Don’t Let Rivalry Get Any Uglier

Fortunately for the NBA, that little melee between its three-time defending champions and their foremost challengers was in an exhibition game, so few saw it ...

Oh, it was on ESPN?

Well, assuming Commissioner David Stern lets Rick Fox out of jail before the playoffs, it still doesn’t mean much, except as a clue to where the Lakers’ heads are these days.

Having proved they’re the best, not to mention the mouthiest, the Lakers now seem interested in showing how bad they are too. Of course, as they just saw, this can only wind up embarrassing them, as in this case, or worse.

“Worse” would be the Laker-King rivalry degenerating into something like the one in the ‘90s between the New York Knicks and Miami Heat, when the two gangs, er, teams kept meeting in the playoffs and the winner often was determined by which had fewer players suspended for the deciding game.

Who can ever forget the immortal 1997 series, which the underdog Knicks led, 3-2, before Stern suspended five of them for their part in a brief wrestling match between Charlie Ward and P.J. Brown?

Because NBA rules stipulated that teams must dress nine players, the Knicks had to serve their sentence in platoons. Three, including Nos. 1 and 2 scorers Patrick Ewing and Allan Houston, sat out their Game 6 loss in Madison Square Garden. Then the other two, Larry Johnson and John Starks, sat out their Game 7 loss in Miami.

This was followed by the stirring 1998 rematch when Alonzo Mourning swung on Johnson, resulting in the annual melee, in which Knick Coach Jeff Van Gundy wound up clinging to Mourning’s ankle as Mourning tugged him around the floor.

Mourning was, of course, suspended for the deciding Game 5 in Miami, which -- surprise! -- the Knicks won by 17 points.

Now, despite massive publicity given to all that milling about, fighting is not a problem in the NBA, which is fortunate for the league, which has enough real ones.

These days players are suspended, not only for landing a punch, but for throwing one and missing, or coming into the general vicinity of one. In that ’97 Heat-Knick series, Ewing drew his suspension for wandering a few feet off the bench.

Author John Feinstein recently wrote a book about the horrific punch the Lakers’ Kermit Washington threw that caved in the face of Houston’s Rudy Tomjanovich in 1977, suggesting that started the NBA’s campaign to curb fighting.

Actually, fisticuffs continued for years and in those days when they said “fight,” they didn’t mean “swung on and missed,” like Shaquille O’Neal’s celebrated roundhouse airball against the Bulls’ Brad Miller last season.

In the late ‘80s, Detroit’s Bad Boys bullied all comers, to be succeeded in the ‘90s by Pat Riley’s “Game of Force” Knicks, before Stern sensed that the league’s interests lay with grace and beauty, as personified by the rising Michael Jordan, rather than the teams that were trying to pulverize him.

After the ’92 Knick-Chicago Bull series, when Starks threw a fearsome midair headlock on Scottie Pippen, whom the Knicks were out to intimidate, Stern began raising the penalties on flagrant fouls, which until then were just part of the game, known as “hard fouls.”

Now the NBA has mill-arounds, and fewer of them, even if they are telegenic and get lots of play.

Meanwhile, baseball has 25 incidents a year in which players stream onto the field after beanballs, et al. It’s so common, there’s a phrase for it: “Both benches emptied.”

However, because the commissioner doesn’t sanction it with mass suspensions, or many suspensions at all, baseball players just dust themselves off, go back to the dugout and resume play.

Then, of course, there’s the NHL, which once looked into ways to curb fighting when Commissioner Gary Bettman came over from the NBA, but found it couldn’t, or shouldn’t.

Not that this is an excuse for the Lakers to forget what they do and what they’ve come for.

Fox is a Jekyll-Hyde personality, amiable, well-spoken and approachable off the floor where he authors about 50% of the Lakers’ great quotes, but hard-nosed on the floor, which is OK, and prone to losing it, which is not.

A five-game suspension would cost Fox more than $225,000 in lost salary. Of course, he’ll have $3.5 million left, so he’ll be OK.

But to paraphrase a late, great U.S. senator, $225,000 here, $225,000 there, the next thing you know, you’re talking about real money.