http://msn.foxsports.com/story/3187398

There are all kinds of ugly. Ugly mean. Ugly crazy. Ugly tragic. The
sports world has provided just about every kind of ugly. Just in the
last few weeks we've had a pregame fight, an in-game fight and an
epic fight with the fans.

THE RIOT IN AUBURN HILLS
There was an awful lot of ugly to go around two Fridays ago at the
Palace of Auburn Hills. The Pistons' performance in the game was by
no means pretty. The cheap shot by Ron Artest was unsightly. The
overreaction by Ben Wallace was homely. And when one fan threw a cup
of beer, it got coyote ugly in a hurry.

In a sea of ugly, the real double-bagger of the night belonged to
Artest. Struck by a cup and its liquid contents, the NBA's loosest
cannon believed this entitled him to select a fan of his choosing and
beat the crap out of him. Maybe the fact that the guy he went after
was still holding a cup should have been a clue that he had the wrong
guy. But then again Artest doesn't quite rhyme with smartest, does it?

While Artest, Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal were all guilty of
woefully bad judgment, the fans who doused the players with a
seemingly endless shower of liquid on their way into the tunnel
cornered the market on cowardice. (Seriously, do they sell 100-ounce
beers at the Palace? It looked like the fans had a hose hooked up to
a hydrant.) Here's hoping these clowns are identified and some
lifetime bans put in place.


THE PUNCH
There have been countless fights in professional sports, but has a
single punch ever wrought such grotesque devastation as Kermit
Washington's roundhouse rearrangement of Rudy Tomjanovich's face?

I remember reading the endless details of the damage in a recent
article about the incident: the long list of broken facial bones, the
spinal fluid leaking into the brain. It sounded more like an
artillery shell than a fist had hit Rudy T.'s face.

The moment was ugly and the result was even uglier. The long epilogue
since has been one of searing regret for Washington and grudging
forgiveness from Tomjanovich.


BOWE V. GOLOTA
One ugly sequence begat another as Andrew Golota's refusal to hit
Riddick Bowe above the belt led to his disqualification and an all-
out riot in Madison Square Garden.

The Polish-born Golota had so totally dominated the champ through six
rounds that he led comfortably on all three judges' cards despite two
deductions for low blows. In the seventh, Golota, ignoring the ref's
warnings, unloaded a three-punch combination on Bowe's cup, earning
himself a DQ.

As Bowe was helped to the locker room, members of his entourage
confronted Golota. When Bernard Brooks taunted Golota, the fighter
took a swing at him, prompting Brooks to crack Golota in the head
with his walkie-talkie, drawing blood. And it was — as the kids say —
on.

The riot spread from the ring throughout the Garden in a melee that
was actually much more out of control than the nonsense at the Palace
last week.

The two fighters hooked up again five months later and, yes, Golota
was once again disqualified for low blows. One silver lining:
Golota's antics gave us one of the great nicknames in sports history,
the Foul Pole.


McSORLEY BASHES BRASHEAR
Where to begin when it comes to hockey, a sport that certainly merits
its own top 10 ugliest moments list.

For sheer violence there is the two-handed attempted decapitation of
Garrett Stafford by Alexander Perezhogin in an AHL game last season.
For total gross-out factor there is the near decapitation of goalie
Clint Malarchuk by a skate blade. (My buddy Schu was at the game and
said people were fainting and throwing up.) There are, of course,
horrendous cheap shots by Todd Bertuzzi, Tie Domi and Dale Hunter.
There's the bizarre scene of the Boston Bruins going into the stands
in Madison Square Garden and Mike Milbury beating a fan with his own
shoe, which somehow seems quaint in comparison to the Pacers'
thuggery.

But for all-time ugly, the winner has to be Marty McSorley hitting
Donald Brashear in the temple with his stick. The cringe-inducing
images of an already-unconscious Brashear falling helplessly, his
head bouncing off the ice, are a kind of requiem for a goon.


JOE THEISMANN
There have been many ugly sports moments that have made us recoil in
horror or wince in embarrassment for humanity, but when it comes to
making us want to vomit, one stands out above the rest: Joe Theismann
breaking his leg on Monday Night Football.

It seems like it became almost commonplace, the tibia and fibula
snapping, the ankle dislocating, the lower leg pointing the wrong
way, often flopping around like a fish on a dock. Tim Krumrie, Moises
Alou, Jason Kendall, Ed McCaffrey all come nauseatingly to mind.

