Last week, when we discovered Old Spice’s amazing video game, Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 ½ Weeks to Save the World, and once I was done playing it for 72 hours (catch the damn ballots, you morons!) I slipped into one of my very common NBA nostalgia wormholes. And what started out as a search for Mutombo finger wag GIFs actually turned into me revisiting Manute Bol’s career and subsequent extracurricular activities.

Of course, Bol passed away in 2010 due to kidney failure and a rare skin disease, but his legacy has lived on through the Ring True Foundation, which was Bol’s most important effort in aiding the people of his native Sudan. Unfortunately, as I looked through a number of pictures, videos and articles about Bol’s life, I was disappointed by the overwhelming use of the words “side show” and, even worse, “freak show” to describe the way that some people exploited his height.

What a lot of people either don’t remember – or just choose to ignore – is that Bol traded this perceived nnotion of exploitation to support his foundation. So even when he was “shamefully” boxing William Perry or hanging out with jockeys and riding horses, Bol was doing his part to make the lives of others that much better. After all, the cause may not matter in the long run to a lot of people, but George Clooney thought it was enough to get arrested over, so hopefully Bol has been bragging to St. Peter and the boys about that.

This isn’t news, but I thought it might be fun to remember Manute Bol, not as a sideshow but more of the main event. Big shoes, son of Manute. Seriously, huge shoes.

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Earlier this season, there were fantasy football reports across the major sites that included a rather depressing update about Houston Texans receiver Andre Johnson. I don’t remember which NFL reporter was involved, but these reports basically read something like, “Andre Johnson’s knees are done and he’s a shell of his former self” and yadda yadda. And it doesn’t matter who the reporter was, because Johnson has been a maniac for Houston of late, with 670 receiving yards over his last 5 games, and that includes a stupi-ridicu-tastical-donkulous 288-yard performance on Thanksgiving against the Detroit Lions.

But this isn’t about AJ’s on-field performances, at least not until he presumably torches the New England Patriots on Monday Night Football this week. This is about how Johnson took 12 “at-risk” kids to a Houston Toys-R-Us yesterday and let them run wild, grabbing as many toys as they could in 80 seconds. The result? Johnson shelled out more than $19,000 for their efforts.

Hold on a sec, my eyes just started leaking happy juice.

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Everyone take a seat. We’re going to stray from our typical topics of dick jokes and boob praise in order to have a serious conversation about social injustices. Homeless people exist, my friends. No matter how much we try to look at the ground or pretend that we’re looking at a really interesting thing in the sky when we pass them, homeless people are real and they need to be treated with respect as human beings. Even the homeless dudes who sell drugs outside my local library or the ones inside that library watching porn – they all deserve their dignity.

That’s why ideas like the now defunct “HoboJacket” are supposedly bad for humanity. What exactly is HoboJacket? The philanthropy’s founder, MIT student Jin Pan, explains that it is “a competitive platform where you can donate your rival college’s jackets and shirts to the unfortunate because it’s terribly unfortunate that people actually went to that other college.”

For example, I hate Marshall, so I would donate some Herd gear and $10 to HoboJacket and it would serve two purposes: 1) A person who needs warm clothing would get just that; and 2) People would see a homeless person wearing a Marshall jacket. Basically, because homeless people are all dirty with their big beards, crazy eyes and B.O., this would be embarrassing for Marshall fans.

Now, imagine how this idea has gone over with social activists. Go ahead and check the HoboJacket website for yourself. Yeah, it’s gone over about as well as a fart in a spacesuit.

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The Boston Celtics lost the 1987 NBA Finals to the Los Angeles Lakers in 6 games, but basketball purists and diehard fans will probably tell you that the Eastern Conference Finals between the Celtics and the Detroit Pistons was the real highlight of the playoffs that year. The particular legendary moment that a lot of NBA fans probably don’t even realize they’re viewing a few dozen times per season took place in Game 5, as the Pistons were on the verge of jumping out to a 3-2 series lead, before Larry Bird stole Isiah Thomas’ inbound pass and chucked it to Dennis Johnson for a game-winning layup. Even if you don’t think you’ve seen it, you have. It’s right here. Watch it and then say, “Ohhhhhhh yeah.”

Anyway, the reason that I bring this up is because a group called “Lift the Children” is trying to raise $56,000 via FundRazr to help some orphans in Kenya build a quality sports field so they can have a little fun and be better than my lazy ass at sports.

GRACE CARE CENTRE is home to over 200 children. There is nowhere for them to safely access a playing field. Please help turn their dreams into reality by contributing to this campaign, so the orphanage can purchase a field they desperately need.

Like most wise fundraisers these days, this group is trying to raise awareness by creating a viral video and job well done, folks. Lift the Children’s brain trust created a video of the orphans from the Grace Care Centre reenacting footage of the 1987 Eastern Conference Finals, complete with the original game announcers, and it is just spectacular.

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Won't someone please think of the Ice Girls?

Not like they really needed it, but we can add yet another reason to support the NHL players as we enter Day 70 of the NHL lockout – they’re good human beings. New York Rangers center Brad Richards and Philadelphia Flyers forward Scott Hartnell got together and decided to partner with Caesar’s Atlantic City to create a charity hockey game known as “Operation Hat Trick”, which won’t feature many of the league’s best players, but it will showcase some guys who want to play a little hockey and raise money for Hurricane Sandy relief. Somewhere, an NHL team owner wiped his ass with a $100 bill and stuck it to an orphan’s cheek.

According to Richards:

“It’ll be a real, 60-minute game,” Richards said. “The focus will probably be more on the offensive side. But we’ll put on a good show for the fans.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if this incredibly generous act led both sides of this lockout to finally sitting down for an entire day and hammering out a 50/50 deal, instead of the owners trying to find any and every way to take as much money from the players as possible? Haha, I know, that was my funniest joke of the year.

The game will be played tomorrow at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, and Rangers goalie Henrik Lundqvist recognizes that while it sucks for players and fans that there probably won’t be a 2012-13 NHL season, that’s a far cry from the pain that people in New York and New Jersey, among other states have been dealing with.

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I don’t know what it is about NBA players that makes them so much more fun to criticize and make fun of than other pro sports stars. Maybe it’s the holier than thou mentality or the rock star “swag” and godlike baller image, but people just tend to either love or hate NBA stars more than other athletes, and that’s typically fine because they seem to like it. And even though a lot of the league’s stars are as transparent as invisible glass, we’re still pretty big suckers for when they break character and the villain becomes the good guy or the good guy becomes the great guy by helping a good cause.

Before heading to Los Angeles for tonight’s game against the Clippers, the Oklahoma City Thunder, which you could argue is a team of good guys and Kendrick Perkins, hit up the City Rescue Mission in downtown OKC to serve food to more than 400 homeless people on Monday. Even if you absolutely loathe the Thunder, you have to admit that this was rather swell of them.

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