We Wuz Fanz

The sportsball Fanz and E-Thot Simps predate the digital era, but never lasted so shamelessly deep into adulthood.

As a young teenager, my bedroom walls were papered with posters of sweaty black men in tight shorts and leather sneakers rubbing up against other sweaty black men. The decor was similar to the bedroom of Emmanuel Macron in France’s Élysée Palace but for very different reasons.

Long before he started penning woke rubbish for Ariana Huffington’s blog, I watched Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sink those silky sky hooks from the elbows of the key.

Magic Johnson was cool with those showtime no-look passes.

James Worthy could take anyone with his first step one-dribble and a finger roll.

Their shoes mattered. Their shots mattered. Winning mattered.

I was a kid. It mattered to my frens and it mattered to me too.

We wuz fanz. We didn’t know any better.

My older brother had a basement bedroom with a futon on the floor.

On his walls?

AC/DC, The Who, and Eddie Van Halen next to Heather Thomas in a blue string bikini. Yeah, that one. He and his friends kept those oversized trojans in their wallets, to show what big men they were, despite silent agreement there would be no circumstances anytime soon where these floppy latex coverings would have any practical use in their lives.

They simped for the latest Hollywood starlets yearning to be famous that flew off that Satanic assembly line. They had no way of “liking their content” or “slipping into their DMs.” If the local record shop had the latest starlet in their poster rack, she found a way onto their walls.

He called me a homo. I called him a slacker.

It wasn’t exactly Andrew Clark and John Bender since I was a two-time state champ at basketball instead of wrestling, but I was also smaller and weaker than him. It was more like Stan and Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds, with him being Ogre.

One day after he did his squats and cleans at the gym with his football buddies he caught me pink-handed, playing his pink Kramer guitar (who was the homo?) in his bedroom.

He followed me up to my room cursing his lungs out until he took my neck with one hand and choked me up against one of those posters of an adult sweaty black man (James Worthy maybe). Things got a little fuzzy, and just before the lights went out I socked him in the nose, breaking it.

The pop sound scared us both. As he examined the blood coming from his nostrils in my closet mirror I raced off to the bathroom and locked myself inside. Your first punch isn’t supposed to be at your brother's nose, but we both learned a valuable lesson that day (more on that later).

Anyway, back when pro coaches slicked their hair and wore Armani suits instead of low-rent Scifi film astronaut training leisure wear, and crowds weren’t so gravitationally challenged they could use their knee joints, quad muscles, and hip flexors to lift themselves to their feet to cheer and scream, I cared about sportsball.

Way back when porno films starred fake Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and nearly up until that time Magic Johnson confessed his Masonic humiliation ritual by mumbling…“I uhhh ohtained a virus” (that also never existed) from—as he was told, having orgies in Jerry Buss’ office, I cared way too much about the Los Angeles Lakers.