The Malice, reconsidered

 Let's begin today with this: Some fan.

Some fan in his home arena at the end of a contentious game between bitter rivals, who finish it by squaring off with one another. Some fan who reacts to this by assaulting one of the visiting team's players ... which leads to a visiting team player going into the stands after said fan ... which in turn leads to other visiting team players going into the stands to brawl with the home fans.

Sound familiar?

Of course it does. It's the Malice in the Palace, right?

It's the Malice in the Palace, and the fan's name is John Green, and he's thrown a beer at Ron Artest of the Indiana Pacers. Which leads to Artest and Stephen Jackson going into the stands after him.

Which leads to a full-scale brawl between the Pacers and a bunch of charming drunks throwing beer and chairs and God knows what else on the night of Nov. 19, 2004.

Except.

Except that's not the date we're talking about here.

The date we're talking about is Dec. 23, 1979, and it's not a basketball game in Detroit between the Pacers and Detroit Pistons. It's a hockey game in New York between the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers.

The name of the fan, in this instance, is not John Green but John Kaptain. The name of the player he's assaulted is Stan Jonathan of the Bruins, whom he's whacked with a rolled-up program. And the name of the Bruins' player who climbs into the stands to go after him is Terry O'Reilly, followed not by Stephen Jackson but by Mike Milbury and Peter McNab and a whole pile of other Bruins.

Here's the interesting thing, though: No one came up with some catchy nickname for this.

 It was just a hockey brawl, albeit a notorious one. The participants were suspended, and the NHL went on about its business. 

There was no dog-whistle hand-wringing about the league's "culture". No yapping sports poodles calling the players involved "thugs" on national TV. No one intimating that the NHL was full of gangsters, by God. The commissioner of the NHL didn't even institute a dress code because of it. 

All of the above happened after the Malice in the Palace. And I bring it up today because I watched the Netflix documentary about it yesterday, and from 17 years distance it's appalling how robustly the media and NBA commissioner David Stern were blowing those aforementioned dog whistles -- because, unlike that other brawl, this one did not involve  white hockey players but black basketball players.  

How did more of us not see then what's so crystal clear now?

Maybe it's just that we needed those 17 years distance to get the full picture of what happened that night in Detroit, and how people who should have known better reacted to it. Artest was a loose cannon and so was Stephen Jackson, and from that the assumptions spread outward in concentric circles -- assumptions that almost entirely had to do with race, because the sight of black players brawling with mostly white fans was the worst possible imagery for the NBA.

And so Stern's solution, and the media's that took its lead from him, was to treat the black players like criminals. And to tacitly encourage media to use the word "thugs" to describe them, which is about as dog whistle-y as it gets.

Problem was, the video and the facts didn't fit the NBA-is-full-of-(black)-criminals narrative. If Artest and Jackson broke the cardinal rule of sports by going into the stands, it was the mostly white fans who did the rioting thereafter. 

They were the ones who rushed the floor, while security ... well, who knows what they were doing. They were the ones who threw things. They were the ones -- one in particular -- who came at Artest after he'd returned to the floor, who came at Jermaine O'Neal, who showered the Pacers with beer and popcorn as they finally left the arena.

What began as some not-uncommon pushing and shoving between the rival Pistons and Pacers at the end of a blowout Pacers' win escalated into an utter s***show because John Green decided to throw a beer at the volatile Artest.

Nothing else happens if he doesn't do that.

In the Netflix doc, Green comes off as about as much a jackass as you'd figure, and indeed the prosecutor in Michigan did go after him. He also went after the jackass who came at Artest on the floor, and the jackass who threw a chair. So at least there some culpability for more than just the players.

And yet ...

Dec. 23, 1979.

Nov. 19, 2004.

Two brawls. A world of difference.