Make no mistake, this is no fourth-inning rain out. In fact, in the annals of suspended sporting events, this has to be one of the oddest. On Thursday night, a Michigan high school basketball game was suspended when a brawl broke out in a hallway outside the Godwin Heights gymnasium with just 9.9 seconds left in the game, in which Godwin Heights led Lee, 61-58. After police fired pepper spray at an assailant, the resulting gaseous fumes forced fans out of the gym and cause the postponement of the game’s conclusion.
(Michigan high school basketball: Now with pepper spray!)
But if you thought that was strange, the motivation behind the brawl is even odder: The man who was attacked rubbed the assailant, Anthony Turley, the wrong way with a simple, positive comment. That’s right, a hallway brawl, school-filling pepper spray incident and suspension of a tense high school game was caused by a compliment.
The result of that late-game encouragement was a beat down from Turley and his friends, and a subsequent night in jail for Turley. He was later sentenced and pleaded guilty to assault and battery, receiving only a single year of probation and a measly $350 in fines.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Wyoming Police Captain Brad Schutter. “The victim basically was just making a very positive comment about one of the players on the basketball court.”
And the recipient of the beat down wasn’t even the biggest victim. Who was? The kids on the court, who had to wait out a long delay and eventually abandon the finish to go home and do homework.
That wasn’t lost on the two coaches, who were openly disappointed in the fans, as they should be.
“Our kids were very disappointed. They wanted to finish the game, go home … and focus on school work,” said Godwin Heights Coach Chad Conklin.
To his credit, Conklin also noted a long string of momentum built up by Lee, which they’ll clearly be unable to get back when the game resumes. Deciding an important game in a 9.9 second window is brutally unfair, and there’s no way that the results will be identical to what might have happened had Turley not lost his head.
That’s an outcome we’ll never truly learn, but at least now we’ve got a new bizarre incident for the record books.
2:24 pm on January 17th, 2009
You would think that something like this took place in Detroit, but guess again… this little dust up happened in Grand Rapids another gem of a city that makes C amden look like a resort community.