BEIJING—The bench-clearing brawl during last week’s exhibition game between the Georgetown Hoyas and China’s Bayi Rockets was merely the latest incident in a long-simmering conflict between Asia’s most powerful country and the college basketball team, historians confirmed Monday. “Tensions between the two have been mounting ever since then-coach Buddy O’Grady came out against Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Revolution of 1949,” said Georgetown professor Anthony DelDonna, adding that Allen Iverson’s visit to Taiwan in 1994, during which the point guard officially recognized the sovereignty of the island state, brought the communist nation and the college to the brink of all-out war. “The only surprise is that anybody made it out of this basketball game alive. The Chinese spent much of the 1980s trying to assassinate Patrick Ewing.” Though further conflicts may be temporarily averted by Georgetown coach John Thompson III and Chinese president Hu Jintao’s agreement to let U.N. peacekeepers officiate games, intelligence reports indicate the Hoyas are now only six months away from completing their first nuclear weapon.