ClayNation: Public reaction to NBA fights completely out of whack

Every time there's a fight or a brawl in the NBA the country reacts like the sanctity of our American culture is at stake. In the wake of the New York Knicks and Denver Nuggets brawl this weekend there's hand-wringing ("What has our country come to?"), whining ("I can't believe these millionaire athletes can't behave") and morally superior generational posturing ("These kids today are just bad seeds.")

This is all complete crap. Your average intramural league has more dustups than an NBA game. Yet every time one of these brawls or fights occurs, the cultural critics come yapping, and the eternal barking over our sporting demise is ascendant. Never mind that the NBA is by far the least violent of our major professional sports leagues, or that the league is likely to levy a substantial suspension and fine to punish those involved. None of that matters, because these dust-ups are primarily black guys fighting, and we can't have that.

Fighting in baseball? It's accepted. (Getty Images)

Don't believe the race of the brawlers has any significance? Go ahead and send me e-mails rife with grammatical imprecision and sterling lines like, "your obsurd." But before you hit send, ask yourself this: Why do Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League consistently allow their majority white athletes to fight with hardly any public outrage?

Think about it: Each night in hockey games, white guys square off and throw multiple punches at one another. White guys get bones broken in their hands and faces, bleed and get put on the injured list, and fans cheer like crazy. It used to never make any sense to me how owners who pay millions of dollars in hockey salaries can countenance that fighting. I mean, they're paying salaries to highly skilled professionals to ply their trade. Imagine if you owned a hospital, and halfway through a surgery, two doctors got into a fist fight over placement at the operating table or who got the shiniest clamps. The doctors would get fired.

To me, this is every bit as ridiculous as other million-dollar paycheck earners squaring off in a hockey rink. Both are completely unrelated to their actual jobs. But then I realized the owners put up with the fighting because their fans demand that it continue. Delicious irony, don't you think? The same fans who will be reacting with utter disdain to this NBA fight on a hardwood floor will be cheering like deranged lunatics to an NHL fight on ice.

Hockey fans always fall back on the fact that fighting is just a part of hockey culture. No, it isn't. Players don't fight in college, and they don't fight in the Olympics. Fighting helps sell tickets. Period. And the NHL doesn't actually have sufficient penalties to keep the players from fighting. If they did, it would pretty much stop. But the NHL needs the money and fans they gain by allowing fighting. There is no comparison to how stringently the NBA militates against fighting as opposed to the NHL. And if the NHL was a majority black league, the public outcry would demand an end to hockey fights. But two white athletes fighting are unthreatening, marketable and highlight-reel worthy. Great, says the average fan, pass me another beer, and maybe, a cotton candy for the kid. Two black guys fighting? My God, lock up the women and children and batten down the hatches. The Apocalypse is nigh.

Fighting in hockey? It's part of the game. (Getty Images)

In baseball, managers actually instruct their pitchers to hit opposing batters. This, of course, is an embedded code of the game that is entirely permissible. To actually throw a high-speed pitch at an opposing player. And the resulting mound charges and ensuing brawls? Just a part of the game as well. This is insane. If a pitcher loses control of one of these pitches, a player could die. Or be maimed for life. Fast balls to the head have a way of wreaking havoc. All on the instruction of the manager. Yet, has baseball done anything to eradicate this from the game? Of course not. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that baseball is a majority white sport and that the majority of these brawlers are also white.

Remember when Temple's John Chaney sent in a player to commit a hard foul because he was angry over the screens being set by St. Joseph's? On the foul, the St. Joe's player was injured, and there was talk that John Chaney should be fired. He was a pariah for the better part of a month. In baseball, Ozzie Guillen can do the equivalent of what Chaney did multiple times with his pitchers. Then Guillen can talk about it to the media and no one cares. People will write articles about how much they love a colorful guy like Guillen, and the same people will lambaste Chaney to no end. This is hypocritical and absurd. Yet the racial dynamics of sports fighting somehow permit it. Encourage it even.

Personally, most of the time when I see NBA players fight, it makes them seem less threatening. That's because usually the punches are wild and don't connect. Players who otherwise seem athletic, controlled and physically imposing turn into gangly windmills tilting at opponents who are nowhere near them. Watching two NBA players fight is sort of like watching old people jump on trampolines. It just doesn't seem natural. There's no quicker way to kill your street cred than to throw a wild and sideways punch with your thumb still inside your fist. But, to the NBA's credit, they've recognized that fighting isn't an integral part of basketball. And when it happens they issue stiff penalties.

But fighting in basketball? It's a cardinal sin. (Getty Images)

The result is that the NBA now has less fighting than just about any recreational basketball league in America. And it certainly has less than most pickup games featuring players of the same age. I've seen more fights and near fights from basketball games I've participated in then I have from NBA games I've watched on television. And these are games featuring guys of every race, class or creed.

Baseball's players are 60 percent white and only 8.5 percent black. The NHL has 2.5 percent black players, while the NBA is about 80 percent black. But I'm sure it's insignificant that the players in the NBA fighting this past weekend were black. After all, we're a color-blind society, right? We treat everyone the same, and comparing professional hockey or baseball fighting to basketball fighting isn't really fair. And the race of the athletes has nothing to do with how we respond to the fighting in those sports, either. Or maybe in the end, the reaction of our country when NBA players fight says a lot more about us than it does about them.