'Twas a riot.

Forgive us for not doing our homework. We mean plowing through the archives for the classic riots in sports and then comparing them with the two that occurred just before Thanksgiving--the Friday night riot in Detroit (Pistons vs Pacers) and the Saturday afternoon football brawl between the U. of South Carolina and Clemson.

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They had to rate with the horrors of all-time. Heck, back in the '20s and '30s, pro basketball had to put cages around their courts to protect the players from UFO's and all kinds of garbage, including a lot of fans.

The worst punch ever thrown in basketball was the tremendous roundhouse delivered by Kermit Washington that crushed the jaw of Rudy Tomjanovich and nearly killed him.

It was the same kind of blow with which Yankee catcher Bill Dickey once broke White Sox star Carl Reynolds' jaw and got himself suspended for a month.

What we couldn't remember or locate were any massive player-fan riots that compared with the free-for-all between fans and players in Motown.

It was ugliness at its worst: A group of players, led by Pacer Ron Artest, knocking each other around and then jumping into the stands to take their whacks at some of the fans.

That was enough ugliness for a whole season, but not for that particular weekend. The very next day, the Gamecocks and Tigers wrote another glowing chapter into the annals of donnybrooks.

It started in the middle of the field, lasted for 11 minutes, covered 60 yards of the gridiron, and made the perfect sequel to the festivities in Detroit.

It was brutal, grotesque, and more than a little heartbreaking for the great veteran coach, Lou Holtz.

It was awful to see him caught in the middle of the melee between the ruffians, doing all he could to restore order. What made it so terrible was that it was Holtz' last game. After 32 years of coaching, he was retiring from the game he loved and the players deserved being horse-whipped for their gift to him.

As the TV camera kept moving around the field, it stopped for a moment on a familiar face. The announcer made no mention of it, but we recognized it immediately. It was Steve Spurrier, who was going to replace Holtz at South Carolina.

He stood motionless in back of the sideline, with an odd look on his face. His mouth was slightly open and he appeared to be smiling at what he was watching, but it really wasn't a smile. It was more of a contemptuous sneer at what was unraveling before his eyes.

One interesting thing about the two terrible riots: In the basketball brawl, it was the fans against the players. In the football scrap, the fans never invaded the field.

This is what Larry Brown, head coach of the Pistons, said in the New York Daily News following the riot:

"Coaches and players hear a lot of vile things and see some terrible things from fans.

"If somebody throws a plastic cup of beer at you outside, you go right after him. But the rules are different inside the arena. If you're gonna cross that line and go into the stands, I think you gotta have a better reason that that. It wasn't just last night, as out of control as things were. It's more than that. I've been thinking about this all night and all morning. It's our society.

"It's one kid being able to disrupt a whole class.

"It's one player being able to disrupt a whole team.

"It's a couple of out-of-control players and some out-of-control fans nearly starting a riot.

"This is all about a culture where it's some kind of rule that you can't back down. This is every kid beating his chest after dunking the ball, or making a shot. It's every guy who makes the kind of pass you're supposed to make, and his teammate gets a basket, and the guy who threw the pass acts ticked because the shooter didn't acknowledge him. This is the sense of entitlement in sports that I can do whatever I want to whenever I want to and you can't tell me not to.

"I'm talking about the whole thing now. I'm not defending anybody, or trying to defend any case here. If a fan had come out onto the court at the start of this, and attacked (Ron Artest), that's one thing. If a guy gets physically attacked, he's got a right to defend himself.

"But does a plastic cup of beer give him the right to go up into the stands and start beating on people? Maybe I just should start accepting that we live in a world where way too many people, and I'm not just talking about sports here, think they can say or do anything."