Thank God this — totally fabricated — rumor has finally been put to bed. After an on-court altercation between Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Garnett extended beyond the hardwood last season, outlets, including us, picked up an erroneous report KG had said Carmelo’s wife, La La, “tasted like Honey Nut Cheerios.” In La La’s new book, The Love Playbook, she divulges the truth surrounding the cereal brand heard round the world.
We never believed this silly thing was true, even for a second, and that’s with friends and strangers at the bar chiming in with their own “expert” analysis and amateur lip reading. It always seemed ridiculous and it exposed the very worst parts of the online world, and humanity’s capacity to obfuscate when a lie is more “palatable” than the truth.
KG definitely said something messed up, how else to explain Carmelo’s reaction, and it was probably a whole lot worse than some cereal brand allusion to his wife.
As Marc Berman of the New York Post details in his piece about La La’s book:
“I wasn’t ever going to bring up the Honey Nut Cheerios incident again. But since I’m writing this book, I might as well set the record straight for good,” La La writes. “Kevin Garnett in fact had never said that I tasted like Honey Nut Cheerios. I tried to figure out how this big lie was turned into a media firestorm. I still can’t answer that one…Melo and Kevin are cool today. And now it’s nothing but a faint memory.
[…]
“I asked Melo about it and all he said was that Kevin said things you shouldn’t stay to a person you have a friendship with or respect for. [Melo] told him I’m not some rookie. We’ve been in this league a while together so don’t treat me the way you’d treat a rookie. I’m sure the words were a little stronger than that but that was the gist of what Melo said back to Kevin.”
So there you have it. KG said something that pissed ‘Melo off because ‘Melo’s not a rookie (KG is notoriously more wolfish when it’s a younger player going against him), and Anthony’s emotional response only poured gasoline on the rumor. But rumors are just that until they’re confirmed wrong. Now we have confirmation, so lets hope we never again have to think about this story.
As the wife an NBA player, La La also addresses the unique deal fellow New York basketball player, Andrei Kirilenko, has in place with his Russian pop star wife.
La La also takes issue with the wife of Nets forward Andrei Kirilenko, who once was quoted as saying she “allows her husband one night a year to do whatever he wants with whomever he wants.”
“By letting your man have ‘a free pass,'” La La writes, “you’re opening the floodgates.”
Noted.
What do you think?
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