Lord forgive me but LaVar Ball is back on his AAU nonsense again. After losing it on his son LaMelo after a blowout tournament loss, it’s hard to think the basketball world’s coverage of a random AAU team in California could get any more obsessive. But then Ball makes his team forfeit a game because he thinks the officials are “cheating.”
Ball apparently pulled his AAU team off the court leading 69-60 after he got a technical foul for arguing a call with officials. As USA Today notes, Ball kept saying “that’s not a foul,” then questioned the official’s manhood. There are highlights of the game below from Ball Is Life, and you can see Ball pull his team off the court around the seven minute mark.
You can hear Ball call something “bulls–t” shortly before he’s T’d up, which is probably what caused it all to go down in the first place. After he stormed out, video caught Ball talking to other people about what happened.
“I’m not gonna have my guys playing hard and they cheating,” Ball said. “I don’t play that s—t.”
All of this was filmed, of course, as Facebook is doing a reality television show about the Ball family that will be sure to auto-play on the website at some point in the future. The foul itself seems pretty innocuous, and a technical foul when you’re up nine points doesn’t seem like that big a deal. So perhaps all this was staged as some juicy but ultimately harmless drama for the cameras.
“We had some raggedy-ass refs try to cheat us out of our game,” Ball said in an interview afterward, quickly pivoting to advertise a pop-up shop to sell some Big Baller Brand gear.
Meanwhile, Lonzo went to the game in a brand new Rolls Royce. You can get a good look at it, and him talking to a young woman while a boom mic hovers overhead.
https://twitter.com/LeadingSports_/status/888860097090211840
We really do live in strange times.
