Georgetown’s basketball brawl in China erupted from complex mix of history, hubris and culture

By early evening Sunday in Washington, Georgetown’s men’s basketball team will conclude its three-game trip to China — against a less physically aggressive team than the Bayi Rockets, one hopes.

Replaying the video Saturday — hands, feet, chairs and bottles flying amid the chaos — it’s still so surreal.

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 A goodwill trip for the men’s basketball team turned into a benches-clearing melee.

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Georgetown Hoyas coach John Thompson III said on Saturday he had made peace with his counterpart of China's Bayi Rockets over the bench-clearing brawl during their teams' match in Beijing a few days earlier. (Aug. 20).

The Great Brawl, of course, was not on Georgetown’s itinerary Thursday in Beijing, just two days after the Hoyas visited the only man-made structure visible from space.

But the unfortunate takeaway for everyone involved won’t be the awe of man; it’ll be the raw of man, the ballgame turned into an international incident, a cultural exchange, all right — of overhand rights.

When two teams leave their benches and fists are balled, when Chinese professional players begin grounding, pounding and stomping their American-college counterparts, when fans hurl bottles of water toward the visitors — in a game ironically billed as a “friendship match” — dissecting the senselessness is always an imperfect science.

But here’s a theory: Beyond nationalistic pride, a bevy of home-cooked calls that made for over-the-top bad officiating and two teams going at each other physically, the fight was very possibly the result of the perfect storm — a caldron of history, hubris and the overseas marketing of win-or-die American sports culture.

And it’s been percolating for years.

It began with the aggressors on the Chinese military team. With a penchant for throwing elbows and punches in its recent past, many were taking their cue from the people who govern the sport in China.

As NBC’s Sarah Kogod reported this past week, in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, former NBA star Yao Ming, among many of his countrymen, felt that the Chinese “non-contact style prevalent in the [Chinese] Basketball Association was producing players who were not tough enough for the international game.” The CBA allowed more physical play to begin the 2008-09 season.

“After the Olympics, we realized that unless we strengthened our physical presence, Chinese basketball would not be able to compete with the world’s best,” Liu Xiaonong, the head of the CBA, said in 2008.

Going into that game, Chinese players as a whole had been encouraged to scrap more to compete internationally.

It continued with a Georgetown program trying to rebound not only from consecutive first-round knockouts in the NCAA tournament but also an unflattering label, almost insulting to the old Hoya Destroya stereotype of the school’s physically imposing teams led by Patrick Ewing and embodied by Michael Graham in the early 1980s: soft.

Soft is the worst thing you can be called in sports now, and it rarely applies to a lack of mental toughness. Even John Thompson Jr., the program’s patriarch, has wished for tougher players on his son’s precisely patterned offensive teams.

In January 2009, he said on his radio show that Georgetown might need more “thugs” on their team. He explained by saying the Hoyas needed to be more physical and tough in a Big East scrap against a rugged team such as Pittsburgh, which had pulverized Georgetown that week.