Ball Don't Lie: NBA True Horror Stories — 'Deep Fakes In Deep Space'
Ball Don't Lie: NBA True Horror Stories — 'Deep Fakes In Deep Space'
Will James Harden succeed in his diabolical plan to counter the NBA's new fouling rules?
The point of The Classical was...well it changed a lot, and I regularly went months without remembering it. But broadly I would say that the point was to provide a home for weird sports writing in every possible guise, and to let writers do stories that they might otherwise not be able to do because other websites were “trying to make money” and “had reputations to uphold.” And while we did not make money or uphold any kind of reputation, we most definitely ran weird stories. It is a testament to our success in this area that I don’t really think of Katie Heindl’s Ball Don’t Lie horror stories as really being much weirder than some of the stories we ran that didn’t involve, like, Paul Pierce becoming a vampire. They were, and are, as exuberantly and unflaggingly strange as all the other Classical stories that I loved best; as with all those stories, only Katie could’ve written them.
The website came and went, as websites do, but Katie kept delivering every Halloween. Even at the end, when I was only putting up a few stories a year, one of them would invariably be Katie retelling the “The Masque Of The Red Death'' such that it somehow involved Jonas Valanciunas, with one of those goofy gorgeous Griffen illustrations up top. I remember putting one up on my last day at Deadspin, in 2019. And I remember last year, with the website offline and the world hunkered down and miserable at the beginning of whatever wave of pandemic that was, writing one of these forewords for another Ball Don’t Lie. Then as now I was delighted to see that this tradition lives on, not just as a testament to the power of strange ideas and goofy jokes but to the enduring appeal of doing something silly because you love it, and because it makes you happy, and because you know there are some other people out there who will pick up what you’re putting down. As long as there is someone willing to write this kind of story—to send Patrick Beverley to the very end of space, or to turn Jayson Tatum into a werewolf, or wherever Katie goes next—there is hope.
David Roth
October 2021
The first part of the idea came to James Harden as he was crushed under Deni Avdija’s body. Harden had heard the whistle and knew he’d finally had a foul called in his favour after what felt like the longest first week of an NBA season in his life, but a realization hit him the same time the Wizards 20-year-old rookie did: he was too old for this shit.
He counted himself as one of the greatest actors not just in the league, but alive and working, but even he couldn’t sell contact if it meant being sandwiched between the floor and a young player whose body might as well have been made of elastic every time.
The new fouling rules were here to stay. Adam Silver had told him as much when he vowed to take his revenge on Harden for throwing a Spalding basketball at Jae'Sean Tate in Rockets practice before the 2020-21 season and his trade to Brooklyn.
u KNOW we’re with WILSON now 😡
Silver had texted him after the news got out. Followed by,
I vow to take my revenge 😘
Then,
Sorry, meant 😈
And finally, like Harden couldn’t put two and two together, a text came from Silver after the Nets second preseason game,
ICYMI: THE NEW FOUL RULES ARE MY REVENGE 😝
Harden knew there was no way to get around the new rules so he looked instead to the source of most of his frustrations — Patrick Beverley. Well, Beverley and the crop of young and long, springy players the league was overrun with every season. How could he slow them down, make their every move so laboured and obvious that there’d be no way the refs would think it was Harden who was making contact by angling himself just so to meet them?
The second part of the idea came to him when KD showed him a meme he’d posted from one of his burner accounts, a joke about the Lakers all hitting that beach that makes people old from the movie Harden was too scared to watch because he loved beaches and didn’t want to ruin them.
“Because the team is so old, do you get it?” Durant pressed.
Harden had feigned a smile around the straw of his ubiquitous smoothie, like he always did when Kevin showed him one of his tweets, but quickly put his hood up to hide the real smile spreading across his face, like the smoothie was doing in his head as it gave him brain freeze.
The invitation seemed legit enough. Beautiful thickness and paper weight, a tasteful eggshell white, printed with a bold, crisp, sans serif font so he knew it came from someone with no time for the trappings of a bygone era. And the message itself was just as confidently declarative: COME TO SPACE!
It had to be from Bezos. This was his chance to take that rich guy rocket up to space and back and brag about it. The only All-Defensive and All-Space player in the league!
It wasn’t until later, when he was strapped into the seat of the rocket with the earth receding into a little blue and green dot outside the small windows, the skin of his face forced against his skull with so much velocity he wondered if he was going to permanently look like that gross green ghost from Ghost Busters, that Patrick Beverley wondered why it was him, LaMelo Ball, Matisse Thybulle, Trae Young and Deni Avdija on this special flight.
