After brawl between Georgetown, Bayi, all is forgiven, China says
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A top Chinese official said Friday that all was forgiven between the Georgetown Hoyas and the Bayi Rockets, whose Thursday ‘goodwill’ exhibition game in Beijing ended in an all-out on-court brawl with punches and chairs being thrown.
‘The sun has come out again, as it were,’ Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai told reporters at a briefing on Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to the country.
With a rematch set for Sunday in Shanghai, both the Georgetown University coaching staff and Chinese officials are trying to make sure there’s no recurrence of the fight at Thursday’s game, which had been intended as a sign of sunny relations between the U.S. and China during Biden’s trip.
PHOTOS: Brawl between Georgetown and China’s Bayi
‘By this morning, the two teams have returned to good terms,’ the foreign minister said, according to Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune political writer Michael Memoli and White House pool reporter for Biden’s trip to China.
Cui said that Bayi members had gone to the Beijing airport as their U.S. rivals were departing to make up, and the teams had even exchanged souvenirs.
At this time Thursday, Chinese officials were denying that the brawl had even occurred, according to Memoli. Basketball fans in China weren’t thrilled with the fight and went online to take issue with the Bayi team’s behavior, according to the Associated Press.
‘Does the Bayi team think they are better at Chinese kung fu than basketball and that is why they are desperate to show it off,’ a user named JF1113 wrote on the popular microblogging site Sina Weibo.
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The chair-tossing, bottle-flying brawl
-- Amy Hubbard
