Huge basketball fight gets so out of hand that cops have to be called
In the gym at Clairton High School in metro Pittsburgh, the hometown Bears got smacked 54-45 by the visiting Monessen Greyhounds, wearing a black-and-white color scheme reminiscent of the Brooklyn Nets.
It was a chippy, aggressive, physical basketball game between two schools that clearly don’t like each other, featuring players mugging each other and engaging in questionable sportsmanship (keep your eye in particular on the guys wearing Nos. 1 and 2 for Monessen, who give mean looks and meaner fouls in the video below).
It was a game full of dunks (No. 1 on Monessen looks like he’s got the athleticism to play college ball), a “Shaqtin’ A Fool” moment when one of the Clairton players rises up for a monster dunk worthy of a Gus Johnson fit of apoplexy before slamming it off the back rim and out, and a whole lot of tight, old-school inside-the-paint play.
Then, with Clairton making a late run to close what had for most of the game been a double-digit deficit back to nine, all hell broke loose:
The previously mentioned No. 2 on Monessen attacked one of the Clairton players, and next thing you know, players, fans, parents, a good 60 people in total were involved in a melee that spilled onto the court, a full-scale brawl without even the slightest semblance of civilization.
Monessen is a Rust Belt mess of a city, a place where the jobs all disappeared when the steel mill closed for good in 1987, a city whose high school, in the 2011-12 school year, ranked in the bottom 15 percent in Pennsylvania for standardized test scores.
It is a hardscrabble city with hardscrabble people.
Clairton, meanwhile, has a coke plant spewing pollutants into the atmosphere, and is so iconically American industrial that it was used as the setting for the 1978 film “The Deer Hunter.” It’s a place where the median household income is just $25,596 and the per capita income is less than what you’d make working full-time at the federal minimum wage.
Both cities have crime rates in Pennsylvania’s top 15 percent.
So when things get physical, they have a greater chance of getting violent, and that’s what we got in this disgrace to the spirit of athletic competition.
Police were called. Pepper spray had to be used to control the crowd and get them to stop pummeling each other. The game had to be called off, the final score allowed to stand with the last nearly five minutes left unplayed.
One parent at the game, former Clairton football assistant coach Eric Fusco, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the story from his point of view:
“People were getting sucker-punched. I saw guys just getting picked off. The game was chippy from the start, but I didn’t think this was going to happen. People have said they should ban both teams from the playoffs. I don’t think that’s going to solve anything. I think the fans are way more guilty than the players. You can’t hold players responsible for what fans do.”
True as that may be, there is still the issue of a player going full Ron Artest and attacking an opponent. The teams may not be disciplined, but the players should be. And perhaps the “empty stadium punishment” might have to be imposed, as seen in Italian soccer when hooliganism forced the national soccer authorities to punish several teams by making them play in a silent stadium devoid of a crowd.
Tim O’Malley, executive director of the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League, called the incident “totally unacceptable” and called for a “severe response” from the schools, while the chief of police in Clairton said his department will be investigating what happened and issuing whatever action becomes necessary under the law once all the facts are gathered.
Both teams have already clinched playoff berths; if they meet in the playoffs, one can only hope a phalanx of police will be on hand before things go Malice in the Palace in the crowd, not after.
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