Note to Self: Hit Self in Face

If you happened to affect a youtube search this morning for the word “Hansbrough” (as in UNC big man Tyler Hansbrough), you would have found that the first result is a video of Hansbrough playing ping pong on the Roy Williams show during his freshman year.

In the midst of playing ping pong against some guy we don’t recognize (possibly a host of the show), Hansbrough puts away a particularly vicious slam and decides to throw out a little smack talk, saying:

“You can’t hit what you can’t see.”

That line seems to have a particularly interesting newfound meaning in the wake of Duke’s Gerald Henderson clubbing Hansbrough in the face while giving a hard foul in the closing seconds of Sunday’s game. (Because while you may not be able to hit what you can’t see, apparently you can hit something (or someone) very hard in the face if you see them doing something that you don’t like.)

And in this case, Hansbrough was going up for an attempt near the basket with UNC leading by 12 with under 20 seconds left.

Needless to say, Henderson clocked him.

Much of the post-game talk seems to have been centered around whether or not Henderson intentionally meant to hit Hansbrough.

If you asked us, we’d say that given the situation, yes – it seems pretty clear that Henderson meant to take Hansbrough down and make him pay for unnecessarily running up the score.

With that said, he may not have meant to make him look like an extra from one of those basement brawl scenes in Fight Club (which is to say, very bloody), but the intention to harm/discipline/physically admonish was clearly there.

We should also mention that the second and third video clips we found of Hansbrough (after the ping pong clip) were both videos of this incident. We bring this up because we found ourselves rather entertained by the discrepancy in headings and descriptions. The first video we saw was described as follows:

“Tyler Hansbrough suffers cheap shot from Gerald Henderson
Needless to say, this made me absolutely furious. Henderson deserved the ejection and one-game suspension he received. This is why I hate Duke.”

And the caption for the second video read:

“Gerald Henderson vs. Tyler Hansbrough
Gerald Henderson punks Tyler Hansbrough and makes him cry.”

We have to admit – even though we agree in theory with the UNC fan’s rational (if not slightly annoying) editorial, we do find ourselves amused by the Duke supporter’s much simpler one-line phrase, despite its blatant immaturity and oversight of the evidence.

Actually, who are we kidding – we love it because of its blatant immaturity and oversight of the evidence.

The lesson here is twofold:

1) If you’re going to go up for a dunk or a lay-up in the closing seconds of a game that your team already has well in hand, you first should probably ask yourself if it’s really worth potentially getting your face bludgeoned. (We’re guessing Tyler Hansbrough has probably learned this lesson, at least on some level.)

2) If you’re attempting to make people see things from your viewpoint when posting sports-related mini editorials on youtube, try not to make yourself sound so nerdy and uptight that some Duke fan can just swoop in and completely derail your argument with about 12 seconds of effort just by simply coming across as far less irritating than you, even though he probably is incredibly irritating and has absolutely no rational ground to stand on and juxtaposed next to just about anything other than your argument his claim would look completely ridiculous.

And now for some strange reason we kind of want to lace up our basketball shoes, head out to the court, go up for a lay-up and then throw an absolutely brutal flagrant foul on ourselves, in large part because we’ve just wasted an extraordinary amount of time talking about what two dufuses probably spent about 30 seconds writing on youtube.

In sum, did Tyler Hansbrough get punked by Gerald Henderson, did the UNC fan get punked by the Duke fan, or did we just get punked by ourselves?

We have this sinking feeling that the latter is true.

Now where did we leave those basketball shoes?