Richard Boock: Basketballer's conviction gives lie to old maxim

American writer Heywood Hale Broun once opined that "football is a wonderful way to get rid of aggression without going to jail".

How wrong could he have been?

If anyone was wondering, they only had to follow the court case in Dunedin this week when former Otago basketballer David Jarvis was found guilty of assaulting an opponent during a club match.

The rare charges arose after it was claimed Jarvis deliberately elbowed Tony Ashton in the head last year, a blow that caused the victim to fall to the ground and sustain a "traumatic brain injury".

Now rehabilitating in a residential facility in Nelson, the 21-year-old can walk, but is still restricted on his left side.

Crown witnesses argued the blow was deliberate, defence witnesses insisted it was an accident, and a Dunedin jury favoured the prosecution.

They found Jarvis guilty of injuring in circumstances that, had death occurred, he would have been guilty of manslaughter. He will be sentenced next month.

But it's hard to feel completely comfortable about the verdict, which raises pertinent questions about consistency and fairness, not to mention the exact location of the so-called "line" drawn in the sand.

After all, an elbow in basketball is pretty routine stuff, not too dissimilar from a late challenge in soccer, a low-blow in boxing, a beamer in cricket, or a corner-cutting manoeuvre in Formula One.

It's illegal under the laws of the game but it's hardly unusual where tall men like Jarvis make a career out of competing for possession above their heads and at close quarters.

Far more serious, you might have thought, was the incident last year when an opposition player chased Breakers basketballer Dillon Boucher into a car park after a game and punched him in the head.

Of course, there have already been many successful prosecutions around the world for violence within sport, notably the damages that Kiwi and Tigers forward Jarrod McCracken won from Marcus Bai and Stephen Kearney after a spear tackle in 2000.

There have also been landmark cases in British soccer, possibly the biggest in 1988 when Swindon Town's Chris Kamara became the first player in the history of the English league to be fined in a court of law for an assault on the field.

And then there have been the great escapes: Roy Keane's brush with the law after his horrendous tackle on Norwegian Alfie-Inge Haaland, Mike Tyson's let-off after biting the ear of Evander Holyfield or Lee Bowyer's much-publicised head-butting of team-mate Kieron Dyer.

But if any sport has courted legal controversy over the issue of violence it would have to be Canadian and American ice-hockey, a game that embraces body-checks and sucker-punches as much as it does powerplays and breakaways.

A long list of ice-hockey players have been hauled before the courts over the years on assault charges, where cases are usually examined on the basis of the code's "norms", and the accepted notion of "implied consent".

The way the US Supreme Court sees it, people who agree to participate in collision or contact sport also implicitly consent to a degree of physical force that would elsewhere be considered illegal.

That is, it would be against the law to run down Sunset Bvd tackling people, but perfectly acceptable within the confines of an NFL match. Quite how Jarvis ended up being prosecuted for throwing an elbow (deliberate or not), given the frequency of that type of foul in competitive basketball, is anyone's guess.

Only in Dunedin, perhaps?