A Return To The Heady Days Of Bernie Goetz

You throw-a you drink, I break-a you face.

I listen to a lot of sports radio and have finally reached my boiling point with people calling in to defend the actions of Ron Artest and Stephan Jackson during last Friday's mayhem in the otherwise happy, polite little hamlet known as Detroit.

Memo to each and every jackass that's been using the analogy, "Hey, if someone came to where I worked and threw a beer on me, I'd kick their ass too". You are an idiot. You are everything wrong with society in the first place and you should put a gun in your mouth immediately. Try thinking before you open your stupid, reactionary trap just once, please.

A more accurate analogy would be if you were sitting in your cubicle at work and a drink came in from the direction of the accounting department and hit you in the head. You then respond by running over to the accounting department and punching the first person you see. Any idiot would acknowledge that that is moronic, and that you would then spend the next several days in jail. But that would be OK because you dealt out your 'justice' Chuck Norris-style on someone who may or may not have deserved it.

I think Ron Artest is a great basketball player. He's a monster on defense and is the closest thing the game's got to a Dennis Rodman-like presence right now. It's a tradgedy that he won't be playing anymore this year. Same goes in the shorter term for Jermaine O'Neal and Stephan Jackson. They're all good. But make no mistake, David Stern HAD to dish out heavy punishment to these guys. It doesn't matter what the crowd is doing, the players CANNOT be allowed to go after fans in the stands EVER. It is security's job to get unruly fans out of the building. And if they're not doing it, the players can refuse to play at a certain stadium, complain to their union, raise holy hell every fucking day. But the day that you condone anything close to what happened on friday is the day that you kill the NBA. If the only people that come to basketball games are jackasses that want to throw shit on the court, you might as well move them into a small theatre and call it performance art. The league would sell about 50 tickets to each game and each player would make about $20 a night.

Just ask yourself, how much different would the sports world look if Jackie Robinson had run up into the stands and pummelled the shit out of any one of the thousands of slack-jawed yokels who shouted the N-word at him?

UPDATE: The guy that chucked the beer at Artest was interviewed on TV this morning. Apparently, drinking any beer at all violates his probation for THREE D.U.I.s!!! I can just imagine what was going on in his head. "Boy, I sure don't want anyone to notice me pounding this beer, otherwise I'll go back to jail. I'd better get rid of it discreetly. I know, I'll THROW IT at the most UNSTABLE FUCKNUT IN ALL OF SPORTS." You are a genius.