Kevin Garnett is my favorite athlete of all time. My AIM screen name growing up was ‘MattKG21’ (don’t judge), my high school basketball number was 21 (ya I balled), and I once took a two-hour lunch break at my old job in Boston because I heard he was at a mall downtown (he wasn’t).
The reason KG was my go-to guy was because he was an entertainer, a showman. Not just for the playoffs, not just when his team was playing on national television, but when he was playing Milwaukee on a random Tuesday night in February. In a league with a bunch of pre-madonnas and me-guys, KG never takes a night off from doing his job. You won’t see him schmoozing with Drake on the sidelines or a tweet when he accidentally sends a dick pic to a groupie. He’s the last of a dying breed of old-school, blue collar ballers.
And he’s always making gains.
That’s why I loved the story from Howard Beck’s Oral History of Kevin Garnett when he got turnt over an episode of Making the Band:
“Tyronn Lue: A lot of people do all their howling on the court and they’re faking just for attention, but what he does is genuine. So one day we were at his house and we were watching Puff Daddy’s show ‘Making the Band,’ and in one of the scenes, some new guys came in and were trying to sing and were trying to compete against the guys who had been there. And KG just got so hyped, ‘Motherf—-r, you’ve got to stand up for yours! You’ve got to fight! Motherf—-r, you’ve got to come together!’ He’s going crazy, he’s sweaty. And he just head butts the wall and put a hole in the wall of his house.”
No, no. That doesn’t seem like him.
Yep, definitely happened.
[H/T For the Win]