These days celebrities and high paid athletes can’t get away with anything anymore. You can’t cheat on your girlfriend or wife because you’ll get busted by someone with a cell phone camera. You can’t sleep with a call girl or get busy with a stripper because she’ll likely write a book about it afterward and rate your performance and talk about the size of your unit. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, here we are, trash talking is now public discourse.
Turns out now, that NBA players can’t even get away with trash talking on the court. Thanks to Twitter which has become the pipeline for everything behind the scenes, trash talking is no longer sacred. Trash talking used to be the colorful banter on the court between players that only those with press passes and those lucky enough to have court side tickets had the privilege of hearing. Reporters didn’t even publish the smack talk they heard players say to each other, but now players are. Well, one player is, Charlie Villanueva.
Charlie Villanueva in my opinion, broke the cardinal rule of sports. He tweeted that Kevin Garnett called him a “cancer patient” on the court. If you’ve ever seen Charlie Villanueva you already know where KG was going with that. Inappropriate? Only off the court in my books. Frankly, if you looked this up in dictionary of Real Men, you would find this under the heading “bitch move”. Villanueva might as well have ran home and told his mommy. Seriously. Grown ass men don’t do this type of shit. Heck, high school girls don’t do this type of shit.
Garnett has since stated that he didn’t say that, rather he was saying that Villanueva is a “cancer to his team”. Bullshit. But of course KG had to say that in his defense, cancer is polarizing issue and in the public arena KG’s comments are distasteful and grossly inappropriate. But he didn’t make those comments in the public arena, he made them on the court where they’re allowed and that’s where they should have stayed.
The debate on whether professional athletes should be banned from using twitter to discuss team and league matters has be an ongoing one. While Twitter is a tool for athletes and celebrities for effective media control, those 140 characters can have Million Dollar Consequences. You wonder how this incident will affect KG in terms of sponsorships.
