Michigan coach Juwan Howard turned the handshake line into a haymaker line Sunday afternoon after his Wolverines got pummeled by host Wisconsin.
"Juwan Howard just threw a right hand!” CBS announcer Andrew Catalon said as the former Fab Fiver kicked off the brouhaha with his slap/punch/mush to the face of Badger assistant coach Joe Krabbenhoft. “And now we’ve got a scrum! We’ve got a scrum in Madison!”
According to the broadcaster, Howard was miffed that Wisconsin coach Greg Gard had called a timeout late in the 77–63 blowout. Gard said as much in his postgame interview:
Judging from his own postgame comments, Howard isn't exactly the picture of remorse:
Making himself the center of attention by being a bonehead has become old hat for Howard. He did his best to start a brawl last year during the Big 10 tournament and was ejected from a quarterfinal game for going after former Maryland coach Mark Turgeon. Howard interjected himself in a less violent way last week at Iowa, getting a technical for absentmindedly walking onto the court to pick up a rolling basketball.
Back to me: I was at a charity fundraiser on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. in the '90s when Howard was in the middle of his ho-hum stint with the team that drafted him out of Michigan, the Washington Bullets. There were a pair of Juwan Howard’s sweat pants up for auction, with a $12 starting bid. Nobody bid on them, and I saw an organizer of the event toss Howard’s unwanted collectible into a box at the end of the night. Watching the tape of Howard throwing his right hand over and over, I was mostly thinking about how I could’ve had those sweat pants for just $12.
