Twitter Reacts to Clay’s Take on the Juwan Howard Punch

BUCK: Clay, I see there’s a handshake line, Juwan Howard — whose name I do remember from when he was in the NBA.

CLAY: And he was a member of the Fab Five back in the day, like, one of the most famous basketball recruits of all time.

BUCK: So all I saw is, he open-hand struck another coach in the face —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — to me this feels like, you can’t do that, but what’s the backstory and what happens here?

CLAY: So we got a lot of people listening to us right now in Wisconsin who are big Badger fans; so this was of a game between Michigan and Wisconsin, and right as I’m about to hop on the plane, this thing goes viral. It’s a handshake line, and Juwan Howard just… It’s not even the head coach that he ends up hitting, it’s an assistant coach. And so far the Big Ten and Michigan have not issued any punishment, but you coached before.

BUCK: Mmm-hmm.

CLAY: I have coached the Little League. One of the sacrosanct rules of sports in general regardless of the level in which you are coaching is you can’t hit the opposing coach (laughing) in a handshake line, even if you’re upset. Another ridiculous thing about this is, of course, he’s got a mask on, right, so the stupid charade of masking, his mask comes down. He’s yelling and screaming at it other side, and he loses his cool and he hits him, and so I think that there has to be a significant punishment levied against Juwan Howard over this. Now, it just… I can’t even conceive of major college athletics where one coach has hit another coach. It just doesn’t happen.

BUCK: So just for everyone listening, another part of the entertainment here — this was pointed out to me by friends in Florida literally showing me this on their phones — hey, did you see this? I said, no. No, you don’t see a coach throw a punch that often, so it was getting a lot of attention. An additional part of the, shall we say —

CLAY: Fracas.

BUCK: — the fracas was I was seeing people coming at you on Twitter and the fights over this. Somehow calling for punishment of Juwan Howard for on video in a very prominent national game for a college athletics striking another coach, this is racism, apparently.

CLAY: Well, everything that involves multiple races now immediately gets seen in the context of race-related behavior. So Juwan Howard’s a black guy, he hit a white guy — and not surprisingly, very frequently, almost immediately upon this story happening, some people said, “Oh, Juwan Howard doesn’t need to be punished,” and neither of those people were Michigan fans, which I respect the fact that you’ll defend your coach, or you’ll defend your program.

My wife is a Michigan grad, or it was other minorities in sports media somehow saying, “Oh, this other coach was actually the instigator.” It’s really kind of embarrassing if you watched the footage to make that argument. Now, if you’re a defense attorney which I have been before, I’ll argue for anybody, right, that your client could be. It is just so disappointing because effectively what’s happened is the identity politics universe that we have created in larger society has infected and infiltrated into sports so that you can’t be held responsible for what you did. It’s all seen within the prism of your race, your gender, basically the Oppression Olympics and/or the pyramid of victimization, how are we going to assess what should happen? And that is now playing out as it relates to Juwan Howard.

BUCK: Real quick, you think suspension?

CLAY: Rest of the season. He should not be able to coach the rest of the season.

BUCK: Should he be banned from coaching in the NCAA, period?

CLAY: No, I think that’s probably too much. I would suspend him for the rest of the year, put him on notice — hey, if we have any more incidents like this you’re done, like this is the last opportunity, this is the last straw — but I wouldn’t fire him.