Edge of Sports

Racism 101: College Hoops Brawl Could Lead to Criminal
Charges

By Dave Zirin 
December 14, 2011

http://bit.ly/vhOLT1

In 25 years of playing organized and disorganized
basketball, I probably was involved in a dozen fights
on the court. Call it a natural side effect of playing
under the hoop, banging bodies, taking (or giving) a
stray elbow, and then having tempers flare. In none of
those dust-ups did I ever face felony charges,
mandatory jail sentences, and the prospect of a ruined
life for my ill-temper.

But now players from the University of Cincinnati and
Xavier, storied cross-town rivals, are staring at the
prospect of criminal charges after an ugly brawl took
place at the end of Saturday's game. Hamilton County
Prosecutor Joe Deters released a statement that his
office is considering a series of charges that could
include assault and battery or disorderly conduct. No
one condones fighting on the court, but the idea that
college basketball players could go to prison speaks to
the worst kind of hypocrisy and the most twisted
traditions of the city of Cincinnati, a place with a
history of institutional racism that would make
Mississippi blush.

Cincinnati has spent the last decade trying to heal
after the police shot and killed an unarmed African
American 19-year-old named Timothy Thomas in 2001 which
led to the largest urban riots in the US since Rodney
King and the LAPD crossed paths in 1992. The Cincinnati
riots were an expression of bottled rage against a
police department that saw, between 1996 and 2001, 15
African Americans died at the hands of Cincinnati
police.

Given this history, and given Deters own history, we
should look at this threatened prosecution, with a very
suspect eye.

Let's start with the obvious fact that hockey brawls,
no matter how brutal and no matter how many teeth end
up on the ice, don't end with participants behind bars.
There is a different reaction by the press, by a
school's administration, and clearly by law enforcement
when it's young black men throwing the punches. This is
a racist double standard that has the potential now to
ruin the lives of the young men involved.

Myron Metcalf, the African American college basketball
journalist for ESPN started his column this week by
stating, "I guess I'm wired this way. But my first
thought about Saturday's Xavier-Cincinnati melee
centered on race. My initial response disregarded the
pending suspensions or the blood spilled or the trash
talk. Instead, it was simply: 'Dang, young black men
fighting on national TV.' I wondered if other African-
American viewers had the same reaction."

It's a bizarre comment on our times that Metcalfe would
confine his comments to the African American viewers
and assume that only they would have a reaction colored
by race.

Then there is the good prosecutor Joe Deters himself.
Deters is a very ambitious political figure who was the
local chair of the 2008 McCain/Palin campaign. Deters
knows his base and maintains a friendship Jim Schifrin,
author of a notorious Cincinnati rag described as a
"racist political tip sheet".called The Whistleblower.
Schifrin has been reported as having referred to
Cincinnati's first directly elected African American
mayor Mark Mallory as a "gay darkie," and called
Cincinnati Public Schools' superintendent Rosa
Blackwell "mammy." It was also reported that Deters and
Schifrin told jokes about President Obama being
assassinated, a charge to which Deters never responded.
When questioned about their friendship, Deters, said
that this was his "personal life" and would not
comment. This is the person who is now in a position to
pass judgment on the players.

As Nathan Ivey, a talk radio rebel on Cincinnati's 1230
am WDBZ said to me "Once again the Hamilton County
Prosecutor is quick to deliver his very own brand of
`Go-Go-Gadget' justice. Joe Deters has an uncanny knack
for pulling out the wrong gadget at the wrong time. In
this case he should have used common sense. Instead he
pulls out a flamethrower, choosing the classic
Cincinnati knee-jerk reaction.  From his political
associations to his selective application and
interpretation of the law, Joe Deters bungles and
juggles justice so much, that I honestly can't tell if
he's an officer of the court, or a clown yet another
trait that he shares with Inspector Gadget."

The players involved have expressed all the right
remorse. Cincinatti guard Yancy Gates, suspended for
six games, wept deeply on camera saying, "I'm just not
that type of person. A lot of people have been calling
me a thug, a gangster.'' The fact is that this is a
rivalry both schools have ginned up over the years to
the point where the tensions transcended basketball.
The more hype, the more tickets, the higher profile for
the programs, and the higher revenues. It's been played
up as the large public school against the elite small
Catholic school, with every provincial prejudice tied
up on which side you stand in a game the schools call
"the cross-town shootout." But the players themselves
don't share these differences of class and community.
They are gladiators thrown against each other for the
joy of boosters on both sides. Now they are facing the
judgment of a man like Joe Deters. Somewhere a
toothless French Canadian on skates is breathing a sigh
of relief he doesn't play hoops in the city of
Cincinnati.

[Dave Zirin is the author of "The John Carlos Story"
(Haymarket) and just made the new documentary "Not Just
a Game." Receive his column every week by emailing
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