I had to sit on the phone with a lawyer for four hours going through every objectionable passage in the first draft of this book, Needless to say, when we were finished, there wasn’t much of a book left.
So a lot of crap from the book got deleted due to both legal and creative issues. The following section, after the jump, is one of them. Hooray, table scraps!
Recent revelations in the life of Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas are that he would undergo his third knee surgery in a year and half (costing him the first half of the coming season) and that he got engaged to his on-again, off-again girlfriend of six years.
Well, Agent Zero finally wrote about the engagement on his blog, and not surprisingly, it involves an elaborate scheme to throw a surprise party for his fiancee and tricking her into proposing to him. D.C. Sports Bog sums it up as such:
Now, the full engagement story comes out, and as you might have guessed, it involves a convoluted surprise party, white lie upon white lie, plane trips to and from Miami, a proposed meeting with Barack Obama, a visit from Mos Def, ice sculptures, a moon bounce, the touching revelation that Gilbert’s “done kicked her out of my house almost every weekend, yet she’s still here and she still believes in me,” several flavored ring pops, and a high school-style note which his bride-to-be had to read out loud.
It would have been a better story, but the juggling midgets canceled at the last minute, then the pyrotechnics went off early and set the petting zoo on fire, and of course the fire department didn’t come for an hour because they’re so used to getting pranked by Gilbert, so he had to put the sheep and goats in the garage, forcing him to move his Maserati outside, because the last time he let farm animals in that thing… Well, let’s just say live chickens and leather interior don’t mix.
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Even though an unheard-of Bucks rookie named Ramon Sessions spoiled the return of Gilbert Arenas last night (17 points in 20 minutes on 5-of-9 shooting) in the most heartbreaking way possible, there was no stopping the Wizards from letting loose and having a blast at DeShawn Stevenson's '80s-themed birthday party. Pictured here is DeShawn with some of the Wizards dancers, all of whom were wearing DeShawn-inspired t-shirts, a carry-over from the second half of the loss to the Bucks where they rocked "I can't feel my face!" half-shirts.
Lucky guy. The only time you see large groups of women wearing shirts with my face on them is outside the courthouse whenever there are missing strippers. They're all "Justice!" and "Put him behind bars!"… as if putting me behind bars is gonna help. That's where the liquor is.
Many more photos of the Wiz and other DC celebs like Clinton Portis at D.C. Sports Bog. Not pictured: George Bush and Dick Cheney as Mike D and Ad-Rock.
Henry Abbott examines a slice of the NBA's culture — specifically, players' dining habits — in this oddly fascinating post at TrueHoop.
[S]prinkled in there among the things players talk most frequently — you hear it again and again — is the Cheesecake Factory.
Nowadays, if ever someone tells me that they bumped into an NBA player out in public, I like to stop them mid-sentence and guess: "Was it at the Cheesecake Factory?" It can make you look like a freaking genius… People always want to know what it's like to be an NBA player. I feel pretty confident that one of the easiest and most accurate things you could do to live just like an NBA player is to eat a meal at the Cheesecake Factory.
Abbott then posits why NBAers are drawn to the Factory and examines who's gone on record in their support of the soulless chain: Gilbert Arenas (natch), Lindsey Hunter, J.J. Redick, Bobby Simmons, and Andre Iguodala, among others.
"Ooh, look at me, I'm a basketball star and can afford to eat with the sultan at the Cheesecake Factory!" Well, la dee dah, you princes of roundball. Some of us are getting by on Ramen noodles and Olde English High Gravity, you know.
Wizards guard Gilbert Arenas is scheduled to miss the next three months after surgery to repair a torn meniscus and microfracture in his knee. But even though he's going to be on the sidelines for the foreseeable future, Agent Zero's still making a splash with his most recent blog entry. He shares his frustration about the injury, his excitement about the four short films he made for his new shoes, and — most candidly — his mixed emotions about the breakup with his girlfriend:
You know what? When stuff goes bad it goes bad. I just broke up with my girlfriend and I don’t get to see my kids for a while because of the breakup…
Now she’s back in California. You ask for space, you know, because everything feels closed in … the house is dirty, the kids are drawing on the walls and on the couches and you’re thinking, “Oh man, I can’t do this. I’m not playing well and I’m coming home to all this.”
So you ask for space and now you got clean walls, clean furniture and you’re lonely. And now you got to sit out three months. Oh man. I guess it has to get bad so it can get good.
That whole passage is just kinda mind-boggling to me. I blog for a living, and I make up stories about hookers and strippers (yes… "make up") to avoid sharing details of my real life, because people on the Internet can be terrifying creeps. Myself included. And I'm not even a celebrity outside of the snuff film industry. Gilbert Arenas is an All-Star, and he's delivering all these emo goods on his blog. I just can't imagine someone like Kobe Bryant doing that. You win a bunch of championships, and hardly anyone calls you a champion. But rape one girl, and you're a rapist for life…
(Image courtesy this amazing Photoshop essay from Wizznutzz)
