New video casts doubt on who started huge brawl at AAU basketball game
In the end, it doesn't matter who started it; not one looks good.
At an AAU basketball tournament in Georgia on Sunday, things got way out of hand during a game between the Houston Raptors and the R.A.W. Athletics out of Chicago, according to Yahoo Sports.
It appears to begin with three R.A.W. players surrounding a referee, who was on the floor. The referee got up and was not happy as he went at the players. Things appeared to calm down, but tempers flared and it turned into an all-out brawl.
R.A.W. coach Howard Martin told ESPN: "At the end of the game, one of my players was complaining about a call. He made a comment to the referee. The ref didn't like it. So the other team inbounded the ball, walked it up, the ref said to my player, 'Say it again.' Then he T'd him up and kicked him out of the game. And he walked behind him, still having words. Then the ref pushed my player, and they squared up right by my bench. When they squared up, another one of my players jumped off the bench and took (the ref) down. We separated them."
Martin added that a referee from another court tried to join the melee.
Twitter user Bobby Benjamin shared videos of the fight (which you can see above) and told ESPN that the R.A.W. players were to blame.
"The referee definitely didn't attack the kids," Benjamin told ESPN. "Absolutely not. Once things got going, and he was attacked ... he got assaulted. They were too outnumbered to even try to defend themselves."
The video above seems to indicate that the players jumped the official, right?
However, this newer video shows what happened just before the first video begins, and you can see the referee appears to be going after a player on the court when a teammate takes down the official:
As the tweet notes, the camera pans just before we can tell who started the incident. But it does seem plausible that Martin's version of events was right.
But one thing is for certain: It was a bad situation.
"Tempers got hot, one of their players hit the referee, and then all hell broke loose," Marcus Fisher, who was coaching on an adjacent court, told Yahoo Sports. "It's a bad representation of AAU basketball. It’s sad."
This story was originally published July 9, 2018 at 8:27 AM.