Tony Battie: Assault Isn’t Magic

Tony Battie, power forward and center for the Orlando Magic, has been a professional player in the NBA since 1997.  He got his start with the Denver Nuggets during the 1997 Draft.  The Nuggets only held on to him for his first season in the NBa for some reason, shuffling him off to the Boston Celtics.

His stay with the Celtics was a better fit, spanning six seasons before he was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers.  He didn’t stay with the Cavaliers long before they traded him to the Orlando Magic in exchange for two other players: Drew Gooden and Anderson Varejao.  He has been with the Magic ever since.

Battie has played in the NBA for ten years, and for a while it looked like he would beat the odds, not becoming one of those players that gets in trouble with the law when success goes to his head.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t to be. Battie succumbed to the pressure like so many before him.

A few years ago Battie faced criminal charges while with the Celtics.  He was arrested for assaulting an officer after dragging a police officer behind his car.  When he went to court he copped a plea of “sufficient evidence” in exchange for a continuance. The plea means that he admits the police may have been able to make a case against him if the arrest had gone to trial.  So far the case has never gone to trial.

Battie was also present during a fight in a club in Boston in 2000. During this fight Battie’s team mate, star player Paul Pierce, was stabbed repeatedly.  The fight broke out in response to Pierce’s lewd comments to two women in the club.  Battie and other team mates present rushed Pierce to the hospital.

The arrest was fraught with mishandled evidence and bungled witnesses, causing the Boston Police Department a great deal of embarrassment.  Everyone expected a conviction of the three men charged with the crime against Pierce, but mishandled evidence and spotty witness testimony kept that from happening as expected.

During the trial, witnesses even accused the prosecutor of identifying defendants for them prior to trial, instead of relying on their memory.  For some reason this testimony was ignored by all but a few reporters, and the trial continued on its crooked path.  In the end the jurors acquitted the defendant’s based on Pierce’s trial testimony, which was much less certain than his ID of the defendent at the time of the attack.

Battie continues to play with the Magic. He saw court time in every game last year and averaged 7.9 points and 5.6 rebounds per game.  Since his two arrests in Boston and the stabbing of his team mate and friend, he seems to have been trying to keep himself out of trouble, concentrating on his game instead of his social life.