Tomas Satoransky grimaced a little bit as he could hear the sounds of an argument beginning between his teammates. It was like this whether they won or lost. John and Bradley always found something something to disagree about, and, while some of the other teammates ignored the arguments, others couldn’t resist coming to the defense of one or the other of the primary combatants.
“You ain’t even playing! Get out!” yelled Bradley, who had come out from the showers, dripping wet and nude, to confront John, who was wearing the suit he had worn on the bench. “Get out of here! You don’t belong here!”
“Last I checked, I was on the team too,” John snarled, getting in Bradley’s face. “Why don’t YOU get out? Management’s gonna trade your ass anyway. Prolly for Drummond or some trash like that.”
This comment caused Bradley to shove John, but the conflict didn’t immediately escalate beyond shoving. Tomas was glad; he had been beseeched repeatedly by coach Brooks to show some locker room leadership and defuse these fights when they started getting physical. Keeping one eye on the side of the locker room where Bradley and John were now separately stewing, he started changing out of his game jersey into his street clothes.
“DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!” John suddenly screeched, running at Bradley and tackling him from behind, where they rolled around in a scuffle that featured very differing levels of nudity. There on the locker room floor, they whaled on each other while teammates clapped and hollered for their preferred combatant, or just for the spectacle of the fight itself.
Sighing, Tomas walked over, knowing that he wouldn’t make anything past a token effort to break them up. “Scott said we gotta stop fighting,” he said, but if his statement was heard over the sounds of the fight, it wasn’t acknowledged. “Trevor, you’re supposed to be a vet, can’t you do something?” he said to the nearby Trevor Ariza. “Maybe they respect you more or something.”
Trevor nodded and walked into the fray. Instead of trying to restrain one or the other, however, he simply contributed his fists to the collection of flying fists already present. Swinging his fists with abandon, Trevor didn’t seem to care who he was hitting.
“That didn’t work,” Tomas said to himself, worried that some of his younger teammates would join the fracas now that Trevor had set such a poor example for them.
“OW! MY BALLS!” Bradley screamed in agony, and Tomas, who had been prepared to just walk away from the whole situation, couldn’t help but stay and observe. In a very suspect fighting technique, John had bitten down on Bradley’s scrotum and was trying to rip it off with his teeth. This unfair action immediately prompted Dwight Howard, also in a suit, to withdraw a sledgehammer from his locker.
Tomas didn’t want to watch anymore. “I’m not paid enough for this,” he said calmly, turning away just as Dwight brought down the sledgehammer onto John’s injured leg while yelling something about “giving you some more bone spurs”.
“AAAAAAAHHHHH” John wailed, immediately releasing Bradley’s testicles from his mouth to clutch his leg, which, while not broken after the first sledgehammer hit, was cleanly broken in two by the second swing.
Bradley, for some reason, took exception to Dwight intervening in “his” fight, and got back to his feet. He walked over to where Dwight was gloating over his fallen opponent and started slapping Dwight’s ass with open palms. “Gluteal injury not feeling so good now, is it? IS IT???” he yelled as he whacked Dwight’s butt-cheeks repeatedly, much to Dwight’s bemusement.
Scott Brooks had just walked in, but, upon seeing a naked Bradley spanking a fully-clothed Dwight while a crippled John weakly defended his face from Trevor’s punches, he turned around to leave. “Looks like you got it under control, Tomas,” he said before he walked out.
Tomas sat down at his locker with his head in his hands. “You know it, coach.”