A group of African American high school football players from Long Island are taking legal action after they claim they were targeted in a November game that turned into an ugly brawl fueled by racial slurs and assault.
Via NY Daily News:
The varsity Amityville players say they were beaten and taunted with racial slurs repeatedly during a chippy November game with Comsewogue that ended early following a brawl. Five players have filed a lawsuit against their rival school.
Five black high school football players in Long Island say they were called the N-word, targeted and assaulted during an intense rivalry game in November, a bombshell lawsuit reveals.
Amityville High School eventually lost the game to Comsewogue High School in Suffolk County, but it was the cheap shots, taunting and eventual brawl that led the players to file suit, they told WABC-TV.
A late hit in the third quarter caused emotions to boil over into a sideline-clearing brawl that ended the game early and shut Amityville out of the playoffs.
But what happened during the fight, which the Amityville players call assault, proved the whole thing was prompted by racism, they say. “They tried to hurt us,” Travon Duncan told the news station. “I was swarmed by not one, but three to four players.”
Video of the late hit, which cuts out after just a few seconds, shows the start of the fracas, including a Comsewogue player who sprints from across the field and decks an Amityville High player right in the back.
Duncan and the other players say the Comsewogue team is made up mostly of white players and coaches — who used horrible, racist language towards their rivals.
“Their coach comes up to me and he grabs me viciously by my left shoulder pad and said, ‘N—–, I’ll kill you,’” Duncan said. “I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“I remember the coach, in my face, grabbed my chest plate and say ‘I’m gonna f—— kill you,” Jean-Michel said. The referees did nothing to stop the assault, the teens say.
“The coach grabbed me and I was choking, so he’s choking me and then does nothing to stop his player from still attacking me, so his player was hitting me,” said Niem Harvey.
It wasn’t just during the fight, though, the kids say. The entire game was chippy — and laced with inappropriate and vile language.
“Before the halftime break, the kids were getting in our faces, like ‘Yeah, it’s coming for you, all game, all game, n—– this, n—– that,’” Jean-Michel said.
It sounds like the behavior shown in this game went way beyond the competitive nature of football. Still, unless they can prove these statements were actually and that the brawl was racially charged I think this will be a hard case to win.