Pacers, Pistons show NBA still has a good side

INDIANAPOLIS — Once again, a player went into the stands. Once again, it involved the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pacers. Can’t we all get along?

As a matter of fact, we can.

His name is Antonio McDyess, the soft-spoken, perpetually easy-going forward for the Detroit Pistons. Her name is Linda Taylor, a resident of Greenwood, Ind., and on this day, she was sitting in the first row at Conseco Fieldhouse.

They met in the second quarter, as McDyess, chasing a loose ball that was heading out of bounds, crashed into Taylor.

“A couple of seconds later, we were standing there at the free-throw line, and I saw her leaning over, like she was bleeding from her nose or mouth or something,” McDyess said. “I was trying to stop myself from running into her, but I hit her pretty good. I think I got her with my elbow.”

Shortly thereafter, a timeout was called, and McDyess went back into the stands.

“You OK?” he asked Taylor as she held a tissue to her face. Her nose was bleeding and there was a cut just above her lip. “I’m really, really sorry.”

Taylor, stunned to see McDyess in her face a second time, laughed.

“You owe me,” she told him with a smile. “You owe me.”

As McDyess returned to the court, the crowd nearby gave him a warm ovation.

It wasn’t any grand gesture, nothing that would make the horrific brawl dissipate into the mists of time, but it was honorable and human and decent, and represented everything the vast majority of these guys are all about. On a day when this game was hailed as The Brawl Redux, this little moment was the best moment of all, the one that gave us the best and most accurate view of people we too often see as TV caricatures.

Be honest now: Didn’t the Throwdown in Motown feed into all our worst biases about professional basketball players? That they’re arrogant and overpaid, spoiled and immature?

For many of the players involved in the fracas, that was the worst part of the fallout, far worse than the suspensions or the lost salary; that now, fans would see them as bad actors instead of hard-working professional athletes who are husbands and fathers and contributors to the community.

“A lot of people only know me by what they saw on TV” from the brawl, Jermaine O’Neal said.

Public perception is no small issue for a player like O’Neal. Not because the good-guy persona will help him get more endorsements, but because he wants to be seen for who he is. This, remember, is the person who fulfilled a local high school girl’s dream by escorting her to her senior prom.

What we witnessed Saturday was everything the NBA and these two solid franchises wanted and needed: A tough, well-played game devoid of ugly incidents or misbehavior. It was as if a giant sprig of mistletoe had been hung from the fieldhouse scoreboard. Before the game, both teams presented youngsters with books as gifts, and they weren’t copies of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.”

Sure, there were boos — and who ever thought Rasheed would be the more popular Wallace when the Pistons came to town? But it was nothing out of the ordinary, a testament both to the fans’ good sense and the obvious security presence.

So this game, finally, is over, accompanied by a giant civic exhalation. And for the Pistons, there is some closure.

For weeks, head coach Larry Brown has been doing what he does second best, right behind coaching: complaining. He lost one player for six games while the Pacers, and their season, were essentially gutted, yet Brown did exponentially more complaining in the aftermath than did anybody in the Pacers organization.

After Saturday’s game, though, he seemed almost sanguine. At least by Brown’s standards.

“My biggest hope is that we’ve all learned from that (the brawl), although, obviously I didn’t by the way I acted the other night,” he said, referring to the $15,000 fine he received for verbally assaulting an official Wednesday night. “But the fact that we could come in here and the crowd could be the way they were, and the players conducted themselves like they did, hopefully people will understand that that was just an unfortunate incident that never really happens and, I would hope, won’t ever happen again.”