Basketball Player Tweets Apology After Choking Teammate During Game

As sports freak-outs go, this one's pretty epic.

Our antagonist protagonist here is Renaldo Balkman, a former University of South Carolina star (as seen above) who spend a few years in the NBA and now plays pro basketball in the hoops-mad Philippines.

During a Wednesday night game Balkman, in the simplest terms, lost his mind completely. Upset when he didn't get a foul call, he began arguing with a referee and just yelling in general. Teammates tried to intervene. He shoved one, hard. He shoved another teammate. That one shoved him back. So Balkman grabbed him by the throat and squeezed for a second before a group of teammates intervened.

The game broadcast, not surprisingly, caught Balkman's conniption on camera and YouTube video of the incident was basically unavoidable on the sports social web Friday morning. Here it is:

After the bad publicity, Balkman then took to his Twitter account on Friday morning to apologize for choking teammate Arwind Santos and also for pretty much everything else. Here's what he had to tweet:

Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images