In an AOL article, Jason Whitlock comes out with an almost shameful explanation for the difference in reaction between NBA fights and fights in other sports leagues.
Defenders of the NBA are ready to play the race card, suggesting that it?s OK to duke it out in sports dominated by white athletes.
Hockey doesn?t belong in the discussion. It?s damn near the same as including boxing as part of the argument. The NHL made fighting a central element in its entertainment package long ago. Hockey fans pay money to see players scrap the same way boxing fans pay money to see Roy Jones Jr. and James Toney exchange leather.
In addition to that, because of the glass wall, fans and hockey players are separated. When a hockey goon drops his gloves, it?s highly unlikely that he and his combatant will fall into the laps of paying customers. The same can be said of a typical baseball melee. Baseball players run to the pitcher?s mound ? away from fans — to fight.
And how does that relate to words like ‘thug’ being thrown around so cavalierly? How does that relate to people referring to this league as a gang, and making cracks that all the players are criminals? These players aren’t being called thugs because they fought near fans. These players aren’t being called gangsters because of the possibility that they might fall into the stands.
When Texas Rangers receiver Frank Francisco threw that chair into the face of a woman in Oakland, there was outrage. But nobody painted all of Major League Baseball with one broad brush. Nobody said that all the players were criminals, nobody questioned the intelligence of all the players, nobody referred to them as thugs, bums or gangsters. Nobody said they would stop taking their kids to baseball games.
Jason Whitlock, as we saw from his interview with The Big Lead, is usually one who sees through the crap and tells it like it is. Apparently, that does not go for the NBA, which Whitlock has been virulently critical of, even going so far on an episode of The Sports Reporters to chastise Candace Parker for simply dunking — because she shouldn’t want to be like the ‘me, me, me’ punks of the NBA. To continue giving credence to a view that has very little merit, to continue letting the bigots off the hook, goes to show that Whitlock is either ignorant or gutless. Ignorant if he doesn’t see the truth, gutless if he doesn’t speak it.
The cop outs that Whitlock gives in his article are the kind I would expect from a hack like Jay Mariotti. The intimate setting is why the players are being treated differently. It’s because the fans are right there, and the players are practically naked, and the music is mean and nasty. In hockey, fighting is part of the game. It’s good and okay, and none of the players are violent thugs. In baseball, those cerebral players have the mental fortitude to fight away from the stands, out at the mound. How gentlemanly of them — nevermind the fact that the reason they fight at the pitcher’s mound is because 99% of all baseball fights happen when a pitcher throws at a hitter.
When it comes down to it, Jason Whitlock isn’t ignorant or gutless. That’s giving him far too much credit. Jason Whitlock, like Michael Irwin and Scoop Jackson before him, is just a bojangler.
*In case you don’t know what I mean by ‘bojangler’, Whitlock uses the word about one hundred times in his interview with The Big Lead, which I linked to in the article.
