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WATCH: Ryan Hollweg's face takes a highstick
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WATCH: Ryan Hollweg's face takes a highstick |
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[by Amy Bass] I might be the only one, but I've been feeling like New York has gotten really violent lately. There was the horrible fire in the Bronx that took out almost an entire family. There were the truly random shootings in Greenwich Village. There was a horrifying student stabbing in Union Square. And the entire Sean Bell case makes it seem like we're living in a city gone mad. And then there was that basketball game – the final showdown in the Public Schools Athletic League's AA division. One of the more celebrated athletic events that Madison Square Garden hosts, it came to a screeching halt this year when the NYPD took down 21 teens, arrested for fighting during the championship game between Lincoln High School and Boys and Girls High School. The violence, which began in the stands, spilled into the streets, the subway stations, and Times Square. Outside, according to the New York Post , 73 knives were confiscated as police tried to make sense of the madness and, according to the New York Times , shots had been fired on 8 th Avenue by a man in a white hooded sweatshirt. In the aftermath, the Garden announced that it may not ever host the game again, and city officials speculated that night games in general should be cancelled. This is not the first time that the championship game had seen violence. In 1994, a fight broke out in the stands during a day game (so much for the new no-night-games rule), and in 1964, fans threw bottles onto the court in the midst of a nasty scuffle. Earlier this year, Paul Robeson High School had been suspended from playing the rest of the season for fighting, as Robeson fans stormed the court to attack the other team's players in the middle of the game. Sport, utopianists claim, is a place for battle to take place without blood. But it seems to me that instead, it is place where violence can take place without serious repercussions, unless one is in high school. Because while New York City and Madison Square Garden tries to figure out how to make high school basketball safe again, doing sane things like cooperating with police investigations that seem to be probing into what actually happened, professional athletes seem to be allowed to let violence be dealt with in-house. While the now-famous Nuggets/Knicks brawl is a great example of what teams do, and Ron Artest remains the most recent notorious singular case, let's turn to hockey, where the Islanders' Chris Simon recently received a 25-game suspension for brutally knocking down the Rangers' Ryan Hollweg with his stick. Simon's coach, Ted Nolan, actually went on the record saying that suspension was “way too harsh.” I wonder what a judge or jury would think? Because I am absolutely sure that if I walked down Broadway with a hockey stick and clubbed people in the head, I wouldn't be dealing with a suspension: I'd be looking at assault and battery. For Christ's sake, Naomi Campbell got five days community service for throwing a freakin' cell phone at someone, never mind high-sticking a guy to the ground. Accidents do happen, of course, and sport is no exception. There are deaths, there are tragedies, and most are simply within the rules of play. In judo, for example, it is legal – legal – to break your opponent's arm as a means towards victory. But to deal with Simon's assault with a suspension is akin to college campuses dealing with rapes via student judiciary boards. We have rules, people – laws even. So let's use them. While sport is never going to be some level field where playing hard and playing fair always works, it should be a place where you can't legally break the law. Some order on the court, please. March 30, 2007 |
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