UPDATE (1:45 p.m.): And now, Sports Grid has uncovered video of the brawl, which we’ve embedded above. As you might expect from the descriptions below, it isn’t pretty.

UPDATE (12:00 p.m.): Wang’s report on the fight dropped shortly after we published this post. It’s pretty crazy — apparently after a shoving match, center Henry Sims had a chair thrown at him, which led forward Moses Ayegba to walk onto the court with another chair. Thompson then pulled his team off the court after, Wang writes, “Chinese police…made no attempts to break up any of the fights taking place on the court.”

In 1979, the then-Washington Bullets were the first American basketball team to visit China after then-President Jimmy Carter opened up a relationship with the nation. As J. Freedom du Lac noted in his oral history of the trip, the Bullets’ trip was credited with “tipping off a new era of sports diplomacy.” The Georgetown University’s men’s basketball team’s trip, on the other hand, was not quite as successful.

The Hoyas are currently on a pre-season trip to China — and during a game in Beijing against the Chinese Basketball Association’s Bayi Rockets, the team got into a brawl after head coach John Thompson III pulled his charges off the court in the middle of the fourth quarter:

So what led to the messy brouhaha? It sounds like some aggressive play, combined with some one-sided officiating, at least according to an (admittedly biased) account from a Georgetown fan message board:

Two minutes into the fourth, they were pressing full court, trapped one of our guards (I forget who it was), and then must have pushed or punched him on the ground after he made the outlet pass, because then there was a shoving match and then a bit of a fight, and then the whole thing set off. He tried to get away as quickly as possible as the Chinese players sort of converged on him, and then benches cleared, and then people on the Chinese bench started picking up chairs. Everyone on the other side of the court started fighting as well. Brawl spread all over the court, and then off the court. After it kicked off it immediately became possible for the crowd to get involved, and then they did. As we tried to get the team off the court, bottles (plastic ones, thankfully) came out of the crowd at the team and everyone left. Security was there (sort of), but it was more equivalent to mall cop-quality security rather than actual security. The Georgetown staff wanted the security to get on the floor, but honestly these guys didn’t have a clue what to do. They escorted the whole alumni contingent out fairly quickly after that. Game over, 64-64 (following another intentional foul).

Thompson, for his part, kept the discourse diplomatic:

“Tonight, two great teams played a very competitive game that unfortunately ended after heated exchanges with both teams. We sincerely regret that this situation occurred.

We remain grateful for the opportunity our student-athletes are having to engage in a sport they love here in China, while strengthening their understanding of a nation we respect and admire at Georgetown University.”

We’re told that Post reporter Gene Wang, who was on hand to cover the tour for the paper, is preparing a report from the scene. It should be interesting to see whether Wang is able to glean any kind of reaction from the players, or whether Thompson will want to keep things close to the vest. No matter what they say, though, we’re guessing that this is probably not what Vice President Joe Biden had in mind when he met with the Hoyas to encourage their “effort to strengthen the U.S.-China relationship through sport.”