After Ball Don’t Lie posted the follow up video, I realized that I never got around to posting the original. Anyone who likes basketball, hip-hop, video games or smiling will enjoy wasting a few minutes of their life on these.
Archive for the 'NBA' Category
Do you also like logic? If you answered yes, you’d do well to read this piece by Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports about the recent allegations that current Chicago Bull and former Memphis Tiger Derrick Rose may have had someone take his SAT for him and the idiocy of the NBA’s age limit.
If Rose sang or danced or wrote computer code, even if he hit forehands or curveballs and not free throws, his acumen at standardized questions concerning probability, diction and critical reading wouldn’t matter.
They do in basketball because NBA commissioner David Stern wanted to control long-term labor costs and use college ball to market his young stars. In 2005, his league began requiring American players (but not Europeans) to be at least one year out of high school to be drafted.
That essentially sends them to college ball, where outdated and hypocritical amateurism and academic rules exist not because they have any moral basis, but so the NCAA can avoid billions in local and federal taxes.
Isn’t it amazing how much clearer the picture gets when you follow the money?
06
Dec
A fallen Demon Deacon
Some sad news from the world of sports. Fellow Demon Deacon and former NBA player Rodney Rogers was injured in an ATV accident last week, and is paralyzed from the shoulders down. This is obviously a horrible story and my heart goes out to Rogers and his family. What jumped out at me when I read the news story about the accident was this passage:
A Durham native who starred in high school football and basketball, Rogers had returned to his hometown and was working for the city public works department as a heavy machinery operator. He was promoted to a supervisory position six months ago, according to the report.
He was also volunteering as a girls’ basketball coach at a Durham middle school and had set up a computer lab at a city public housing complex, according to the report.
His agent and lawyer, James “Butch” Williams, described Rogers as “an outdoorsman, plain and simple,” according to the report. “He hunts, motorcycles, rides horses. He loves big trucks,” Williams said.
Rogers, who was financially set, took the job with the Durham DPW because he liked working with heavy trucks, Williams said, according to the report.
“Rodney isn’t the type to sit around twiddling his thumbs. There aren’t any jobs he considers too small for him,” Williams said, according to the News and Observer. “He started his own trucking company and was usually the lead driver. He’d be out there driving to the quarry at 3:30 in the morning.”
Michael Balzarano, who oversaw Rogers at the Durham DPW, said Rogers was not working for the city as a lark until he got bored. “I didn’t even know he had lots of money. He is very friendly, very concerned, very conscientious,” Balzarano said, according to the report. “We chose him because of his ethics and his attitude. He was highly motivated. He was promoted to supervisor six months ago.”
Yes. You read that correctly. A guy who played 12 seasons in the NBA and was financially secure was working at the Durham Public Works department for kicks.
I was lucky enough to see him play in person when I was at Wake. The image of him unleashing one of his patented 360 degree, left-handed dunks will forever be burned into my sports memory. I’m not a praying man, but I’ll definitely be thinking good thoughts for Rodney and his family.
26
Sep
Roundup
Image via Flickr user Nrbelex
Dwayne Perkins was one of the first people I met when I started doing stand-up in LA. He’s one of the nicest people in this town, and he’s one of Rolling Stone’s 5 comics to watch.
This catch by Morgan State’s Edwin Baptiste is great because it’s just amazing to watch, and it also validates the theory held by my wife and I. Namely, that athletes are more likely to have memorable names than the average person.
Former NBA player Jon Bender helps rebuild New Orleans.
Mission accomplished…for Osama bin Laden.
Given the Palin problem, now might be a good idea to (re)-familiarize yourself with Thomas Eagleton.
That headline may sound like a childish, personal attack if it weren’t so very true. Clearly, the guy is morbidly obese. And his idiotic proclamations about sports are approaching legendary status. Finally, we find out why his writing is so uninformed. He’s fucking blind.
But there’s one issue driving improved ratings that likely won’t be touched by all the NBA talking heads on TNT and ESPN.
Tattoos. Or rather the lack of tattoos in the conference finals.
Part of the reason more people are watching these playoffs is because the average fan isn’t constantly repulsed by the appearance of most of the players on the court. Most of the key players left in the playoffs don’t look like recent prison parolees.
The only accurate way to describe Garnett, Pierce, Duncan, Allen, Manu, Parker and even Kobe is "clean cut." Yeah, there are a couple of tattoos in that group — Duncan has something on his back, Kobe still has his post-rape-allegation tat — but the Lakers, Spurs and Celtics have far less ink on average than your typical NBA franchise.
Like most of the nonsense this guy spews, this isn’t based on any evidence or facts. It’s just his own clear distaste for tattoos projected onto the entire population of pro basketball watchers. Obviously, anyone even remotely familiar with the rosters of the remaining squads can do a quick search and come up with various examples of Kobe’s ink, KG’s ink, Chauncy Billups’ ink, Tim Duncan’s ink, or Luke Walton’s ink. But that isn’t even necessary. Whitlock’s idiotic thesis is refuted by the image that’s featured on the web page where his column appears. God bless ‘Sheed.
10
Aug
Gilbert Arenas: Asshole
A week or so ago, Gilbert Arenas posted an observation about shark attacks on his blog. The crux of the post was that there are no such things as shark attacks because they all happen in the water, which is the shark’s domain. Initially, everyone remarked about how it was kind of an old premise that he was trying to pass off as a new observation. Turns out, it’s worse than that. Arenas was finally forced to admit that he stole the joke from comedian Ian Edwards. Arenas is a smart guy, so I was expecting a candid, honest mea culpa. Instead, here’s what Agent Zero had to say.
Listen, nobody even heard of Ian Edwards before me. He’s no Chris Rock. I helped him become famous. Now everybody is going to YouTube and looking him up.
The joke was worth about $7 when I heard it, now that I’ve used it’s probably worth a little bit more. I’ll sell it back to him for $7.78. Seventy-eight cents, Ian, you can put that in a royalties check made out to me.
Puffy and Ashanti made careers out of stealing other people’s beats. This is America, the land of the reused.
If you think about it, nothing is original. Every joke has been retold at some point. What I did was recycle a new joke instead of waiting for it to get old. It was too funny not to. I mean, at least I picked a good joke, right? It’s not like it was some lame, “Yo momma” joke.
It’s one thing to steal someone else’s joke. (And that’s what you did, Gilbert. You stole it.) It’s an entirely different level of assholery to then defend said thievery with this lame explanation.
Here’s Ian Edwards performing that very bit on Conan.
One of my daily must-reads is ESPN’s excellent NBA blog TrueHoop by Henry Abbott. They’re currently running a piece detailing Brazilian sensation Leandro Barbosa’s journey to the NBA. Canadian writer Gregory Dole recounts the tale of escorting Barbosa to the US for his round of workouts with NBA teams. Apparently, Dole saw Barbosa’s on a Brazilian basketball mix tape and knew he was an NBA caliber player the moment he laid eyes on him; which is pretty much how the rest of the basketball world felt once they saw him in a Phoenix Suns uniform.
Here’s a taste from part 1 of Rolling with Barbosa:
However buried deep in the goof’s mixtape is a guard who is off the charts. The player’s skill seems almost unbelievable, like a legend of street basketball. I can’t really begin to describe it other than to say that he is off the charts. Off the charts and from some unknown universe. An alien basketball lifeform, unlike anything I have never seen before.
Like all Lakers fans, I’ve seen exactly what he can do in the playoffs for the past two years. If you haven’t had the pleasure, here’s a little taste of what The Brazilian Blur is like on the basketball court.
10
May
KG, are you listening?
Via GetGarnett.com
