It's one thing to go and play with LeBron James. It's quite another to face Bruce Manley.
Perhaps you are not yet familiar with the name. Manley is something of a YouTube cult hero for his rather picturesque basketball trick shot skills.
Somehow, Shaquille O'Neal, the newest Cleveland Cavalier, saw the video. Apparently, his ego was piqued even more than when he saw Orlando's Dwight Howard claim to be Superman.
So what did the NBA's king of social networking do? He Twittered a challenge to a HORSEing duel.
"i wanna play this guy n horse for a thousand dollars, find him pls http://bit.ly/CK5nk," read Shaq's tweet.
According to the HoopDoctors.com, Manley has accepted Shaq's challenge and the contest should happen some time in July. So I really would encourage everyone to look at the YouTube video I have embedded.
If you are not utterly astonished by his tree-point shot, then your emotions have left you for another woman. And, yes, I said tree-point shot--no spelling mistake.
As for the shot Manley hits totally blind from behind a wall, well, if that isn't extraordinary talent then I am the new chief executive officer of the Golden State Warriors.
Will Shaq be able to compete against this kind of ability? It will be very interesting which H-O-R-S-E rules they choose to play. But, if I were a betting man, and perish the thought, I would be betting Manley.
Unless, of course, there's some very fine editing going on here.
I wonder about college basketball coaches. It's hard for them to be squeaky clean. Or even vaguely shiny.
So they certainly don't need their daughters' social networking to cause more discombobulation in their attempts to be a cross between Vince Lombardi and Mahatma Gandhi.
You see, I am currently placing my mind beneath the shiny hair of John Calipari, the new basketball coach at the University of Kentucky.
Calipari does seem to make quite a few people tense involuntarily. I am suddenly reminded of a 1994 incident in which Temple coach John Chaney threatened to kill Calipari at a press conference. (I have embedded the video, purely for nostalgia's sake.)
One recent critic appears to be an ESPN.com journalist named Pat Forde. Forde happens to live in Kentucky and tends to drizzle on the Caliparade. For example, when Calipari was hired, Forde asked during his introduction whether the Kentucky athletic director would mention his two trips to the Final Four. Or merely one.
"Because the first one, with Massachusetts in 1996, was officially vacated from the NCAA record books after an agent hooked up star center Marcus Camby with cash and prostitutes," Forde said.
Now Calipari is a fond Twitterer. He tweeted that he thought Forde's criticisms were personal.
But the coach's socially networked stirring is nothing when compared with that of Megan and Erin. These would be his daughters. Both are college students. And both are esteemed Facebookers.
Megan unfortunately used Facebook to reveal who would be Dad's replacement at the University of Memphis, which might not be considered perfect media management.
Indeed, it prompted Dad to be quoted by CBS Sports as saying: "I told them that they have to get off Facebook. This stuff is crazy."
The feisty girls decided not to listen to Dad. In fact, the highly amusing folks at Deadspin have been following Erin Calipari's remarkably literate Facebook postings about ESPN's Forde. They make for stirring digestion.
The dictionary definition post, for example: "To Pat Forde, Pat Fording. Pat Fording (verb): To say or write something with no background or sources. To act like you know something when in fact you do not. 2. To repeat the same story in different words 3 or more times. eg. "You told me that story three times!" "Oh, sorry for Pat Fording that."
Or how about the hair-besmirching post: "Source: "Pat Forde's hair received improper benefits of around $10,000 from Just For Men Hair Club and his hair also had someone take his SAT for him."
Gosh. What will Daddy tweet now? Will he take away their laptops? Will he have them transferred to Oral Roberts? Or will the wise avuncular corpses at the NCAA decide that social networking, even by family members, is a heinous violation?
- prev
- 1
- next
