Ball Don't Lie launched a little attack on rapper Lil Wayne last spring when he, like Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea, was denied the star treatment by the Oklahoma City Thunder. The recording artist didn't plan things out beforehand and expected to receive a basketball benefit for free in the form of courtside seats at a Thunder playoff game, and he was swiftly shut down.
And, on the karmic end of things, he's more than made up for it by out of nowhere deciding to donate the outfits for Jonas Jerebko's youth basketball camp. That's right — Lil Wayne gave Detroit Pistons forward Jonas Jerebko the keys to the Trukfit kingdom. From SLAM Magazine, via Piston Powered:
SLAM: You hosted a basketball camp this past summer in Michigan. How'd that go?
JJ: It went great. That's something I always wanted to do. I kind of wanted to do it at home—coming from Sweden, I wanted to give an NBA experience to the kids over here. But I just felt like the best situation was in Detroit and I wanted to have my own basketball camp. We got about 50 people signed up for it, and then we decided to fill the camp up—we wanted to have a full camp—so we got in contact with an AAU team down in downtown Detroit, and we gave that team free scholarships for the whole camp and we just decided to fill the camp up with free scholarships. We had kids from all over Michigan send applications via YouTube on why they should come to the camp for free. Kids were driving three hours [to come]; we had kids from downtown who couldn't even get to the arena, so we went and picked 'em up. The kids got free t-shirts and gear—Lil Wayne was really nice and sent a lot of Trukfit gear.
SLAM: Wait, what?
JJ: I don't really know how he found out about it, but somehow Wayne got word of it and was kind enough to send gear for all the kids.
Credit to Adam Figman for the interview, and the proper reaction. "Wait, what?" is the absolute correct thing to say in this instance.
Lil Wayne is from New Orleans, not Detroit, and he appears to have no connection to Jerebko or his team outside of a nice play on words from his tune "La La."
My paint bubbleish, the motor so vicious
The rims the same color as the wrapper of a kiss
First some hyphee, thump it like a piston
And when I'm in Detroit, I'll be ballin' like a Piston
Jerebko, the Swedish-born Piston forward that is working his way through a tough season (36 percent) from the field, mentioned this as an aside. So there's no telling if Lil Wayne makes this a common practice, and donates free gear to all manner of youth camps without public mention. It's a heck of a lot better than whining about not being afforded celebrity ducats by the Thunder on Twitter, as Flea did as well, and a sound move considering the Detroit locale and Jerebko's less-than marquee status.
We'll leave it to the comment section to make the appropriate puns based off of Lil Wayne song titles as a summation, because we admittedly fall well short in that arena.
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