Lisa Leslie was mortified that the sport she helped build had become just another ... well, sport.
Rick Mahorn was mortified to discover that, having spent much of his playing career as the baddest dude in the NBA, he would now be known as the baddest dude in the WNBA, too.
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| Cheryl Ford's injury was the most unfortunate byproduct of the skirmish. (Getty Images) |
And league president/witness protection beneficiary Donna Orender was jumping up and down on her desk, exhilarated by her league's Pinocchio "You are a real girl now" moment.
You might have seen the highlights of the Los Angeles-Detroit WNBA game by now, in which a contentious game turned into a brawl after a don't-tread-on-me moment between L.A.'s Candace Parker and Detroit's Plenette Pierson. Pierson got into Parker's kitchen after two brief moments of crankiness in the waning moments of L.A.'s 84-81 win in Detroit.
Then both benches emptied, hands were thrown, and Mahorn, apparently trying to make peace after all those years of experience unmaking the peace with the Bad Boys, shoved Leslie to the floor.
And then everyone acted ashamed, a mass don't-get-it moment that (a) makes the brawl seem worse than it was, and (b) makes everyone seem less competitive than they are.
Now we're not keen on bench-emptiers, but we're also not judgmental about them. Sport has plenty more to worry about than the occasional temperfest, and this brawl didn't go into the stands, produce felonies or require police intervention. It was, in the classic sense, one of those things that occasionally happens when highly competitive people want the same thing and one can't have it. Plus, actual hands were thrown, as opposed to those grab-someone-and-stand-still moments which are baseball's specialties.
And given that this was either the first brawl in WNBA history or damned close to it, we can also see it as the aberration that it was. It was the stuff of stuff-happens, and to get one's Under Armour in a bunch over it is exactly the wrong overreaction.
But it was also a gender-neutral nostalgia-fest, a more ground-bound Lakers-Pistons battle from the late '80s when the Lakers were winding down and the Pistons were trying to overthrow the established order. It is, in fact, touching in a weird way that the coaches were Bill Laimbeer and Michael Cooper.
And other than Ford's injury, which required hospitalization, nobody was harmed in the making of this film clip.
Now we're not advocating the league go full MMA on us, because a brawl a week is pretty over the top, or a night at your corner bar. Too much of an odd thing would make it not be odd any longer.
But this did show the league in a new light for casual fans -- as something these women care about quite deeply, deeply enough to forget their traditional roles as pure sportsmen and get to the more primal ...
