For as long as people have been posting humiliating home videos to YouTube with the hopes of becoming the next Star Wars kid or Tay Zonday, my absolute favorite has always been the goofy white kid showing off his slam dunk moves on a NERF hoop in his basement. Naturally, I’m a little geeked that after several years of being the (latest) authority in telling us about those videos, Daniel Tosh finally tracked down the man who was once that boy in his basement for a new segment entitled, “30 For 30.0”.

Of course, I also worried that it would just be typical Tosh fare, in that he’d help recreate the original video with his own special, snarky touch, but the guy who once stabbed Kate Upton in the tit with a banana actually put a little extra into this spoof, recruiting Jalen Rose, Bill Simmons, Spud Webb and even Darryl “Chocolate Thunder” Dawkins to tell the story of Ryan, a goofy redheaded kid from Michigan who was a beast on the NERF hoop.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »