With Josh Bacott and his intenstines still recovering from a week long trip to Mexico, we dip into the archive to take a look at a column from 2006. This past week, we may have only been a few heated words away from adding a new category to this list "catcher takes off all his equipment punches the umpire fight", but thankfully Yadi kept a cool head.
Each major sport has it’s own catalog of memorable fights, the inevitable result of players getting heated in the midst of competition.
In fact, there have been so many brawls in the past few decades that they’ve started to slot themselves nicely into several categories. Below are a few examples of the type of fights common to the modern sports landscape:
The Sissy Fight
As fans, we view these athletes as super human. They’re what we all wanted to be but weren’t physically gifted enough to become. If they should happen to use their superior skills and athleticism in a fight, we’d expect to see some serious whoopings being dished out.
As you’ll see below, in rare cases that actually happens. But more often the reverse is true of the sports fight – we see athletes square off in a threatening manner only to unleash a hail of uncoordinated roundhouse slaps or throw cheap shots and take off running the other way.
Carmelo Anthony served as the perfect example with his aforementioned hit and run on Mardy Collins. Going into the fight, Melo oozed “street cred” between his tat’s, cornrows and his infamous cameo on the youth inspiring “don’t snitch” video.
Then in the midst of this weekend’s brawl, he scrapped all of that with a cheap shot punch followed by him backpedaling the entire length of the court to avoid retaliation by Collins and his teammates. He basically acted out the strategy of the nerd in Dazed & Confused who wanted to fight Clint the greaser – land one good shot, play defense and wait for it to be broken up. Only in Melo’s case “play defense” meant, “run away from anyone in a Knicks jersey”.
Often times, the Sissy Fight is just the result of someone getting involved in a fight when they had no business doing so. St. Louis fans remember the day when Will Clark, then of the Giants, slid hard into second basemen Jose Oquendo setting off a skirmish that attracted the attention of Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith.
Let’s just say Ozzie wasn’t called the Wizard because of his transcendent fighting abilities. While Clark and Oquendo were engaged, Oz uncorked several wild hooks at Clark’s head that missed by six inches. Put it this way, if Ozzie swung a bat like he swung his fists, the Cardinals would have never beat the Dodgers in the 1985 NLCS.
Regardless of the reasons behind it, seeing an elite athlete in a Sissy Fight is sort of like finding out that Sergeant Slaughter wasn’t really a Sergeant. Takes the sheen off a little.
The Utterly Pointless Football Fight
Football fights are always amusing. Typically you’ve got two or more large men who, despite all of the performance enhancing drugs coursing through their system, just can’t seem to inflict any pain on their opponent.
Apparently in the heat of the moment, a player disregards the fact that the guy he’s punching is completely draped in body armor.
There was no more shining example of the Utterly Pointless Football Fight than when heavy weights Deion Sanders and Andre Rison went toe to toe at the line of scrimmage in a comical 1994 battle royale. The players, known for their frosty attitudes, traded an assortment of roundhouses until finally they seemed to figure out that an open hand slap on a helmet really doesn’t do much damage. At that point there was lots of head shaking and arm waving, then it was over.
By then, the audience had been thoroughly entertained and the images of both men forever amended to include the mental snapshot of their slap boxing match.
The Press Conference Fight
Whether it’s Riddick Bowe drilling Larry Donald with a killer combination in their pre-fight press conference, Mike Tyson flying completely off the handle and attacking Lennox Lewis before going on a ten minute verbal rampage on everyone in sight or Apollo Creed getting into it with Ivan Drago before their fatal exhibition match, boxing press conferences and fighting go hand in hand. Half the time they’re staged for publicity, so they’ve become old hat.
It’s when the non-boxing press conferences break into fisticuffs that make for real entertainment.
Let’s face it, if the onlookers wouldn’t have gotten in front of Temple coach John Chaney when he charged then Umass coach John Calipari during Calipari’s press conference, we probably would have seen the single most entertaining fight in sports history.
The Monumental Ass Beating
Given the nature of the sports brawl, the Monumental Ass Beating is one of the most reclusive of the bunch. Rarely does a fight break out in sports that last long enough for one guy to get dominated like a nerd in an 80’s movie.
Hockey fights make up the majority of the one-sided brawls because it’s the only sport that has glorified fighting for much of its existence. Pretty much any fight involving Detroit goon Joey Kocur resulted in a Monumental Ass Beating (as seen in the classic hockey fight tape “The Bruise Brothers” featuring hours of nothing but Kocur and Bob Probert fights.)
Off the ice, they are a rarity.
The most notable example is probably the 1993 Nolan Ryan – Robin Ventura battle in Texas, where Ryan scored a victory for every old man who’s ever been challenged by a young punk. Ventura sprinted to the mound after being drilled in the ribs with a fastball and preceded to have Ryan, 46 years old at the time, work his forehead like a speed bag.
I can’t imagine much would be more embarrassing for a professional athlete than to suffer a Monument Ass Beating on live TV…unless of course the guy dishing it out was closing in on 50.
The “Uh, That Guy Has a Weapon” Fight
If sports have one thing that’s universal, it’s that most of them have an assortment of items that can be used as weapons in a pinch.
Just recently we saw an on-field riot at the University of Miami where players were swinging helmets like sledgehammers at their Florida International counterparts. And they certainly weren’t the first to use the tools of the sport to inflict pain. Players use baseballs, chairs, cleats, basically anything they can get their hands on.
Two of the most notorious incidents fell into this category - in 2000, when Boston Bruin Marty McSorley bounced his hockey stick off the side of Donald Brashear’s temple damn near killing Brashear and earning himself an assault conviction in the process and in 1965 when San Francisco Giants pitcher Juan Marichal smacked a baseball bat off of John Roseboro’s head busting the catcher’s head open.
To this day, both are amongst the more frightening altercations that have happened during a game.
If you watch a fight break out and someone introduces a blunt object into the mix, it’s safe to say things have probably gotten out of control.
The Hopeless Mismatch
For the simple reason that most sports fights are against players competing at the same level, there is rarely a fight that is a major mismatch between the participants. Football is the only sport where there are significant physical differences between players (basketball to a lesser degree), but they normally clash with opponents of similar size and girth; lineman rarely take on wide receivers or cornerbacks in a scuffle because they could probably snap them in half.
There was one Hopeless Mismatch that will forever live in infamy – Pedro Martinez versus Don Zimmer. Nothing can quite match the visual of a 73 year-old Zimmer bull rushing the Red Sox ace only to be sidestepped and guided face first into the dirt. Zimmer had balls.
Even if that incident is the last of the notable mismatches in sports brawl history, it will still be worthy of its own category.
The Pre-Meditated Assault
Some fights happen as a pure result of the heat of the moment. Players get pissed and shit goes down. Nothing was really planned, nobody was thinking straight and before they knew what happened, a brawl was unfolding.
Not so with my man Izzy Alcantara. He was and is the poster child for the Pre-Meditated Assault, a fight where a player clearly has been planning out how he was going to go about wreaking havoc. Alcantara made himself a household name as a baseball minor leaguer in 2001, when he went Chong Li on the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons. After being brushed back with a pitch, Alcantara threw a textbook leg kick into the face of the Scranton catcher to clear the way for his rush to the mound. He found no takers on the mound so he danced around, fist cocked, until he was engulfed by players. The shear speed with which he drilled the catcher tossed aside all suspicion that this was simply an instinctual reaction.
Make no mistake, Izzy’s mind was crystal clear when he felt it was time to exact revenge. I’m picturing him sitting on the bench in between innings, stewing over his last at bat while chugging Citrus Cooler Gatorade to replenish the electrolytes that he would soon need for his assault.
The Certifiably Insane Player
Three names come to mind when trying to categorize a sports fight as one featuring a certifiably insane participant:
1.) Ron Artest – Holds the dubious honor of being the last NBA player to charge into the stands to attack a fan who he thought threw something at him.
2.) Stephen Jackson – Artest’s out-of-his-mind partner on the Pacers who joined Ron in the crowd to lay waste to some Detroit fans, simply because he thought it looked like fun.
3.) Eric Cantona
For those not familiar with the last name on that list, he’s most recently been seen as the fat, bearded guy in the Nike Soccer commercials that aired through the World Cup – the one who needed subtitles even though he was speaking English. Years and some 100 pounds ago, Cantona was a world-class soccer player and certifiably insane. For proof of the latter accusation, one only needs to take ten seconds to watch this You Tube clip.
For those with dial-up Internet, I’ll give a quick description – Cantona goes beserk and leaps into the front row of the crowd, cleats first, to deliver a Hulk Hogan-level big boot to a fan.
The lesson to be learned here? As much fun as watching sports brawls can be, you never know when one of the players is going to get pissed and attack you like a belligerent Rhinoceros.
And if that Rhino is wearing two-inch soccer cleats, well, sucks even worse for you.
JSF Weekly is written by Josh Bacott. He's still pissed that Sergeant Slaughter isn't a Sergeant. E-mail him at josh@joesportsfan.com