EAST LANSING — Tom Izzo sat in a meeting Sunday afternoon with his three Michigan State basketball freshmen when Mike Garland burst into the room.
His special assistant was watching the ending of the Michigan-Wisconsin game when tempers flared in Madison. He felt his former college teammate and longtime boss would want to know about it.
“Mike Garland came running in and says, ‘You’re not going to believe what’s going on.’ He told me a little bit, and I didn’t get out of my chair because I really didn’t care. I was worried more about my team and my players,” Izzo said Monday. “So I just said, ‘Yeah, I’ll see it later.’ ‘No, you gotta come see this, you won’t believe it.’ And I said, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and never left.”
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A half-hour later, Izzo emerged and watched the end and ensuing melee on a cell phone. He said he didn’t know first-hand what caused Wolverines coach Juwan Howard to confront Badgers coach Greg Gard and then hit Wisconsin assistant Joe Krabbenhoft. He added he might call both Howard and Gard to find out more details of what happened.
“Or maybe I’ll just coach my team and do it after the fact,” he said.
Yet the 27th-year Hall of Famer knew he would be asked about the skirmish as the longest-tenured coach in the Big Ten, and he offered plenty of opinions of bigger-picture issues being discussed rather than the intricate details of what caused the situation.
“When I watched it on a big screen and I saw people swinging, I saw the fans right behind them, it reminded me of the Malice in the Palace. And it bothered me,” Izzo said. “But what instigated it, I don’t know that whole thing. I feel bad for Juwan, I feel bad for Gard, I feel bad for all of them that are involved in it, because nothing good comes of it. That I’ve learned in the last few years, nothing good comes of it.
“So I’ll just say that what I hope for everybody’s sake, more than the punishment that’s dealt. I hope the lessons have been learned and we move forward.”
[ Why Juwan Howard didn’t apologize for postgame scuffle at Wisconsin ]
A local TV video from the court showed a visibly upset Howard confronted Gard as they walked through the postgame handshake line after the 77-63 U-M loss, telling the Badgers coach, “I’ll remember this (expletive)” as Gard reached out. Gard then touched Howard’s arm, saying later he did so as an attempt to try and explain, when the U-M coach started yelling, “Don’t (expletive) touch me” and grabbed Gard by the shirt. Seconds later, after Gard was moved away, the former Wolverines star and NBA All-Star reached over a number of people to open-handed slap to the head of Krabbenhoft, who played at Wisconsin from 2005-09.
That sparked a wild and frightening scene, with players throwing punches and police stepping in to pull people away from each other. That, Izzo said, is what concerned him more than anything that happened before it.
“It was a scary situation. The reason for it all, what I saw, I have no idea. I just hope that everybody learns from it gets better,” he said. “And it I guess it gave me a point, when we met that night, to reiterate to my players just how important it is to not get involved in anything. Forget the suspensions, I’m more worried about the injuries and what happens to players. It didn’t look good. But unlike a lot of people in the world, I’m not going to comment on something I don’t know anything about, which is pretty common nowadays.”
Izzo said he did not know what was going through the minds of any of the participants and first tried to figure out what circumstances during a game might have led to the incident. But he also did not want to comment on that without finding out from Howard and Gard.
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“I just say it’s hard to de-escalate,” Izzo said. “I think what somebody should realize is these jobs that were high-pressured are more pressured, because now you got to worry not only about your game and what’s going on, you’re worried about players and who’s recruiting them off your team and who’s going pro. You just got so many different things, you wouldn’t appreciate how difficult that is each and every game. But there’s still right and wrong in this whole thing.”
Izzo also vehemently disagreed with talk of potentially eliminating handshake lines after college basketball games.
“Not shaking hands, that’s typical of our country right now. Instead of solving the problem, let’s make an excuse and let’s see if we can just instead of, confronting and demanding that it changes, let’s eliminate it so that we don’t have those problems. Let’s try to do that,” he scoffed. “That’s perfect us right now, that’s not perfect me. That’s not happening here. So if some team doesn’t want to shake hands, you’re gonna see 15 of my guys walk down and shake air. We’re going to shake air and I’m gonna to shake air and then we’re gonna leave.”
Contact Chris Solari: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari. Read more on the Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Spartans newsletter.
