Let’s Please Not Make “the Slap” More Than What It Is

The last time America got riled up about a slap was in February, moments after the University of Wisconsin’s basketball team closed out a 77–63 win over Michigan. As the teams lined up for the customary postgame handshake, Michigan head coach Juwan Howard angrily told the Wisconsin coach Greg Gard that he’d “remember that shit,” referring to a timeout Gard took late in a game where the outcome was no longer in doubt. Smith swiftly moved toward Chris Rock, who made the mistake of telling a joke that compared the buzzed head of Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, to Demi Moore’s in the movie G.I. And at the Oscars, Smith totally lost control in public, something that I can’t remember him doing in the decades since he was the goofy kid in the “Parents Just Don’t Understand” video. ESPN’s Dick Vitale, the face of the network’s college basketball coverage for five decades now, best represented those fragile sensibilities by calling for substantial measures: “INEXCUSABLE behavior by Juwan Howard MUST LEAD TO SEVERE PUNISHMENT.