Angling his head as incrementally as he could against the g-force, he saw that the other four were smiling, the youthful and taut skin of their faces barely affected and even retaining a healthy glow in the cold void of space.
How old are they? He thought. Gotta be ten years younger than me. And why would Bezos pick these guys? Is it some kind of Eastern Conference showcase thing. But then, I’m the only one from the West? What could we all have in common?
He felt on the verge of something but was interrupted by a sudden beeping from the ship’s console and a sharp, agitated voice that sounded a lot like Jeff Van Gundy announcing that the flight course was adjusting for deep space.
“W-what,” Beverley struggled against the chair’s restraints, trying to sit up and free himself, “this thing’s supposed to turn around!”
But he realized his headset was not connected, and that, judging by the confused looks on their faces, the other guys couldn’t hear him. Instead, just before the gas being pumped into the ship’s cockpit filtered through his helmet, Beverley heard an all too familiar laugh in his earpiece.
“Enjoy the flight, Pat, and see you in 20 years!” James Harden hooted. It was the last thing Beverley heard before he passed out.
It was halfway through the season and Harden felt great. His body was once again unbruised, he was back to making multiple trips to the line every game, and the Eastern Conference was collapsing around the Nets like, well, a black hole. He chuckled to himself and accidentally ingested some smoothie up his straw and down the wrong pipe.
He hunched over in a coughing fit and KD was there quickly, knocking him on the back with an open palm.
“You drink those too fast,” he chastised.
Harden waved him off.
Durant settled into his plush seat and went back to endlessly scrolling his feeds. Harden gazed out the window at the stream of white headlights coming toward the team bus as it rumbled onto the freeway and away from downtown L.A. and Staples Center, where the Nets had just beat the Lakers.
It was almost too easy, Harden thought, remembering the winded look on Dwight Howard’s face, Westbrook shooting the wrong way over a confused Rondo, and LeBron eyeing Harden, a little suspiciously, as he made it to the line yet again after a sluggish hack from Trevor Ariza.
Soon the whole league’s gonna be this old, Harden thought with delight.
Harden had cleared the East of most of his personal threats but left Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid and the entire Celtics roster intact. The disappearances of LaMelo, Thybulle, Trae Young and Avdija were being kept quiet by each player’s team because no GM would ever admit that something was wrong while simultaneously thinking the reason for the other absences in the East were strategic, some kind of advanced load management. Targeting the West would have been too obvious, but with how healthy the Nets were, and Harden’s foul problem solved, Brooklyn was winning enough to make it seem natural. Plus, with Kyrie Irving’s prolonged absence and new fixation on “moving past the 4th dimension”, there was enough attention on the Nets that Harden felt like he was hiding in plain sight.
But he was bored. It was something he’d hardly accounted for.
No, he thought, tightening his grip on his cup, squeezing more delicious smoothie up the straw, stick with the plan. If this works, they’ll be back before the season is out in our time, but it’ll be two decades of their time. Bezos is never going to stop doing those stupid launches and I can keep sending the most young, promising and naive players to space to prematurely age them for the rest of my long and championship-filled career.
“James, did you see this?” Durant was thrusting his phone into Harden’s face.
Harden, annoyed at being snapped from his ring-clad reverie, roughly swatted KD’s hand away. The phone went clattering down the bus’s aisle, screen shattering. KD just shrugged and pulled another phone out of his pocket.
It would’ve done Harden some good, had he read the headline floating there on Durant’s smudged up screen. He would’ve realized another NBA season, and his entire plan, was about to fall apart.
ABSENT NETS GUARD KYRIE IRVING DISAPPEARS. CRYPTIC NOTE FOUND IN CONDO. SOMETHING ABOUT FINDING 5TH DIMENSION.
Patrick Beverley came to just as Trae Young was repeatedly smacking his own elbow in an exaggerated move to signal that he was about to do a wrestling drop onto Beverley’s chest. Beverley quickly rolled to the side just as Young hit the floor where his body had been.
“Ow!” Young cried.
“What the hell were you doing?” Beverley shouted, rising unsteadily to his feet.
“We were trying to wake you up, Pat,” LeMelo said cheerfully.
“Don’t any of you know CPR?” Beverley levelled a pointed scowl at each of their faces and four sets of eyes sheepishly dropped to the floor.
“It always works on the Undertaker,” Young murmured, back on his feet.
Beverley looked around. Best he could tell the rocket was intact, but still hurtling toward deep space. There were piles of foil and food wrappers littering the floor.
