Sportsmanship? What’s that? NBA legend and current Georgetown Hoyas coach, Patrick Ewing opines that the tradition of the post-game handshake line be eliminated
In all fairness, I don’t really disagree with Ewing. This whole discussion came into question after an incident where former player-now coach of Michigan, Juwan Howard took a swipe at a Wisconsin assistant after losing to the Badgers, it’s probably not the worst idea in the world to keep two teams apart from each other after a game ends, especially since society today is full of sore losers who can’t handle defeat.
It’s an antiquated custom that creates more room for conflict than it does at preventing it, even if it is an attempt to curry the notion of sportsmanship in the game. It’s the kind of thing that’s practiced at the junior, junior, kids level, but considering basketball is still originally a children’s game, I understand why they try to force it onto participants even at a level as high as D-I collegiate.
But this post comes to fruition because it’s Patrick Ewing who came out and said this, and it’s just such a low-hanging fruit easy opportunity to clown on Ewing, because as many players have proven throughout history, it’s just so easy to dunk on him.
And as the subject of the post said, of course Patrick Ewing wants to get rid of the handshake line – since he’s taken the reigns at Georgetown, the Hoyas have gone 26-48 over four years in the Big East, so that means Ewing and his players have had to go through a whole lot of post-game handshake lines as the losing squad. It’s no wonder Ewing wants to get rid of the handshake line, because he’s been getting owned way more than doing the ownage, and he’s tired of it.
The funny thing is that in doing the cursory fact-checking for this post, I had no idea that Georgetown actually won the Big East conference championship last year. The Hoyas went 7-9 in conference play, but then used a Game Genie during the conference tournament and ended up winning the whole fucking thing from the 8th seed. That was four straight critical games in which Ewing was actually on the winning side of the handshake line, and fairly recently, so I’m surprised to see that he’s still against it.
Oh shit, but then I realized what I was looking at wasn’t factoring in this season, and at the time I’m writing this, the once vaunted Georgetown Hoyas, are an abysmal 0-16 in conference play this year. FFfffffuuuck, no wonder Ewing is completely over the handshake line, after all. Poor guy just can’t stop getting owned, he might want to consider leaving the industry if he ever wants to stop getting dunked on.
