Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid watches from the bench during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Indiana Pacers, on Oct. 27.Darron Cummings/The Associated Press
If you had to guess where in the world a pro athlete would lie in wait to ambush a sportswriter, Philadelphia would probably be your first, second and third guess. When it comes to sports, that city is not kidding around.
As fights go, it wasn’t much of one, but it has already prompted a hailstorm of commentary in the United States. Everyone wants to figure what it means, and who is right, and why it happened.
How about for no other reason than that reasonable people sometimes fight? Given the way things are going in our public debate, maybe we should all fight this way more often.
The alleged assailant in this instance is 76ers’ centre Joel Embiid. He has yet to play this season. The story going around is that that’s because he’s run down after a long, indulgent summer. Without Embiid, the 76ers are just barely an NBA team.
A sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Marcus Hayes, did what columnists do in such situations – he brought a piano to work and dropped it on Embiid’s head for a thousand words.
It’s a good piece of opinion writing – cutting and unambiguous. Hayes led it with a promise Embiid made to commit more fully to his work after his son – who is named for Embiid’s dead brother – was born. The suggestion was that Embiid was not fulfilling that pledge.
Hayes later removed that part – which is not cricket – saying he was responding to “constructive criticism.”
Nobody likes it when you bring their family into something. The pros do not like it times 10.
After Saturday night’s game, Embiid was waiting for Hayes in the Sixers’ locker room. According to witnesses, he confronted the writer angrily. Words were exchanged. At some point, according to ESPN, Embiid reached out and “pushed Hayes on the shoulder.” Then people got between them and it was over.
Now everyone’s losing their minds and the internet is aflame with ire. Well, more than usual.
This morning, all the rage is directed at Hayes. By tomorrow or the day after, the anti-Embiid brigade will have taken over, because that’s how these things go. You have not wrung the maximum amount of content out of an altercation until both sides have been its villain.
I can’t argue that either guy was right or wrong. Hayes makes a living provoking people. Embiid chose to be provoked.
Based on the work he does, Embiid has opened himself to strong critique. His dead relatives have not opened themselves to any sort.
Both men crossed a well-understood line – Hayes with his words, Embiid with his actions. But in the end, the reputations of both men are burnished.
Without having done anything more out of pocket than his job, Hayes is now someone whose name you know. Another Philadelphia Inquirer columnist with big opinions, Stephen A. Smith, used that currency to stake a small media empire.
On the other side, Embiid has let everyone know his limit. It might cost him a little in fines. Because he currently makes about US$600,000 a night to do nothing, he can manage it.
It’s even good for Philadelphia. You can’t rain beer bottles on Santa Claus every year to remind people how unhinged you are. That would get boring. Pros vs. Writers is a creative new approach.
The next stage here is an official probe.
“We are aware of reports of an incident in the Sixers locker room this evening and are commencing an investigation,” the NBA said in a release.
Why?
What exactly is being investigated here? Two grown men disagreeing?
I will pretty much guarantee you the end of this is both guys in a room, each of them apologizing for going too far. By the immutable laws of the schoolyard, that may result in something approaching understanding, if not friendship.
Remember when most disagreements ended this way, because you had to see the people you disagreed with all the time? Those really were the good old days.
Now, in our HR-ified search for perfect professional civility at all times, we have convinced ourselves that no one should ever be angry. If they are, they absolutely should never confront the object of that anger. To do so now isn’t just against decorum, but socially aberrant.
Better to snipe at them obliquely on social media or in the group chat. This digital outsourcing of bad feeling has yet to result in a friendlier world.
The goal of sports is to elicit big feelings, which won’t always be good.
There are a lot of ways to deal with that, and one of them still is to get a few inches from someone’s nose and let them know how those feelings are going for you. It’s not okay to strike anyone or cause them to reasonably fear for their physical well-being. It’s wrong to get personal. But hard words and a little chest bumping between two men where there are others to intervene? That’s fair game. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with something worse.
It is a wonder how cruel we can be to each other while sitting over a laptop, and how scandalized we have become by any sort of real-life confrontation. The two things must be linked.
So it is oddly reassuring to see two men have a famous fight and it all ended up okay. Nobody was hurt. Nothing was said that can’t be unsaid. Nobody’s losing their job.
I am assuming that this next week is going to be a modern high-water mark for cruel and stupid things said from behind the safety of a screen. If that morphs into violence, people will wonder how we got to this point.
Like anything complicated, it’s a constellation of reasons. But one of them is that we no longer seem to accept that people can disagree with each other, sometimes confrontationally, and still live and work together.
The hard part of managing differences in opinion isn’t avoiding or even managing interpersonal conflict. It’s learning how to do it within limits. Which means that on occasion, you have to practise it in real life.