“What’s all that?” Beverley motioned with his chin to the piles of trash.
“We got hungry,” Thybulle shrugged. “We found it in one of the compartments.”
“But there isn’t anymo—”, Avdija was interrupted by LaMelo elbowing him in the side, “there isn’t much left,” he corrected.
“Space food sucks,” Young added, “We’re hungry.”
Beverley felt a dull throbbing in his head. It was one thing to be cruelly sent to deep space by one of your enemies, it was completely another to be babysitting while you were there.
“Listen up!” Beverley switched to his best heckling from the bench voice, “I don’t know what the hell you rooks have been up to while I’ve been out, but we’re in big trouble.”
He sent Thybulle to look for escape pods, Avdija to look for instructions, figuring there was a good chance they might be written in Russian (he thought all Euro players were Russian). LaMelo he instructed to clean up the garbage and he had Young go look through all the closets and containers, in case there was anything else they could eat or use in them. Young had begrudgingly gone away muttering, “But I’m in my fourth year.”
At first, the monitors and controls seemed way too complicated to read. The ship was a little green blip on an old-fashioned sonar screen filled with nothing else but empty, black space. But something nagged at him. He took a step back. The positioning of all the monitors was way too familiar.
Secaucus! A disembodied voice suddenly echoed all around him.
Beverley jumped back, eyes darting all over. There, one of the walls of the ship was, warping? Shimmering like a heat mirage. He squinted hard and swore he could make out an all too smug familiar face.
“K-Ky?” Beverley sputtered.
Jaaaavie, the now eerily floating space head of Kyrie Irving said.
Just then Thybulle and Avdija came stomping back into the control room, the apparition of Irving vanishing as they did. Avdija had his arms full of binders and Thybulle was dangling a set of keys from his fingers.
“Who were you talking to?” Thybulle asked.
“Nobody,” Beverley shook his head, sure the pressure of deep space was pulling his brain apart, “what did you both find?”
Avdija dumped the binders down on the ground and started flipping through the sheets of paper inside. Some of it so old it had perforated edges.
“Just numbers,” he shook his head, “no words.”
Lines and lines of random sets of numbers went across each page. Coordinates? There was no way to tell. Beverley turned to Thybulle, who handed him the keys. Attached to the key ring was a diamond-shaped piece of foam.
“A floater,” all three said at once. There wasn’t an NBA player working who didn’t recognize the keychain used on yacht keys so they wouldn’t sink if they fell into water.
For a brief moment the three of them smiled sadly, remembering the boats they’d ridden on, wondering if they’d ever ride on boats again, but then a muffled screaming came from the hall outside the control room.
A bound and gagged man was shoved in, tumbling to the floor.
Young came in behind with his arms crossed, “Look who I found hiding in one of the utility closets with months worth of space food.”
Beverley nudged the man over with his foot, so he was looking up at them with wide, but somehow still beady little eyes.
“Tilman?” Beverley cocked his head.
Tilman Fertitta writhed angrily on the floor.
“Why’d you gag him?” Beverley asked Young, who shrugged.
“He wouldn’t shut up about wanting me to franchise a Saltgrass Steakhouse.”
Beverley ungagged the billionaire, “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Jeff! JEFF!” Fertitta immediately started to scream for Jeff Bezos, “Alexa, call Jeff!” He screeched.
Beverley put the gag back. Fertitta had been tricked like the rest of them. “He thought this was a rocket for rich guys,” Beverley sighed, “The sad thing is, he was right.”
“These are some crazy stats!” Came the enthusiastic voice of LaMelo from behind them. They turned to find him cross-legged on the floor, flipping through binders and popping open packet after packet of the newly discovered rations.
“Stop eating those!” Beverley scolded. “And what do you mean, stats?”
“Well,” LaMelo says tentatively, “they might not look like our stats, but these are definitely stats. Here,” he points to a line of numbers with a finger covered in powdered space gravy, “these gotta be Offensive Rebounds. Look how many there were! But we don’t recognize those kinds of numbers because they were way more prevalent in—”
“The 80s!” Beverley exclaims, snapping his fingers. “Of course!” Beverly spins to face the monitors again, backing up a few steps and putting his arms out in front of him, making his hands into two Ls to frame the control room between.
“What’s he doing?” Young whispers nervously to Thybulle and Avdija, who shake their heads. LaMelo happily tears open a bag of dehydrated cheese.
“Secaucus! That’s it!” Beverley hoots. “I knew it looked familiar. You young fellas might have the strength, length and revolutionary conditioning, but you sure as hell don’t have as many technical foul calls as I do,” Beverley beams, “It’s the NBA replay center in New Jersey, where Javie reviews calls from.”