But for sheer, involuntary, reverse peristaltic impulse, nothing
beats the first time we saw a leg snap "like a potato chip in too-
thick dip" as Hank Hill would memorably describe it.


GO FOR WAND
The Joe Theismann of horse racing. While any time a horse breaks down
and is put to sleep, it's tragic, this one stood out for the
protracted flailing of the agonized filly.

She broke her foreleg in a homestretch duel with Bayakoa in the 1990
Breeders' Cup Distaff at Belmont Park. Unwilling to accept defeat, Go
For Wand fought desperately to get to her hooves and carry on on her
broken leg. The panicked thrashing on the track was one of the
hardest things to watch in sports history and forced the vets to put
her down right where she lay.

In that moment, the Sport of Kings seemed a whole lot less majestic.


NIGEL BENN V. GERALD McCLELLAN
It's the paradox of boxing: one man's ugly, senseless, violent event
is another's all-time great sports spectacle.

The sport's history is littered with tragedy. It's the nature of the
often not-very-sweet science. Fatal beatings like the one Boom Boom
Mancini administered to Duk Koo Kim or Emile Griffith put on Benny
Paret are all too common. But for sheer blow-by-blow horror — the
sense that permanent, irrevocable damage was being done right before
your eyes — nothing matches the devastation dished out in the brawl
between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan.

On Feb. 25, 1995, in London, Benn and McClellan fought for Benn's 168-
pound Super Middleweight title. The fight against the 31-year-old
champ was supposed to be an easy win for McClellan on his way to a
superfight with Roy Jones Jr. The two men beat the hell out of each
other until McClellan was counted out in the 10th. Imagine Hagler-
Hearns going 10 rounds and you have a sense of the totality of the
violence.

After the fight, both men were hospitalized. McClellan suffered
swelling of the brain, went into a coma and was left blind and
confined to a wheelchair. Benn was never the same. He defended his
title twice before losing the last three fights of his career.


MONICA SELES STABBED
I don't know which is uglier, the fact that lunatic Gunther Parche
stabbed Monica Seles in the back in 1993 or that he never served a
day in jail.

Parche reminded us that fan is short for fanatic when he attacked
Seles to keep his beloved Steffi Graf atop the world tennis rankings.
One of the many sad footnotes to this story — like the two years
probation slap on the wrist he was given by a German judge who must
also have been a Graf fan — was that Parche's deranged plan worked,
successfully derailing Seles' career. Though she made a stirring
comeback two years later, Seles was never the same player.

Ironically, Graf's father Peter did do jail time for what some might
consider the less venal offense of income tax evasion. This begs the
question: Is the phrase "German justice" oxymoronic?


WOODY HAYES
There are, as I've noted, many different definitions of ugly. In his
final spasm of frustrated rage, Woody Hayes was about seven of them.
He was ugly on the inside, ugly on the outside, ugly mean and ugly
crazy all rolled into one.

When Clemson sealed its 1978 Gator Bowl win over Ohio State on
linebacker Charlie Bauman's interception of an Art Schlichter pass,
Hayes completely lost it, punctuating his otherwise distinguished
career by punching Bauman in the throat.

Hayes later added ugly delusional to his repertoire when he denied
punching Bauman despite the millions of witnesses who saw the video
evidence.


THE MURDER OF ANDRES ESCOBAR
Soccer fans have redefined subhuman behavior and could fill a
compendium of 1,001 ugly moments with their hooliganism, but one
incident from the 1994 World Cup stands out above the rest.

When Colombian defender Andres Escobar returned home to Medellin
after kicking the ball into his own net in a 2-1 loss to the U.S., he
was shot 12 times, murdered by a soccer fan.

They may call it the beautiful game, but for some reason it elicits
the ugliest conduct from its fans.

TRAGEDY IN THE STANDS
Twice in a span of nine months from July 26, 1998 to May 1, 1999,
fans were killed as a result of tires and debris flying into the
stands and hitting spectators of open-wheel races at the Michigan
Speedway and the Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte. Three fans died
in each incident after on-track collisions sent car parts hurtling
over the wall and into the densely-packed stands.

The accidents were eerily similar, but the racetracks handled them
differently. The U.S. 500 at the Michigan Speedway completed the
remaining 75 laps while the VisionAire 500 in Charlotte was halted as
soon as the extent of the injuries was determined.

These tragedies highlighted one of the enduring dilemmas of sports:
balancing fans' desire to be as close to the action as possible with
public safety.