The Portland Trail Blazers of the early 2000s were a very talented but volatile bunch. One of the many infamous incidents when it comes to those “Jail Blazers” was a fight involving Zach Randolph and Ruben Patterson in 2003, and the former spoke about it during an appearance on Podcast P with Paul George.
“Man, listen, Ruben is a bully man,” Randolph said. “… He slammed me, man. He’s a bully. Ruben is strong, man. So he come in, he just got done lifting weights, now he ain’t got no body fat. I’m 18, 19. This a grown man. I think he probably 28, 30, 29.”
“He come in the locker room, ‘Can’t nobody slam me.’ After working out, we in the locker room,” Randolph continued. “… So I’m sitting around, I’m like, I’m from the hood. So I grew up locking up in the yard. We dumping each other every day. That’s fun… I’m thinking somebody going to say something like you got me f***ed up or something.”
“Nobody say nothing,” Randolph replied when George asked if anybody said anything. “… I stood up, try to grab him, we lock up, he slammed– he throwing me all in the lockers. Boom! Boom! I’m trying to, I’m 19, I ain’t going. So I’m trying to, man, it’s a difference, grown man strength I found out then it’s different.”
“So he slammed me in the locker, boom, all over the locker room. Boom, boom, boom,” Randolph stated. “So we get back to the middle now, Portland, in the locker room is carpet on the floor, but underneath the carpet it’s concrete. So I’m standing off thinking he going to grab me again. We get the middle, he dropped on me, grabbed my legs. Man, pick me up bro. Like this and thump me on my back like a WWE fool.”
“Slammed me so hard, bro, they had to come carry me, had to pick me up,” Randolph said. “… They put me on the stretch table, iced me up… I couldn’t walk, I walked with a limp. I couldn’t practice for a week, I had a bruised tailbone.”
Teammate Rasheed Wallace called it “The Slam Heard Around The World” and Randolph admitted he found it to be rather funny. He didn’t find Patterson’s actions to be funny, though, and there was going to be some sort of retaliation.
When Patterson and Quintel Woods got into an argument a few weeks later in practice, he took his chance. Randolph punched his teammate in the face and fractured his orbital socket.
As you might imagine, Patterson was incensed and it took about six players to hold him back from hitting Randolph. Both he and Woods were told to leave the facility and go home to get away from him.
Randolph revealed both of them wanted to stick around to beat up Patterson but did leave eventually. While he got away scot-free there, Randolph ended up being suspended for two games and was fined $100,000 by the team for being the instigator.
You would think the Trail Blazers might have wanted to get one of the two off the team sooner rather than later after this, but that wasn’t the case. Randolph and Patterson remained teammates until 2006 when the latter was traded to the Denver Nuggets. A year later, Randolph was traded to the New York Knicks.
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