Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?

I’m not up on international basketball rules. Maybe it takes more than two technical fouls to be tossed from a game, but when Pina Gershon, coach for Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv, got the heave-ho in yesterday’s exhibition with the New York Knicks, he obviously didn’t get the message.

With the Knicks well on their way to a 106-91 blowout, Al Harrington was whistled for a charge and began complaining to the referee. Maccabi Coach Pini Gershon took issue with Harrington’s behavior, then proceeded to do the same thing. The referee did not care for Gershon’s comments and gave him the technical.

Gershon remained in front of his team’s bench, not far from where the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was sitting. It was as if Gershon were preparing to call the next play and put in a couple of substitutes. For a few moments, it seemed as if no one knew what to do with him, until a clutch of league representatives scurried over.

“He wouldn’t leave,” said Scott Jaffer, an N.B.A. security official who spoke with Gershon on the court. “I tried to talk him out of it. They wanted to stop the game.”

Then things got reaaly weird.

The game is played as a fundraiser for Migdal Ohr, a center for orphans and abused and underprivileged children in Israel. The founder and president of the organization is Rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman, described in this New York Times story as having “a long white beard, a black hat and a black coat.” Grossman tried to intervene on Gershon’s behalf:

Not knowing that two technical fouls result in an automatic ejection, he attempted to persuade the referee to change his call and allow Gershon to stay.

“But he says that this is the law, that he must leave,” Grossman said, referring to the referee in broken English.

“What can I do? I tried. I tried to make peace.”

This back-and-forth evidently took a considerable amount of time.

While Gershon argued on one side of the court, the Knicks seemed mostly confused on the other. They stood around their bench waiting. So Nate Robinson decided to find out if basketball was going to resume and worked his way into the argument.

“I was over there just trying to figure out what was up,” said Robinson, who added that the coach and the rabbi “started speaking a different language,” which was Hebrew.

“It threw me off,” Robinson said. “I needed a translator.”

Now I don’t know if I’m being overly sensitive here. Was Robinson trying to be funny? If not, it really strikes me as silly and/orjust plain ignorant. This isn’t the first time the Knicks played an Israeli team. You would think they would know that the “foreign language” was Hebrew, unless they’re just so insulated in their own little world that they can’t be bothered to learn anything about their opponents, as people or as athletes.

Here’s more on the event from the Associated Press.

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Kaplan’s Korner on Jews and Sports © 2009 New Jersey Jewish News

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