The four younger guys squint at the consoles and screens.
“And these binders," Beverley picks the one up LeMelo has cradled in his lap, “these must be his records. All the stats from all the games he ever ref’d.”
“Oh!” LeMelo exclaims from the floor, where he’s picked up another binder and flipped it open to the first page, “He’s right, look, it says right here, ‘Property of Steve Javie — DO NOT READ’.”
“But if this is Javie’s crib, then where’s he at? And why would the league send him up here?” Young says skeptically, glancing around.
Beverley frowns. “Silver must have known space was the one place no one could interfere with the reviews, and Harden hates Javie. Not from personal experience, just on principal, because the man called so many fouls in his day. That’s why he sent us to deep space on Javie’s rocket, insult to the terrible injury of being shot into space with no hope of return. He must be here somewhere.”
“But I looked in every closet I could find, when I found him,” Young nudges Fertitta, who had fainted, with his foot.
“Well we have to look again! Harden wants him to suffer the same space relegation fate as us,” Beverley motions to the other four, “Hands in.”
Young rolls his eyes but joins the other eager three hands now placed atop Beverley’s.
“Space Comeback on three,” Beverley says, “One, two—”
Alarms start trilling throughout the ship, making the five of them jump. Beverley spins and vaults toward the monitors. On the one that looked like sonar he sees a hole of deeper black opening up ahead of them amidst the already dark yawning void of space.
“Oh that’s a black hole, for sure,” Thybulle whistles over his shoulder.
Beverley spins on him, “Did you find any escape pods?”
Thybulle shakes his head, “Nah dude, just those boat keys.”
There’s a shimmering in the air just beyond Thybulle’s head and Beverley sees once again what looks like Kyrie Irving’s floating head denting the fabric of space and time.
Any vessel can be used to escape, especially the mind, a faraway voice echoes.
“What the hell Ky, enough with the damn riddles!” Beverley shouts.
The shimmering tear in the very plane of existence that looks like Kyrie rolls its eyes, The boat’s in the cargo bay. It’s Tilman’s. Harden jammed the doors but you can get there through the garbage chute. Javie’s crammed in the sewage tank on the boat because Harden thinks his calls were shit.
Even for Beverley, that’s rude, but he starts running toward the back of the ship, the other four falling in behind him, LaMelo with his arms full of bags of space food.
“When we get to the garbage chute,” he huffs, shouting over his shoulder, “no questions, just jump in and trust me! We have no time. Matisse! You have those keys?”
“Got ‘em!” Thybulle shouts.
Beverley realizes his mistake with the chute in sight and the alarms getting louder, “Tilman! Shit!” He turns, “Trae, Matisse, go back and drag him down here.”
“What for!” Young shouts over the screech of the alarms.
“Because the man knows boats! Even if he is a motherfucker!” Beverley yells back. He turns to LaMelo and Avdija, “You two, get in the chute and get in that sewage tank and find Javie!” He opens the chute and one by one they go down feet first.
It’s twisted, but Beverley feels something exciting and new radiating from his chest. He almost feels, despite being tricked onto a runaway rocket heading toward a black hole meant to add 20 years to his life, happy. What is this feeling, he wonders.
It’s leadership, Bev, comes the omniscient voice of Kyrie Irving.
Thybulle and Young are running back down the hall with Tilman Fertitta hoisted between them like a suckling pig on a spit. He waves the toward the chute and makes a heave-ho motion, and they toss Fertitta down before following. Beverley takes one last look around before climbing up and in himself, unable to suppress a little “Wheeeee!” as he goes hurtling down into darkness.
Harden’s sitting courtside and sucking back the rest of his All-Star Smoothie, the one Silver had the league trademark for All-Star Weekend (bananas, strawberries, a little peanut butter — honestly pretty basic) so it could be served over three days at $18 per novelty memorabilia cup, when five men in tattered spacesuits emerge from an arena tunnel. He almost does a spit take, almost.
From beside him, KD stops scrolling and mutters, “Oh, shit.”
Harden looks at Durant beseechingly for the first time in their careers together, but his attention is called back to the floor by a badgering voice he knows all too well.
“James!” Patrick Beverley’s ragged scream cuts through the arena.
Common, who was brought back to do the All-Star intros, every intro, is mid-sentence and jogging over with a mic, “And now for someone who’s got no problem with pace, Patrick Beverley looks like he just got back from space!”
