In arguably the greatest Chappelle’s Show sketch — and therefore, one of the greatest comedy sketches period — Charlie Murphy recounted the time he was beaten in a game of pickup basketball by Prince (it’s a true story). You know it by heart: “Assemble your crew, I’ll be outside,” “Game, blouses,” “…pancakes.” The Purple One himself was a big fan of the sketch, as was Eddie Murphy. The Coming 2 America star was also there that night, and he shared his side of the story on Thursday’s episode of The Tonight Show.
“That is totally and absolutely accurate,” Murphy told host Jimmy Fallon about the sketch. “We had on our club clothes and Prince had on that outfit that was in the ‘Kiss’ video.” The actor said that Prince approached him and his brother, who passed away in 2017, and asked, “Yo, want to play some basketball?” They had the understandable reaction: “What the f*ck?” Murphy continued, adding a new detail to the pickup game:
“My brother was like, ‘Okay, it’s going to be shirts against blouses.’ The blouses won, they beat the sh*t out of us. You know why I think? We had one dude on our squad who could play named Larry and he didn’t have no shoes, so Prince gave him some sneakers. And Prince wore maybe like two, three sizes smaller than Larry, but Larry was so excited to have Prince’s sneakers on. He put those tiny sneakers on his feet, so he couldn’t do his game right. So we lost. The one dude that could play, Prince’s shoes had him shutdown, so he couldn’t excuse.”
There’s nothing in the rulebook that says Prince can’t give someone shoes that are too small to gain a competitive advatnage. You can watch Murphy’s chat with Fallon above.
