Carmelo Anthony Says Ejected Sixers Fan Referred to Him as "Boy" (Updated)
edit –
Update:
The Sixers fan who was ejected in the Carmelo Anthony incident has been banned from the Wells Fargo Center indefinitely, and from all future Sixers events. The second guy seen in the video clips (wearing a quarter zip) is banned from the arena for the rest of the year.
— Kevin Kinkead (@Kevin_Kinkead) January 29, 2022
Scandal at the Sixers game.
A fan was ejected after getting into it with Lakers player Carmelo Anthony, which still feels strange to say. Melo is a Laker? Super weird.
Kyle Scott, aka “The Maestro,” happened to be sitting a few seats away from this dude, and got some exclusive video of him getting the boot, but first, here’s what ESPN’s Dave McMenamin is reporting:
With 7 minutes, 1 second left in the fourth quarter, Anthony confronted a fan standing behind the row of courtside seats near center court at Wells Fargo Center. Anthony said afterward that the fan referred to him as “boy.”
Play was paused for several minutes while security personnel advanced to the spot of the confrontation and refs guided Anthony away from the incident.
“Some things were said,” Anthony said afterward. “Unacceptable. I’m cool with fans heckling, fans talking trash, cheering for their team, booing the other team, I’m all for that. But when you cross certain lines, as a man, you just, that’s what you’re going to see. That’s what you’re going to get, as you saw there.”
Others reporting the “boy” thing were Chris Haynes and Dan Woike:
Sixers fan that was ejected for taunting Los Angeles Lakers star Carmelo Anthony kept calling him a “boy” and yelling “get in the corner boy” and “keeping shooting boy,” league sources tell @YahooSports.
— Chris Haynes (@ChrisBHaynes) January 28, 2022
Carmelo Anthony confirmed that he was called "boy" by fans in Philadelphia and that line-crossing comments came from two different groups of people.
— Dan Woike (@DanWoikeSports) January 28, 2022
I went through all of the clips I could find, and didn’t hear the word “boy” being yelled from the crowd. That’s not to say it didn’t happen, but listening back to everything this morning there doesn’t seem to be confirming video evidence. There was definitely some colorful language and a lot of drowned out shouting that’s hard to discern. A lot of garbled audio. One person I spoke to said the fan was drunk and “being annoying,” but didn’t hear anything racial being hurled at Melo.
In Woike’s tweet, he notes that there were “two different groups of people,” so it’s entirely plausible that inappropriate language came from a second section as well, and that nobody was recording any of that at the time. The ejected fan was sitting near the broadcast area, so everybody on TV row probably would have heard what he was saying and would be able to corroborate.
Here are some of the main clips making the rounds:
Here’s the pre fight with Carmelo Anthony and the Sixers fan. “Punk ass bitch” was said at one point.
📹: @KyleScottL pic.twitter.com/0MVFtcQxSm
— Crossing Broad (@CrossingBroad) January 28, 2022
This view of Melo and the fans going back-and-forth 👀
(via bthomson15/IG) pic.twitter.com/z0KGVJO6DI
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) January 28, 2022
You’re down 18 Melo! pic.twitter.com/tiIhSxvI7t
— Kyle Scott Laskowski (@KyleScottL) January 28, 2022
“You got the right one” -Melo pic.twitter.com/Z5JiTm53BH
— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) January 28, 2022
In the ESPN story, McMenamin notes that “while things were being sorted out, another fan seated courtside also taunted Anthony using similarly offensive language, according to Anthony.” He notes that a Sixers spokesman confirmed the ejection of one fan, so it would seem as though the other guy in the video just left with the ejectee, though he himself wasn’t specifically tossed.
Anyway, it’s kind of a he said/he said thing without video confirmation here. Maybe there will be another clip that comes out later today that puts this to rest, and backs up what Melo is saying, and what Haynes and Woike are reporting. Regardless, Philly is probably gonna get crushed anyway. Racist fans, rude, disrespectful, etc. You’re gonna hear all of that.
edit – looks like the ejected guy was on WIP this morning, lemme find that interview and go back and listen to it and see what he had to say
edit 2 – the guy’s name is “Mike” and I clipped the audio here:
Here's the ejected Sixers fan on the WIP morning show explaining his side of the story: pic.twitter.com/WPGrQI0Ah9
— Kevin Kinkead (@Kevin_Kinkead) January 28, 2022
Alright, so listen – 99 times out 100, using the word “boy” is fine. You’re using it to mean childish or immature or something along those lines. Where it comes into question is when a white man uses it to describe a black man, because when you go back to the days of Jim Crow, white men would often use that term in a derogatory way, to suggest that they were superior. The word “boy” was seen as demeaning to black men. That’s the most basic way I can explain it. In this case, the fan says there was nothing sinister behind the heckling, so that’s his explanation.