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Many celebrities have unlikely skills. Daniel Day-Lewis can handcraft you a shoe, for example. Margot Robbie can give you a tattoo. Steve Martin can do a magic trick while playing a bluegrass standard on his banjo. But only one celebrity skill matters to me: the ability to play basketball. With the FIBA World Cup starting this week and our mighty Boomers seeking glory, it seems like a fine enough excuse to indulge in the most underrated of celebrity skills.
There’s often a sharp divide between arts and sports, as though people think an interest and affinity for both can’t (or shouldn’t) exist within the one human. This is obviously ridiculous. Bob Marley could’ve been a football star. Julio Iglesias was a goalkeeper before someone gave him a guitar and a Willie Nelson tape. And then there’s Adam Sandler.
Adam Sandler (far right) and Timothee Chalamet (second from left) enjoying a pickup game in NYC last month.Credit: MediaPunch / Bauer-Griffin/ GC Images
Adam Sandler is the patron saint of celebrities who can play basketball. People think he’s a slobby dresser, but the only reason he’s perennially wearing basketball shorts, a loose-fitting t-shirt and high-tops is because he’s ready to drop everything at any given moment for an impromptu pickup game.
The internet is filled with viral videos of Sandler traipsing alone, ball in hand, to some inner-city basketball court, ready to mix it with the locals. He looks like he has a serviceable jumpshot, but his strength is his vision: watch him whip rockets into the low-post to some cutting kid who can’t finish a layup.
Sandler’s dedication to his art is only surpassed by his dedication to the pickup game. Recently, he was spotted introducing Timothee Chalamet into his cult on an NYC court – the two in the middle-age activewear staple of the heather grey t-shirt, Timmy stealthily playing in cargo shorts (you can virtually hear his keys jiggling) to conceal some surprisingly smooth handles.
There are so many great stories of celebrities balling. My favourite is the one where an ageing George Clooney lit up Leonardo DiCaprio and his cocky, trash-talking posse in three back-to-back pickup games. “The discrepancy between their game and how they talked about their game made me think of how important it is to have someone in your life to tell you what’s what. I’m not sure if Leo has someone like that,” Clooney told Esquire magazine in 2013, just to pour some humiliating philosophical salt on Leo’s wounds.
It seems like common knowledge now, but Leo must’ve not known about Clooney’s high-school starter prowess (growing up in the basketball capital of Kentucky, no less), or the fact that pretending to be bad at basketball in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight was the hardest role he’s ever had to perform.
The other great source of celebrity basketball stories is late comedian Garry Shandling’s weekly Sunday backyard pickup game, which one of his old writing partners once described as “Fight Club with better jokes”. Shandling’s comedy friends, including filmmaker Judd Apatow and standup Kevin Nealon were regulars, as were “why were they invited?” names like Breckin Meyer (Clueless) and Ben Schwartz (Sonic the Hedgehog). Sporadic attendees included Bob Odenkirk, Will Ferrell and Borat himself, Sacha Baron Cohen. “Classic three-on-three. Make it, take it. There was no three-point line. You called your own fouls. Games were to 7 by 1,” comedian Wayne Federman, the game’s “commissioner”, once explained.
Two of the more intriguing regulars in Shandling’s game were comedian Sarah Silverman and David Duchovny (The X-Files). Duchovny’s skills are well documented; as a college student, he had a basketball scholarship to play at Princeton in 1978. He played for just one year, distracted by his interest in poetry (his poetry received an honourable mention from the Academy of American Poets) and, eventually, his senior thesis on the work of Samuel Beckett. Stamped into my brain is a post-X-Files interview he did on Entertainment Tonight where he showed off his silky jumpshot to the cameras. I can’t find the clip anywhere on YouTube, but here’s a weird scene of Duchovny playing basketball in erotica king Zalman King’s Red Shoe Diaries (1992) instead.
Silverman is a more surprising name; she was the only woman to ever play in Shandling’s game. She’s regularly said that she played basketball her whole life, and it shows: there’s a great GQ feature where she hams it up on court and yet stills shows off her smart cuts to the basket and a jumpshot that never misses.
But the best celebrity basketballer might be the quietest. There are literally no viral clips of two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali torching kids at the local gym in between collecting drama prizes, but in his college years the actor was a guard at St Mary’s College of California – the same place where Australian NBA icons Patty Mills and Matthew Dellavedova developed their skills – which he attended on a basketball scholarship between 1992 and 1996.
He soured on the idea of a sports career reportedly because of the second-class treatment the team’s athletes received, and turned his sights towards Shakespeare instead. But I am certain he could destroy any celebrity alive right now in a pickup game, probably even four-time NBA Celebrity All -Star Game MVP (and blockbuster comedian), Kevin Hart.
I’m sure you have your own niche Venn diagram of pop culture and personal interests, a shadowy corner of the world where the two converge and your response is, “This is amazing, everyone should know about this”. Like Benjamin McKenzie and crypto, for example. Elijah Wood and Elephant 6. Sammy Davis Jr and Satanism. Mine is celebrities who play basketball. I mean, they’re celebrities, they could be doing anything. And yet they choose to play basketball. That’s beautiful.
Sandler, Duchovny, Silverman, Ali and Hart: that’s a solid celebrity basketball starting five. Someone write the movie and let them do their glorious thing.
The FIBA World Cup begins on Friday. Every Boomers, Team USA and finals game will be live and free on ESPN via Kayo Freebies.
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