All of the team’s fans remember where they were the night of the Indiana Pacers brawl. Well, it’s not the brawl. It’s The Brawl. Or The Malice in the Palace.
Whatever you call it, that was the day — 10 years ago exactly — the franchise took a dark turn. It started with a fight, but it begot an era of player courtroom appearances and, eventually, a fun-house mirror reality where Mike Dunleavy, Jr. was the team’s best player for a time.
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Before the The Brawl that changed it all, I was a young adult enjoying a Friday night in Midtown Manhattan. I had been waiting around after work for my friend to finish his shift as a trainer at the Murray Hill branch of Equinox, the most bourgeois gym in town. It was a nice gym, and I even got in a quick workout for free as I waited and waited for my buddy to get off the clock. That whole area of the city reeked of idiots and fratboys, so we would normally leave as quick as possible. But it was getting late and we didn’t want to go far to get a beer, instead opting for the only good dive joint around: FUBAR.
That was actually the name of the pub I watched The Brawl in. An acronym for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Crazier still: Less than fours later, a crane would collapse and land on that bar.
Before the crane destroyed the bar and killed five people, before the Pacers’ fought the Pistons’ fans, it was just a normal Friday night at a dive bar in Manhattan. I was he only one in there who cared about a November game between two Midwest teams. The music and cheap shots occupied everyone else. Even I lost interest as the Pacers pulled away, eventually taking a 15-point lead into the final minute.
Then, before I even noticed, all these non-basketball fans were interested in the game. When I looked up, Ron Artest was hurdling chairs, looking for someone to punch with more vigor than Harrison Ford looking for a one-armed man. Punches flew. Stephen Jackson turned into a meme. Chairs flew. Mark Boyle broke vertabrae. Fans dumped beer on players. Jamaal Tinsley waved a dustpan.
At some point, the bartender turned off the AC/DC and turned up the volume on the television. The announcers were as perplexed as those in the bar. There may have only been one way a November NBA game could have captivated this crowd. This was it.
The fallout of that night will always be larger than the actual Brawl. But the surreal scene in FUBAR will always be a part of Pacers history for me. And now, I can’t imagine experiencing it any other way.
Of course the bar where I watched The Malice at the Palace got destroyed by a crane.
But that’s just me.
Everyone else who writes for 8p9s has their own tales. On the following pages, you can read all about how they watched their beloved franchise unravel live on national TV.