Untold: Malice at the Palace

 

Untold: Malice at the Palace is a Netflix distributed documentary that goes into deep detail surrounding the 2004 brawl between Detroit Pistons fans and a few Indiana Pacers players.

This documentary did a great job being impartial unlike the media at the time. I couldn’t believe some of the things media personnel were saying. They would never be able to get away with some of the racist language that they used against the NBA players today. I was young when this originally happened so I didn’t really have much of an understanding as to what went down but now that I’ve seen this, I feel really bad for the athletes involved. Many of them were robbed of their opportunities to win a championship and some had an unnecessarily tarnished image for the remainder of their careers.

The issue to me is with the fans. The emotional investment for some of them was really out of control. I will never understand why some fans feel like they have the right to assault professional athletes or that they can do anything else besides just watch the game.

In the end I thought this was a well-made documentary that left me with a deeper understanding of what happened in 2004. I also see how the NBA still has so much more to learn when it comes to protecting their players. Almost 20 years later, it’s sad to me that the culture shift still hasn’t happened and that fans are still behaving so disrespectfully to players.