Brawl and response / Really racist

Today: Tommy Craggs, late of "Game Theory" on HBO, and writer and editor at Mother Jones, HuffPost, Slate, Gawker Media, and Deadspin; and Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead.

Issue No. 191

Two Decades of Pacification in the NBA
Tommy Craggs

Shooting the Messengers
Arwa Mahdawi

Two Decades of Pacification in the NBA

by Tommy Craggs

Here, on the eve of the fifth consecutive most important election of our lifetimes, is a little parable about governance, self-governance, bad actors, and violence. It comes to us courtesy the NBA and Joe Mazzulla, the bona fide eccentric who coaches the Boston Celtics.

“The biggest thing that we rob people of from an entertainment standpoint is you can’t fight anymore. I wish we’d bring back fighting,” Mazzulla told NBC Sports Boston the other day. “What’s more entertaining than a little scuffle? How come in baseball they’re allowed to clear the benches? How come in hockey they’re allowed to fight? I don’t understand. I just don’t get why some sports are allowed to clear the benches. They have bats and weapons [in baseball]. We don’t. We have a ball. The other sport [hockey] has one of the hardest playing surfaces and a puck and a stick. And yet we’re not allowed to throw down a little bit?”

OK, bear in mind here that Mazzulla is, by all available evidence, a crackpot. Famously he has claimed that he watches The Town four times a week, and he has evidently given serious thought to the matter of how he would rob a bank. (The Town is the Boston heist flick with Ben Affleck that dared to explore the question of what a movie might look and sound like if George V. Higgins were thrown down a flight of stairs and then forced to write a screenplay. They should’ve called it The Friends of Will Hunting.) He says flaky stuff all the time. A few days ago, a reporter asked him if the Celtics felt any pressure to repeat as champions. “Zero,” he replied. “No pressure. We're all going to be dead soon, and it really doesn't matter anymore.” Thus coached Zarathustra.

Mazzulla is no dummy, though. And I’d bet you a Maurice Lucas throwback jersey he knows exactly why there is no brawling in the NBA anymore. 

Let’s go back 20 years, to the so-called Malice at the Palace. The fight was actually two distinct events, one far graver than the other. The first was a rough but fairly routine bit of chippiness between the Pacers and Pistons, a hard foul by the man then known as Ron Artest that led to some mugging and shoving, after which the players were separated and the zebras began to sort things out. The second, the real precipitant that night, was a fan throwing a drink at Artest as he lay on the scorer’s table. Artest charged into the stands, and in the process he passed through that all-important membrane between the players and the crowd that allows for the whole racialized spectacle of major American sports, of Black men running and jumping for the enjoyment of overlubricated white people, to proceed without anyone feeling too weird about it. The fight was now between the paying customers and the players. On the court, a fan named Charlie Haddad was laid out by the Pacers’ Jermaine O’Neal. By the time Haddad was peeled off the floorboards, the national freakout had commenced.