Gene Wang of the Washington Post is traveling with the Georgetown Hoyas men's basketball team on their trip to China, which means he had a front row seat to the huge fracas that took place a day ago between the Chinese professional team the Bayi Rockets and the Hoyas. By now photos and video of the incident have popped up everywhere on the internet, and fans and media alike have been quick to pass down judgement on both John Thompson III's club and Bayi. But until Wang joined Mike Wise on 106.7 the Fan DC Wednesday, I had not heard a first-hand account of the incident. In the reporter's own words:
By roughly the second quarter there were some hard fouls, it started escalating to get harder and harder. At one point Nate Lubik, a Georgetown player, and another Chinese player had words along the baseline.
In the thrid quarter was when it was really started getting out of hand. Third quarter itself took one hour. This is a 12 minute quarter they play with no TV timeouts. Took one hour because of all the stoppages, all the technical fouls, flagrant fouls, talking to both coaches and players from both teams.
And then with about 9 minutes left, nine and half minutes left in the game, Jason Clark, this is how I saw it, I was on the other side of the court, Jason Clark, Georgetown senior guard and team leader, was fouled hard by a Chinese player.
Mike Wise jumped in here to ask Wang to clarify the "hard foul":
From what I can see, it was a push. He got pushed to the ground trying to dribble the balls across half court. And Jason got up, Clark got up, and had some words for the Chinese player, they both started pushing and shoving, and then the benches emptied for the second time. The benches had emptied early before on another foul, earlier in the third quarter, so this was the second time the benches had cleared.
And this time, before I knew it, there were chairs flying, I'm not kidding you, Henry Sims had a chair thrown at him, and there were skirmishes all over the court, I mean in each section of the court, players from the Chinese team and Georgetown players were wrestling each other. I saw punches being thrown, I can't say specifically by whom, there were just arms waving all over the place.
Sounds like a pretty ridiculous scene, even wilder than still images and amateur video have been able to describe. I am curious to see what, if anything, comes of this incident in the days and weeks to come.