For a couple of breathless seconds, as the kid raised the stool over his head, it was a winter's night in Minneapolis again. That night has been gone for 48 years, but its echoes, and its stain, remain. Six or seven names are attached to it, and always will be.
The names are Ron Behagen, and Corky Taylor, and Jim Brewer, and Dave Winfield, who committed assault and battery that long-ago night in Minneapolis.
The names are Luke Witte, and Dave Merchant, and Mark Wagar, upon whom the assault and battery was committed.
Witte, a 7-foot center for Ohio State, wound up in intensive care that night after being curb-stomped by Taylor and Behagen, a couple of Minnesota Golden Gophers forwards. Merchant and Wagar, the other two Ohio State players, also went to the hospital after being assaulted by Gopher players Jim Brewer and Dave Winfield.
Forty-eight years later Luke Witte is a minister in North Carolina, so I don't know if he saw the kid raise the stool the other night. Probably, because ESPN has it on its usual continual loop now. If so, I can imagine he must have shuddered, because of all our moments on this earth it is the mad moments, regrettably, that have the most staying power.
And what happened the other night in Lawrence, Kansas, was as mad as mad gets.
What happened was an ugly brawl that spilled into the seats at the end of the floor, as the final seconds disappeared in No. 3 Kansas' 81-60 rout of Kansas State. The kid who grabbed the stool and raised it over his head, Silvio De Sousa, also exchanged punches with a couple of Kansas State players who left the bench to initiate the brawl. A Kansas assistant snatched the stool away from him.
Otherwise, Silvio De Sousa's name might have gone right up there with those of Taylor and Behagen and the rest.
As it is, he'll sit for 12 games as decreed by the Big 12. Kansas State players James Love and Antonio Gordon will miss eight games and three, respectively. And Kansas' David McCormack will sit two games.
It's not nearly enough.
No, for this kind of ugliness, the principals should get the rest of the season to sit home and think about it. Because, yes, this kind of ugliness lingers. It has a hang time that far exceeds the briefness of its life. Luke Witte's obit will mention that winter's night in Minneapolis, when he passes. So will Behagen's. And when Taylor died of lung cancer in 2012, everyone cued up the tape of those few seconds of madness -- even though he had done good work for the city of Minneapolis for 30 years as a youth coach and mentor.
"Oh, my gosh, it hurts," one contemporary said when he passed. "I considered him my friend."
That contemporary was Luke Witte.
Someday, when De Sousa and Love and Gordon and the rest have hopefully gone out into life and done their own good works, this kind of redemptive moment will happen for them, too. Hopefully one moment of madness in Kansas will not define them.
But it will stay with them, to one degree or another. Would that the world worked otherwise.
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