Michael Beasley Shows How Not To Deal with Hecklers in Fight Video

For professional athletes, there are proper ways of dealing with hecklers, and there are improper ways of dealing with hecklers.

For a lesson on the latter, we turn to Michael Beasley. The Minnesota Timberwolves forward joined Oklahoma City Thunder star Kevin Durant in Washington Heights, N.Y., for a friendly contest on Thursday night, but it wasn't long before Beasley totally lost sight of the "friendly" pretense.

As you can see in the above video, a heckler on the baseline got Beasley's attention after a player on Durant's team made a free throw. Instead of ignoring him, Beasley totally lost control. After some pointing and yelling, he walked right over to the heckler and shoved him right in the face.

Naturally, this precipitated quite a reaction from the crowd, and the actual game was delayed for about 10 minutes, as both Beasley and the crowd cooled off.

Now, I'm no expert on the New York streetball scene, but I don't think it would be much of a stretch to say that it's pretty common for bystanders to jaw and heckle at players. It's nothing out of the ordinary for basketball in general, really, but the perpetrator in this particular instance clearly said something that rubbed Beasley the wrong way.

That doesn't make what Beasley did right. It's also not cool to disrespect another man by shoving his face. That's barely above slapping another man. Even more important than that is the fact that Beasley is a professional athlete.

Yes, I know the "professional athletes are held to a higher standard" card is overplayed, and that nobody likes it when it is played, but hey, that doesn't mean it's not true. Like it or not, Beasley has to be above crap like this.

For example, he could have taken a lesson from the guy standing immediately to his right at the start of the clip. In case you missed it, Durant had an issue with a heckler earlier this week, but he didn't let things get out of hand. He did engage the guy in some banter, but it was nothing serious.

For the most part, Durant just did what he does best, and that's light up the scoreboard. When he was finished, he made sure to give the heckler a wave.

Now that's how it's done. Instead of losing his cool, Beasley would have been better off playing it cool. If he really wanted to get back at his critic, he should have just done his thing, and then made sure the guy was paying attention. It may be a subtle way to go about it, but that's a pretty effective way to deliver a nice "[bleep] you, man" message.

A message like that has the power to shut up any heckler. Game over, battle won.