Anybody who doesn’t think basketball has become a collision sport, a la football, must not have seen that gonging Keith Langford got at Kentucky, or one rugby scrum a batch of Missouri and Oklahoma State players got entangled in Tuesday in Stillwater, Okla. The days of describing basketball as a “non-contact sport” are no longer with us.
Loose-ball melees, in particular, lead numerous new ways for court performers to addle themselves. They’ll keep it up as long as coaches lavish praise on guys who dive for the errant spheres with no regard for their lives, limbs and noggins. Kansas’ Langford conjoined heads with a Kentuckian who either had an immunity to pain and suffering or just happened to be grazed. Keith was not so lucky; he was clearly in a “Which way did they go, George?” daze.
At one point at Stillwater, there was a keyhole flurry that resembled the flopping around on the floor that John Belushi and Co. did at that toga party in “Animal House.” I half-expected Taras Bulba and the Don Cossack Choir to come riding in swinging bowling balls in gunny sacks to break up the MU-OSU brawlers. The least the officials could have done was employ fire hoses and brooms to break it up — except the refs seemed far more concerned about their own safety than about the combatants, or the staus of the mighty intense game.
More later about the basketbrawl we too often see today. First, we have to be concerned about the string of concussions KU’s Langford has had. That collision at Kentucky is serious business because it’s part of a chain of similar injuries. Football players such as Steve Young and Troy Aikman retired early because of serial concussions and for fear they might wind up with permanent damage, something like boxer Muhammad Ali. What about Langford if he suffers another severe jolt or two? He’s not shy about contact; maybe he should be moreso.
People wonder if some kind of helmet might be in order for concussion-prone people, including soccer players, particularly the youngest ones, who court lasting damage with those high-impact headers.
Yet what we have to remember is that helmets, even the best of them in any sport, are mainly protection against skull fractures. The brain and its environs inside a wearer’s head still flop around in the surrounding sauce. That increases the prospect for lost connections and broken circuits. Once an athlete in any field gets a series of concussions, he, his family and doctors need to take full stock of what perils lie down the line.
Ideally, the Kentucky Konk will be the last such injury Langford ever suffers. It there are more of such a magnitude, Keith may have some tough decisions to make.
Now to the bang-and-clang developments in basketball, where bigger, stronger, more agile, hostile and mobile bodies are overcrowding a given amount of space. The game never has had more of a purist than UCLA icon John Wooden. Time and again, the Wizard of Westwood, he of 10 NCAA titles, has said things like:
“I don’t like to see the physical strength that has taken over the game. I, for one, don’t want to see the physicality. Basketball is a game of beauty, finesse and maneuverability, or should be. I’m not asking for it to become a non-contact game, but people want to see it less physical.”
Wooden has a number of suggestions for improvement, but nobody seems to care.
He’d award one point for a dunk, two points for a regular lay-in or shot, three points for hits from beyond the international range of 20-feet-6. He’d widen the paint area to encourage better team play and legitimate shooting such as we see with so many good foreign outfits. Kansas visionary Phog Allen had the same love for the game as Wooden. Long ago, Doc campaigned for 12-foot baskets and bigger non-campout lanes underneath to reward finesse and inject more poetry into the motion.
James Naismith invented the game to give “the boys” something less violent than football and rugby to occupy their time.
For all his boorishness, Texas Tech’s Bobby Knight is an ardent lover of the game he has coached with such productiivity. Asked recently what one thing he would do to improve college ball, he declared: “To my dying day I will contend that the three-point shot has done more harm to basketball than any other single entity. It has affected the flow, cheapened the dedication to play the game the right way and I’d do away with it tomorrow.” (How about that trey that beat Kansas State this week?)
The barn door is open, and the horse has fled, Bobby.
One of my first moves would be to penalize today’s “ball-handlers” who have refined palming to an art. Then as the King of Referees, I’d declare that all grabbing, groping and butt-thrusting would draw fouls and send lots of thugs to the bench early.
Then, of course, I’d force coaches to disallow the hot-dogging that so many players indulge in in all sports. Maybe it’s not as bad in college ball, but it still can be rankling.
But I’ve got about as much chance of living to see that happen as Wooden does of getting a one-point rule for dunks and Knight has of eliminating the three-point shot. We’re stuck with a collision sport that is a far, far cry from the beautiful thing it could be, because too many people enjoy it as the flawed, violent activity it has become.
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