As a language and rhetoric person, I find Artest's apology, as a discursive act, very interesting. As a Thunder fan and Artest hater, I find it rather hollow. Here is the apology:
There are some interesting rhetorical moves imbedded in this statement--moves which rather remind me of the spontaneous utterances (a legal term) offered by people I've arrested as a police officer. Here's what I notice.
During that play, you know, I just dunked on, you know, Durant and Ibaka, and I got real emotional, real excited and it was unfortunate that James, you know, had to get hit, you know, with an unintentional elbow. And I hope he’s okay, you know. The thunder, they’re playing for a championship this year, you know, so I really hope that he’s okay. And, you know, I apologize to the Thuder, you know, and to James Harden. It was such a great game, and it was unfortunate, you know. So much emotion was going, going on at that time so. . .That’s it for today [smiles, apparently having been directed not to answer any questions].
1) "I got real emotional, real excited."
Here, Artest offers the excuse for his actions. His implicit argument here is that the incident was simply an expression of Artest's emotions, which are of course universal and involuntary human reactions. Again, this mirrors the excuses offered up by many who have just committed crimes who wish to minimize their culpability by blaming their own emotions with statements like "he was talking noise and I just lost control." I'd be interested in a study of such use of emotion as excuse is a feature in the language of apologies in other cultures. I have a sense that such moves are made possible by our culture's privileging of emotion.
Our culture views emotion as central to decision making, and in fact we assume that such a view is natural common sense. We base our decisions about who to marry (and divorce) on how we "feel" about another person. We judge whether or not we are in the right career based on how the job makes us "feel," and we assume that the "right" job carries with it the intrinsic reward of feeling good during and after the work. It is, then, not a surprise that appeals to emotion appear in our expressions of apology and excuse as well. Somehow, we are bad people if our trespasses are logic based (think of the concept of "premeditation). But if they are emotion based, we are just people who make mistakes. We didn't behave out of evil, but rather, we just over-reacted to our own emotions. Artest implies this here as well. He minimizes what he has done by making sure we understand that he did not draw up a plan on the bench to strike Harden and take out the sixth-man of the year. Rather, his action was an unplanned emotional outburst-- natural reaction to just having out-performed the likely league MVP (KD) and on of the best interior defenders on the league (Ibaka).
2) "It was unfortunate that James, you know, had to get hit. . ."
There are a couple things going on in this sentence. One is embedded in the word "unfortunate." Here, Artest transfers agency away from himself and onto the concept of fortune--fate, destiny, Moira. The elbow wasn't the action of a person but rather of plain old bad luck.
The second salient feature of this sentence is the use of passive voice. That is, in the structure of this sentence, no one does any hitting. Harden simply was hit. In fact, he "had to be" hit. Artest conspicuously leaves himself out of the action of this sentence. My sister Tina, a Spanish translator for an insurance company with a highly sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the language, once talked about her occasional frustration in dealing with insurance claims based on a cultural reluctance in many Spanish speaking countries to admit wrong-doing (as we all know, in auto-insurance claims, "fault" is a big deal after an accident). In Spanish, she says, it would be very uncommon for a person to say "I did such and such," but rather "such and such was done [by me]." So, the syntax of the language is actually structured in such a way that actually forces speakers to distance themselves from action.
Since she's told me about this feature, I've been more sensitive to this occurring in English, a language that privileges agency and active voice verb constructions. In English, if someone is leaving themselves out of a sentence, is is conspicuous and telling. And this is exactly what Artest does here. No one hit Harden. Rather, it is simply something that happened. In fact, it is something that "had to" happen--again, an act of fortune, or misfortune, as the case may be.
And all this happens even before he finally simply claims that it was "unintentional." All the features I've pointed out here function to distance Artest from his own actions. He minimizes his own agency, deferring instead to emotion and to fortune (twice each, as it turns out). It's an "apology" that, again, shares the features of confessions made by a criminals who make admissions with their defense still in mind. So, to those of us who were already critical of Artest, his statement hardly seems like an apology at all. These are not the words of a contrite man who had been trying to change his image only to have this setback. Rather, they are the words of a man who had really not changed that much at all.
