almost commonplace, the tibia and fibula snapping, the ankle dislocating, the lower leg pointing the wrong way, often flopping around like a fish on a dock. Tim Krumrie, Moises Alou, Jason Kendall, Ed McCaffrey all come nauseatingly to mind.
But for sheer, involuntary, reverse peristaltic impulse, nothing beats the first time we saw a leg snap "like a potato chip in too-thick dip" as Hank Hill would memorably describe it.
Go For Wand
The Joe Theismann of horse racing. While any time a horse breaks down and is put to sleep, it's tragic, this one stood out for the protracted flailing of the agonized filly.
She broke her foreleg in a homestretch duel with Bayakoa in the 1990 Breeders' Cup Distaff at Belmont Park. Unwilling to accept defeat, Go For Wand fought desperately to get to her hooves and carry on on her broken leg. The panicked thrashing on the track was one of the hardest things to watch in sports history and forced the vets to put her down right where she lay.
In that moment, the Sport of Kings seemed a whole lot less majestic.
Nigel Benn v. Gerald McClellan
It's the paradox of boxing: one man's ugly, senseless, violent event is another's all-time great sports spectacle.
The sport's history is littered with tragedy. It's the nature of the often not-very-sweet science. Fatal beatings like the one Boom Boom Mancini administered to Duk Koo Kim or Emile Griffith put on Benny Paret are all too common. But for sheer blow-by-blow horror — the sense that permanent, irrevocable damage was being done right before your eyes — nothing matches the devastation dished out in the brawl between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan.
On Feb. 25, 1995, in London, Benn and McClellan fought for Benn's 168-pound Super Middleweight le. The fight against the 31-year-old champ was supposed to be an easy win for McClellan on his way to a superfight with Roy Jones Jr. The two men beat the out of each other until McClellan was counted out in the 10th. Imagine Hagler-Hearns going 10 rounds and you have a sense of the totality of the violence.
After the fight, both men were hospitalized. McClellan suffered swelling of the brain, went into a coma and was left blind and confined to a wheelchair. Benn was never the same. He defended his le twice before losing the last three fights of his career.
Monica Seles stabbed
I don't know which is uglier, the fact that lunatic Gunther Parche stabbed Monica Seles in the back in 1993 or that he never served a day in jail.
Parche reminded us that fan is short for fanatic when he attacked Seles to keep his beloved Steffi Graf atop the world tennis rankings. One of the many sad footnotes to this story — like the two years probation slap on the wrist he was given by a German judge who must also have been a Graf fan — was that Parche's deranged plan worked, successfully derailing Seles' career. Though she made a stirring comeback two years later, Seles was never the same player.
Ironically, Graf's father Peter did do jail time for what some might consider the less venal offense of income tax evasion. This begs the question: Is the phrase "German justice" oxymoronic?
Woody Hayes
There are, as I've noted, many different definitions of ugly. In his final spasm of frustrated rage, Woody Hayes was about seven of them. He was ugly on the inside, ugly on the outside, ugly mean and ugly crazy all rolled into one.
When Clemson sealed its 1978 Gator Bowl win over Ohio State on linebacker Charlie Bauman's interception of an Art Schlichter pass, Hayes completely lost it, punctuating his otherwise distinguished career by punching Bauman in the throat.
Hayes later added ugly delusional to his repertoire when he denied punching Bauman despite the millions of witnesses who saw the video evidence.
The murder of Andres Escobar
Soccer fans have redefined subhuman behavior and could fill a compendium of 1,001 ugly moments with their hooliganism, but one incident from the 1994 World Cup stands out above the rest.
When Colombian defender Andres Escobar returned home to Medellin after kicking the ball into his own net in a 2-1 loss to the U.S., he was shot 12 times, murdered by a soccer fan.
They may call it the beautiful game, but for some reason it elicits the ugliest conduct from its fans.
Andres Escobar lies on the ground after scoring an own goal past goalkeeper Oscar Cordoba against the U.S. at the 1994 World Cup. (Romeo Gacad / GettyImages)
Tragedy in the stands
Twice in a span of nine months from July 26, 1998 to May 1, 1999, fans were killed as a result of tires and debris flying into the stands and hitting spectators of open-wheel races at the Michigan Speedway and the Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte. Three fans died in each incident after on-track collisions sent car parts hurtling over the wall and into the densely-packed stands.
The accidents were eerily similar, but the racetracks handled them differently. The U.S. 500 at the Michigan Speedway completed the remaining 75 laps while the VisionAire 500 in Charlotte was halted as soon as the extent of the injuries was determined.
These tragedies highlighted one of the enduring dilemmas of sports: balancing fans' desire to be as close to the action as possible with public safety.
I guess this guy never heard about what happened in Munich in 1972.
The New Jersey Nets in the 2003 NBA Finals.
So, you have a problem with Mark Spitz' 7 golds?
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