Volleying this from MPSIMS to the Game Room. (By way of Cafe Society, because I wasn’t paying attention.)
This wasn’t a big fight. I want my ticket refunded.
By the way, what’s with old fat people starting fights? I’m actually a little disappointed that this guy didn’t knock that old bastard out.
Don’t you mean “why are we questioning the motives of people who object to other’s exercising their First Amendment rights at a public event”?
Bullshit. No justification at all.
Ask him to quiet down once, then go to security. If he’s doing anything wrong as per the ticket agreement, they’ll remove him.
Personally, I wish he’d have clocked that bitch right after he gave that big grin after she hit him. Kind of a “woot! there’s my opening!” look followed by a solid jab to her face. She’d have deserved it, too.
There are a lot of people here who seem to be justifying the slap by saying that his behavior is inappropriate at a tennis match. This is bullshit. If someone’s behavior is annoying you, call security and let them deal with it. The second you lay a hand on someone, you’ve lost any claim to a moral high ground. Nothing he did warranted a slap in the face.
Edit: I’m glad he didn’t hit her. If anything, he knows what not to do when being filmed. If he had hit her, I’m pretty sure the crowd would have torn him to pieces.
I’d imagine that by purchasing the tickets you give up your right to be loud and vulgar. This would be especially true of the stadium is a private business (is it?).
Thank Og they’re taking it to court. I sincerely hope that self-righteous bitch gets her comeuppance. He was breaking a rule. She broke the law.
I wouldn’t feel so bad if he was in a place where he could break her nose and get away with it. But he’s in the middle of a crowd. He’s got this woman beating him and he’s powerless to stop it. He’d have to retreat from her, and thus let the bully win.
Hopefully, Johnny Law will break her nose on his behalf.
Here’s another thread in which people forget that both parties can be in the wrong.
Since we don’t see the beginning of the altercation, we can’t know how obnoxious the guy was being. However, we do know that both of the other parties assaulted him, and he defended himself. The young guy probably should have been thrown out, or at least talked to be security, but it seems to me that the other two deserve much more.
Also, fuck the white knight assholes that come down and tackle the guy for defending himself.
While I typically would agree with you (I’m a ‘whole story’ type person), unless the beginning of the altercation was him threatening them or hitting them first I can’t imagine it’s all that important. It’s seems pretty clear to me that they were the ones that escalated this from verbal to physical.
And yes, the guys that roughed him up a bit were in the wrong, but I’m guessing they didn’t know what was going on and just saw a young punk in a fight with an older couple. Also, there were probably a few people in that group that were getting pretty annoyed by him as well and was using this as their chance to be one of the heroes by getting rid of him.
Does purchasing a ticket from a private business also endow you with a right to physically assault someone who is saying something that you don’t like?
Because the only people who committed assault in that video, as far as i could see, were the woman and the old man. The young guy, no matter how much of an ass, refused to retaliate when the woman slapped him in the face, and defended himself when the old man went after him.
Huh? I was responding to Snowboarder who said that he was exercising his first amendment rights at a public event. I wasn’t defending anyone, I was saying that he most likely gave up the right to be loud and vulgar upon entering the arena.
I hope that lady and the old man get taken to the cleaners, and I want a poster with a picture of the old prick lying upside down across the stadium chairs. Sheer awesome.
He didn’t give up his right. He always had the right. He didn’t waive anything. In order to waive constitutional rights, you have to have the rights you are waiving explicitly dictated to you, and you have to explicitly acknowledge that you are going to waive them.
But, being that he’s at a private event, security has the right to throw him out for being a dick. That’s what he agreed to. But his freedom of speech was always in play.
I wonder if ATtN is on this one as well? I better go make sure they know about it!
Missed the edit: I just watched the video again, and you can see the woman hit the guy AGAIN at 1:49.
How are those 2 not in jail for assault and battery?
The asshole int he blue short assaults the guy too, but he may have been just trying make sure things didn’t escalate. Sure looks like he’s taking it out on the guy a bit, but I’ll try and give him the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve watched both videos about six times each. My two cents are:
The guy didn’t do anything wrong but yell and be overly vocal and probably vulgar at a tennis match.
The two other people, however, started the whole thing.
First the girl clearly hits him and he does nothing. In fact, he even sits back down and is apparently okay with dropping it and considering it done with. He picks up his beer again, he gets comfy, and this is after being assaulted by a total stranger.
Then, the girls dad apparently decides that he want’s a piece of him too and actually walks over to hit the guy as well. After the guy has sat down and is not a threat at all. The guy, pretty understandably, stands up as the old man approaches and then the old man seems to grab him by the head to punch him.
The guy then, with his head being held by the old man–by my eye–tries to push the old man away. So color me confused at the comments that say he actually fought back against the old man; he actually doesn’t appear to hit the old man at all, he just pushes him away, defending himself (because, you know, he’s being punched, again, out of the blue) and then they both lose their footing and tumble over the seats in front of them. In the sportsbybrooks video, at 1:11, you can see that it looks like the old man falling was just the result of losing their balance once the guy got up and tried to ward off whatever the old man was going to do to him (that’d be my instinct too).
Then, as Snowboarder Bo pointed out, at 1:21 in the sportsbybrooks video, the woman punches him a second time.
So, let’s see, the score is now: Punches the guy received: 3 Punches the guy threw: 0
Even after being hit the second time by the girl and the third time total, the guy seems to just try to push her away and that’s when he gets his ass tackled by a group of “heroes” thinking the girl needs to be rescued from him.
Yeah, pretty stupid. I hope the guy wins in court and the girl/old man get the pants sued off of them.
Here’s a video that gives you every angle of the action that’s out there.
And I hope Open security and the “heroes” are included, at least the one who feels he has to get some licks in.
The guy exhibited no sense of decorum for a game I love and was pretty much a total asshole but once he was assaulted all bets were off in terms of blame. Like someone said, he probably broke event rules, but they broke the law.
That he didn’t punch the woman ni the face on the first slap showed pretty good self-restraint, but when Pops comes at him after he’s sat down and assaults him, then she takes another crack, he won any potential legal case, including the USTA for lax security and the knights in shining white shorts. I don’t understand, whenever I’m out at the Tennis Center, there’s security everywhere - what took them so long to get there?
I’m betting the USTA will bring pressure to bear to get him to drop it or settle it (he does admit to betting on the match, is there anything there?) but I hope he pursues this all the way.
And never shows up beside me at a match.
The biggest losers in all of this has to be the stadium security. I know it all took place high up in the nosebleed section, but at least one person from security should have been there well before the woman first assaulted the guy.
If you watch carefully, I don’t think it’s so much that they lost their footing, it’s that Dad punched him with his right hand, causing the guy to start falling, but since Dad had his left arm wrapped around the kids neck they both went down together. If Dad wasn’t holding on to him, the punch would have just knocked the kid over the seats.