Check out the comments at the NBA Fanhouse on AOL.com. The articles themselves are quite good. The people responding? Not so much.
Here’s my opinion, and I don’t quite care who disagrees.
Screw you. Screw you, all of you who view a fight between players on a basketball court and use it to denigrate every player in the league. Screw you, all of those who think the league is nothing but “[o]ver-paid, overdressed, under-educated, street gang members.” Screw you, all of you ignorant people who don’t bat an eyelash at the baseball brawls, who don’t say a word at a hockey fight, who conveniently ignore whenever white athletes get into trouble.
Screw you, all of you who think that the NBA is nothing but thugs. Screw you, all of you who think that every player in the league is a gang member, all of you who think every player in the league is violent and out of control, all of you who think every player in the league is a criminal.
Please leave the NBA. Please let the ratings fall to 4.0 and 5.0, because the last thing the NBA needs is your sorry eyeballs watching some of the greatest athletes in the world. Leave the NBA because these players don’t need to be performing in front of racist idiots who ally themselves with trash like Bill Bennett and Gary Thorne. Leave the NBA because these players shouldn’t have to conform to your idea of what is decent and what is not. Baseball needs you after all; there’s no black men there to ruin that.
Oh. Wait. Except for Barry Bonds. He’s a major thug. And that kid on the Harlem team in the Little League World Series a few years ago? The one who called his shot before hitting a homer? Yeah, he’s a thug too. A showboating bastard, right?
Leave the NBA. And don’t come back.
The league will be better off for it.
