Sportsmanship, Basketball, & Life
Tuesday, December 19th, 2006
I’ve been generally silent for the past couple of days, but most especially because of the last 36 hours. I had luckily acquired two floor seats to the Knicks vs. Nuggets game for Saturday night. 3rd row behind the basket, in NYC (a city obsessed with its sports, most especially basketball) is not an easy feat. My girlfriend had received the seats as a gift through work, and so rather than partake in watching any sports on TV, or chip another block of my growing iceberg of a Netflix queue, we happily took the tix, made our way to MSG and plopped down and enjoyed the game. Don’t believe me? Look for the pink Paul Smith shirt in the picture.
I’m not the consummate basketball fan, but I know players, histories, and more. And because we rarely (read: never) get to watch a pro athletic competition at an eye-to-eye level, we stayed till the last minute. If you have even remotely passed by a sportschannel or a sports broadcast in the last 36 hours then you would have certainly seen the melee that erupted precisely in that last minute of the game. If you missed it, go check out ESPN.com and scan through the video clips for the Knicks brawl, it’s there.
More specifically, the melee happened almost right in front of us. In a crowd of 26,000 I would dare even say that it happened DIRECTLY in front of us. “It” being a flagrant foul by one Knick player that ignited a near bench-clearing brawl in front of fans, coaches, players, parents & kids.
The kids aspect of it was especially poignant. Minutes after all parties of the game finally settled, Spike Lee - the consummate NY Knicks fan, who was watching the game with his daughter, decided it was time to leave and was escorted by security. If you’re a parent, you would want to sheild your kids eyes. Certainly kids haven seen far worse things on TV or video games, but when it comes to people and figures that have the potential to be role models and frequently are, it’s a disaster.
It’s becoming more and more prevalent and it’s unfortunate. The fact that we can’t separate ourselves from a TV to find out about Nicole Ritchie racing down Burbank, stoned on Vicodin, or that we look up to people or players that maybe don’t deserve to be looked up to. I can’t say whether or not most of these players are good or bad people, and I’d generally like to believe there is good and positivity. But it’s hard to admire them or the game they play when they choose to deconstruct it to primitive testosterone contests.
It’s nice to see tha NBA coming down hard on the players that are guilty of the infractions in the form of game suspensions. But how come they never penalize them enough to repair the damage they do to our youth. Collins, Jeffries, and Carmelo Anthony make sizable incomes and yet they only get fined 1% if even that much of their salary. If they make 80+ million a year, why aren’t we penalizing their pockets enough to build a better school or better youth programs that teach it’s better not to slug out the differences of competitive play? That is perhaps some socialistic form of justice, but wouldn’t it make sense? Wouldn’t it recycle the negative energy that is swirling over who said and did what first and align it to providing more positive outlets for kids? More books, more places not to fall victim to the inner city vacuum of striving to be the lowest common denominator. I could be wrong, but then again, I could be damn right. I think it’s the latter.
Events like this add to the cycle and gravity that represses the waywards and downtroddens. It prevents the ascension of youth in our society towards the attainments of which we are invariably capable of. That perhaps, is the largest shame of it all