Division II Tuskegee University men’s basketball coach Benjy Taylor was escorted off the court in handcuffs after Saturday’s (January 31) road game against rival Morehouse College, ESPN reports.
Video shared on social media by HBCU Gameday shows Taylor confronting a security officer as his team exchanged postgame handshakes with the Morehouse College players and being placed in handcuffs and led off the court after a brief exchange. Taylor and Tuskegee athletic director Reginald Ruffin both said that the coach asked the security officer to help remove multiple Morehouse football players, who he claimed were “yelling obscenities,” from the handshake line while claiming that they were creating a “security breach.”
“I am at a loss for words, and I am upset about how I was violated and treated today,” Taylor said Saturday in a statement to multiple media outlets. “For my players, my family and people of Tuskegee to witness that is heartbreaking for me.
“I was simply trying to get the football team out of the handshake line as they were following right behind me and the team yelling obscenities! It was a very dangerous situation.”
Ruffin denied the security officer’s recanting that Taylor was “very aggressive” during the exchange while speaking to HBCU Gameday and disagreed with the officer’s assessment that “security measures” were “mandated by the conference,” adding that he thought the coach acted reasonably.
“He asked the security officer, ‘Can you please remove them from the line?’ That’s what he asked the security officer,” Ruffin said.
Civil rights attorney Harry Daniels announced that he was hired by Taylor to pursue a possible lawsuit, claiming the Morehouse football players were “acting aggressively” toward the Tuskegee basketball team and their families.
“Such behavior from the Morehouse football players, particularly their intermingling with the basketball players on the court and during the postgame handshake is prohibited by conference-mandated security protocols,” Daniels said in his statement obtained by ESPN. “When Coach Taylor asked two police officers to enforce those protocols attempting to diffuse an increasingly dangerous situation, however, one of the officers chose to place him in handcuffs and escort him from the court.”
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