On Monday night, LaVar Ball did an interview with CNN and um, it was, yeah, something. The two discussed (if you can call it that) the topic of LaVar's arguable lack of gratitude towards Donald Trump for allegedly getting middle son (LiAngelo) out of jail time. As is always the case with 24-hour news channel segments, no headway was made, and it devolved into an off-the-rails discussion that would give you a headache if you didn't have the option to change the channel. With that in mind, here's the clip anyway:
Afterward Ball was by far the top trending topic on Twitter, which actually probably tells you more about Twitter than anything else. As is the case whenever Ball does something that generates attention, some supported him, some complained about him, and (apparently) some angrily tweeted at LeVar Burton because in the heat of the moment some people don't have the time to differentiate between the most covered dad in the history of sports and the super polite host of Reading Rainbow.
Frankly, there's probably some irony in the fact that a guy who hosted a program encouraging children to read is on the receiving end of ire from people who refuse to do just that. But it's kind of entertaining, from a distance. Here's a few examples of what LeVar with an 'e' deals with:
A week or so ago … I finally tweeted about it, I retweeted it with my comments. I was like, “What is going on here?” Then I looked into it and found out who LaVar Ball was, and then I just laughed. He’s a piece of work. He is a one-person PR machine. I guess he’s operating under the premise that any press is good press, but he’s bucking for one of the most reviled persons in sports right now.
As you can probably see from the ratios, this seems to be a case of the pushback being far greater than the actual issue (wow, there's a shock). As for Burton, this has been a thing he's been dealing with for some time. Back in March he told Bleacher Report:
I guess the lesson from all of this is to always double check before telling a celebrity to go fuck themselves. After all, you wouldn't want to come off looking like some sort of jerk.
