Outside

Few sport-related events are as bizarre and endlessly confusing as the NBA Draft, which comes just a few weeks after the end of the nipple-twistingly long NBA season, at the precise moment when the needle on most fans' Give-a-Damn-o-Meter is fluttering between “whatever” and one of those thumbs down/fart sound combinations that was the ultimate dis of 1998.
There was a time when the NBA Draft was exciting, or at the very least, topical. It was a graduation of sorts for the best college players to cross the bridge from undergraduate poverty to instant millionaire status as fans proudly welcomed whatever All American their team of choice had selected from the pool. Then, it changed about a decade ago with the influx of straight-outta-high-school hotshots expediting the process by foregoing college all together. Also, people in countries most Americans (sadly) had never heard of started playing basketball – and getting damn good at it, too.

I wish I could have been in the meeting. I would have had some valuable input to provide, especially considering I'd be from the future, my time traveler identity concealed by a fabulously curly mustache. The meeting? I'm of course referring to the gathering of old-timey baseballers sometime after the Civil War when it was decided that a hat would be required atop the heads of all baseball players.
This is a seminal moment in not just sports history, but in the narrative of Western style. Imagine if some guy named Chester Knickerbocker Westinghouse (those were the sort of names people had back then) were to have spoken up.
“The idea of these caps is a straight crackerjack, I tell ya, but would not we be remiss if we didn't at least explore other head-adornment options?” Westinghouse, also fabulously mustached, would have said, receiving a chorus of “here, here” and “oh bully” from the assembled baseball royalty.

Mark Cuban, the crazy-eyed muscleman who sits at the end of the Dallas Mavericks' bench sweating furiously and sometimes bounding onto the court to scream at officials and attempt to chest bump bemused players, is a very rich man. According to Forbes, only 458 human males with more money than Cuban exist.
But here's the thing, those other 458 dudes don't own the Dallas Mavericks and, thus, don't possess a team that just won its first NBA championship. And what do you do if your team just beat out the most overhyped team in the history of the game? Well, you pick up a bar tab that cost about the same amount as a modest home in your hometown. That's right, the multibillionaire (his money came from computers or dial-up modems or something else that seemed futuristic in 1999) picked up a $90,000 tab (with a $20,000 tip, which, all right, I'll admit is cool) all of which went toward a giant bottle of champagne that only a man with the strength of Thor, whoops, I mean Dirk Nowitzki, could lift. The bottle also appeared to be fully gilded (which means it was covered in gold, y'all) which probably added a few grand to that tab.

On Friday, Shaquille O'Neal plopped the massive collection of muscle that is his body in front of a webcam and told his fans that this past season, his 19th campaign and one that was pocked with injuries, would be his last. The friendly giant has been an institution in pro basketball – for a few years my mother worked out in a Shaq shirt she got in a box of Cheerios, if that's any indication of his popularity – since he began tearing down hoops for shits and giggles during the Clinton administration. But he was more than a basketball player, as those who own a rare VHS copy of the “hit” 1996 film Kazaam know quite well. Here are my favorite Shaq moments of all time.
The Skinny Shaq: The year was 1990 and a lanky man-child named Shaquille O'Neal put on some shorty LSU shorts and began blocking any shot that came near the basket. He once blocked 12 shots against Loyola Marymount in a game that freshman season (he did allow Hank Gathers to score 48 points in the same contest, but whatevs) and did it as a slender, sexy young man. Soon, he began eating.