Beverley yanks the mic from Common’s hand and Young, Thybulle, LaMelo and Avdija fall in around him. Harden grins at Beverley, taking one last, long pull from his smoothie so that the slurping sound echoes over the arena, the crowd gone silent.
“Patrick, you look, still 33?” Harden says, “A shame.”
“No thanks to you!” Young lunges toward Harden but Beverley puts out an arm to stop him.
“It doesn’t matter anyway, no one is going to believe you, Pat, and as for the rest of you,” Harden fixes the other four with a withering stare, “your teams didn’t even report you missing. They all just played on,” he waves a hand dismissively, “without you."
One by one their faces fall, except for Beverley, who has an even stranger smirk on his face than he usually does, Harden thinks.
“This is it, James,” Beverley says, speaking into the mic now, “because I’ve brought in someone to make the final call.”
A dirty and putrid smelling Steve Javie walks onto the court and the crowd, thinking this is some kind of addition to the Skills Challenge, erupts. Common is somewhere whispering, “Ref royalty Steve Javie is here and man does he stink, but James Harden’s bugging so let’s hear what he thinks.”
Javie blows into his whistle one long, mournful burst.
“I couldn’t agree with Patrick more. We might not see eye to eye on fouls, James, or even the road that the league is taking, but I draw the line at compromising the impartial void of space. Up there, I’m free to review calls in a vacuum of silence and peace, and you flagrantly fouled that. Not to mention, trying to prematurely age five of your fellow players in a black hole and pin it all on LeBron’s love for a mature roster.”
Javie blows his whistle again, more assured this time.
“You’re ejected James, forever!”
Harden stutters, “But, but, how did you know about LeBron?”
There’s a quivering over center court, the air puckers and inverts into roughly the likeness of Kyrie Irving’s head, jumbotron size.
“Kyrie!” KD shouts.
You were supposed to tweet at NASA to look out for these guys, Kev! The infinite but still disappointed voice of Irving booms.
“My bad, I was arguing with someone named @kdsucks69 on Twitter, but I had a draft to NASA on deck and everything,” Durant shrugs, then brightens, “Anyway, you’re back!”
I’m not, not now, not ever, a voice booms from everywhere, all at once, I knew your plan before you did, James, and it bummed me out. I’ve had my issues with LeBron, but he would never want to accelerate aging league-wide, he’d never be able to dunk on a rookie again. But it doesn’t matter. Where I am now? There’s no such thing as age.
“He finally did it,” Durant murmured, “he finally galaxy-brained.”
With a snap of his very long fingers, Silver has a rag-tag looking group of arena security surround Harden and prepare to escort him off court.
“Wait!” Beverley shouts, feeling that good feeling he had while narrowing avoiding a space catastrophe spread in his chest again, “So, there’s no veering off path, no abnormal launch angles, no off-arm contact anymore,” he says, more to himself, thinking. “And you,” he turns to Silver, “you want Kyrie back?”
“It’s what the greatest fans in the world want.” Silver says, looking around for a camera to speak into.
“And you,” Beverley turns to the big floating head hopscotching dimensions in the likeness of Irving, “you never want to come back, corporally?”
The floating head nods.
“Have nebula Kyrie call Nets games,” Beverley shrugs. “He already knows everything that’s going to happen. James will have to play straight.”
Harden, thinking for a second, shrugs, “Sure. Would hate to give up the smoothies.”
The shimmering facsimile of Irving smiles sheepishly. It’s kinda boring being completely unbound to space and time. I’m in.
Harden quickly apologizes to Young, LaMelo, Thybulle and Avdija for taking advantage of their youthful naivety and trusting nature to send them to space, and turns to Beverley.
“One question, how did you get back? I dumped all the escape pods before launch.”
“You really think you could plan a fake Bezos flight and keep Tilman Fertitta away? The man even stashed his boat on board. Called space the ultimate tax haven. Anyway, we got back on his boat, Javie steered. That guy knows deep space!” Beverley explained.
“And deep fakes!” Harden laughs.
“Hey,” Beverley turns to Harden, a familiar twinkle in his eye, "you got any plans for All-Star break? Because we got a yacht we just crashed from space in the parking lot.”
Off court, in labyrinths of the arena, Adam Silver balls his hands with rage and bursts into a cloud of bats, a set of boat keys dangling from one of the creature’s tiny claws. They could try to ruin his perfect new rules, but he would ruin their vacation. Plus, the floating parallelism of Kyrie Irving had given him an idea. What kind of broadcast ratings would a league no longer beholden to space, time, or even television be bound to, after all?