One player lay at midcourt, blood pouring off his face. Another was throwing punches at every opponent he could see. A third stood on the scorer’s table, egging on a howling crowd at the Cintas Center in Cincinnati. Expletive-laced challenges were hurled back and forth. All the while, a national television audience watched as one of college basketball’s fiercest rivalries exploded into chaos.
The reputations of the two teams involved appeared to be in tatters.
Yet now, little more than three months after a Dec. 10 brawl that was, for better or worse, one of the signature moments of college basketball’s regular season, both Xavier and Cincinnati are among the 16 teams left in the N.C.A.A.tournament.
And the wild brawl has become, if not forgotten, then certainly a secondary chapter to the teams’ seasons. The Bearcats, seeded sixth in the East, will play No. 2 Ohio State in Boston on Thursday night. The 10th-seeded Musketeers will play No. 3 Baylor in a South Region game in Atlanta on Friday.
“We disciplined the guys that did wrong, we apologized, and then we told them how much we loved them, what we expected of them, and moved on,” Cincinnati Coach Mick Cronin said Wednesday. “We knew who we really are. We really focused on making sure we were having fun and not letting that define us.”
The tension that exists between Cincinnati — the large public university — and Xavier — the smaller, more affluent Jesuit university a few miles away — mounted a few days before their annual matchup in December. Bearcats guard Sean Kilpatrick needled Xavier’s star guard Tu Holloway, saying that Holloway, the reigning Atlantic 10 player of the year, was not even good enough to start for Cincinnati, which plays in the Big East.
The game was heated, with the teams exchanging words on the way to the locker room at halftime. But as Xavier pulled away to what would be a 76-53 victory, the trash talk became more intense. Holloway made a layup with 18 seconds left and yelled at the Cincinnati bench as he ran past on his way back up the court.
As the final seconds ticked away, Holloway and the Cincinnati freshman guard Ge’Lawn Guyn went nose to nose. Guyn pushed Holloway in the face, and Xavier’s Dez Wells shoved Guyn to the floor in retaliation. Cincinnati center Yancy Gates then threw the ball at Holloway, causing a full-scale brawl to erupt. Gates then threw a punch at Xavier center Kenny Frease, who was looking elsewhere. The right cross opened up a nasty gash under Frease’s left eye. The Bearcats’ Cheikh Mbodj then kicked Frease after he fell to the floor following a hit by Gates. Frease managed to escape the melee and wander upcourt, bleeding profusely, before lying down and receiving treatment.
The game was called with 9.4 seconds left, and the floor was cleared after several minutes.
In the postgame news conference, Holloway, who had been up on the scorer’s table during the brawl, said that the Musketeers were “grown men over here,” adding: “We’ve got a whole bunch of gangsters in the locker room — not thugs, but tough guys on the court. And we went out there and zipped them up,” an apparent reference to putting the Bearcats in body bags.
Cronin talked angrily after the game of physically removing the jerseys of his players, saying they needed to realize “how lucky they are to even be here, let alone have a scholarship.”
“Mick Cronin did a remarkable job of dealing with that head-on in the postgame press conference and obviously in the locker room with his own team,” Dan Gavitt, the associate commissioner of basketball for the Big East, said. “There’s no preparation or script for an incident like that, and he stood up and said the right things and did the right things and in the long run his team benefitted from it.”
Xavier Coach Chris Mack sent out a Twitter message after the game that said: “If my players say they’ve been taught to be tough their whole life, they mean ON THE FLOOR. Nothing else is condoned.”
Gates, Mbodj, and the Cincinnati freshman Octavius Ellis were given six-game suspensions, with Guyn suspended for a game. Gates tearfully apologized the day after the brawl, and his private apology to Frease was reportedly a factor in his not facing criminal charges. Xavier suspended four players, three of them starters, including Holloway, who missed the next game, a loss to Oral Roberts.
The Musketeers, who had been 8-0 after beating Cincinnati, lost the two games after that as well. They struggled during Atlantic 10 conference play, and went 13-12 after the brawl.
“After that game our confidence was lost a little bit,” Holloway said last week, “and it took a couple of months to get it back.”
It was in the conference tournament in Atlantic City that Xavier righted itself, making the title game, where it lost to St. Bonaventure.
Holloway then showed that he could start for any team in the country, scoring 25 points in Xavier’s N.C.A.A. tournament opener against Notre Dame, including a high-arcing bank shot with 21.3 seconds to go that put Xavier ahead for good. He added 21 in the Musketeers’ victory over Lehigh last Sunday, to go with Frease’s 25 points and 12 rebounds.
“The adversity we see in the N.C.A.A. tournament, we’ve been through a lot more than that,” Frease said before the Lehigh game.
At the time of the brawl, Cincinnati was 5-3, but the fallout seemed to galvanize the team.
The Bearcats won seven straight after the Xavier game, and went 12-6 in Big East play and made the conference tournament final, upsetting top-seeded Syracuse. Gates had a double-double in the opening tournament win over Texas, then played a rugged game against Florida State on Sunday night, battling larger players inside in a 62-56 win. And despite being a 60 percent free-throw shooter, Gates made three critical free throws in the final moments.
Now Cincinnati finds itself in the Round of 16, just like its crosstown rival, Xavier. It is a long way from the ugliness of Dec. 10.
“We’ve been on a mission to define what Cincinnati basketball is all about, what our university and city is all about, and the kids have banded together to do that,” Cronin said. “It hasn’t been easy.”
Comments (1)
The sad truth for Cincinnati, my alma mater, is that in bringing these kids in they birng in some talented sweet kids, and then they, because of money or whatever, bring in some kids who need some academic help, just like they needed some help at home. Yates is a good guy, but I think he is a sign of the times, coaches out there looking for absolutely aggressive ball players, and the hell with really stressing them to check anger management skills. Because of the quality of academics and the individual attention Xavior guys get, usually, they are going to be well spoken young men with impeccable manners. I would hate to think that Xavior is also forgetting that we want a class act team even if they cannot slay dragons. Both Cincinnati teams are loved in this community, absolutely loved, and it would be a fine thing if the coaches would get whole teams, so some of these hard playing kids have some back up instead of depending on two guys or so to carry the teams. The boys making the shots are outstanding, but you cannot have two a season and ever finally show the United States tha this great little city can achieve a National Standing. God bless those kids who at the end of the season give everybody so much credit, but when the guys hit the final championships, Cincinnati, nor Xavior has enough of the super guys to carry the court, and my heart breaks for them, the seniors who walk away without getting their due since the 1960s or so, a National Championship. I live here part time, and in California part time, and the Midwest is the heart of basketball country; Never forget it. Rotten behavior is just becoming more the accepted way across America, for somewhere parents lost their children. Give children a mother, a father, a home where all work together and share the table, and cut out all the nonsense where people cannot stand the sound of anything but noise inside and out. I wonder how many of the kids on both of those teams had Moms and Dads and the table from the time they were children? The westerners have no idea how it works back here, and it is like this Cincinnati does not want to be California. This is a family town, and we pray, go to church, and we share with our neighbors. We do not like rudeness, and the brawl showed everybody, we have some house cleaning to do. Lord, would any one look at the level of solid trash on television these days. Better manners were shown on Roseanna Barr’s dysfunctional family, and that is the other word that needs some re-enforcement, family. A family is the sum of its parts, and our basketball kids may need more loving than they are getting. Barbara Everett Heintz