No passing, no problem for OSU: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
October 11, 20162016 Cleveland Browns Rookie Report: While We’re Waiting
October 12, 2016The Cleveland Cavaliers are set to receive their rings and officially begin defending their NBA Championship in two week’s time. While the Indians are in the throes of the MLB Playoffs and the Browns are full throttle on their way to Tanksville, WFNY will take the next several days to preview the storylines that surround the Wine and Gold.
On the cover, it was nothing more than a tweet with a video attached. Most tweets worth sharing are equipped with a form of multimedia—an infographic, highlight, or screen grab—that lead to varying levels of engagement.
This tweet, specifically, was from Cleveland Cavaliers shooting guard Iman Shumpert, who merely happened to be chilling on his couch, taking a selfie-style video in Snapchat. Shumpert, clad in a hat and ear-to-ear grin, urges his company to “turn up,” before he pans over his left shoulder and reveals said company to be Desiigner, the 19-year-old Brooklyn-based rapper who just so happened to be behind one of the summer’s biggest tracks in “Panda.” The polarizing hip-hop star rattles off a string of barking and tongue-clapping that traverses between indiscernible and Bantu Xosha on fast forward.
You never need a hotel bro @LifeOfDesiigner just fall through pic.twitter.com/rPEVWvOOxb
— Iman. (@imanshumpert) October 9, 2016
The tweet itself is still racking up retweets and likes and drew a slew of replies. Throughout the summer, Shumpert and Desiigner drew twin-like comparisons large in part to their similar hairstyles, the Houston Press once referring to the rapper as a “facsimile Shumpert.” The two men were even arrested on the same day, though in two different locations and for two different charges, Desiigner’s involving road rage in New York, and Shumpert’s involving possession and potential influence in Atlanta—a situation for which the shooting guard exhibited extreme remorse during a recent Cavaliers practice.
This, of course, was the defensive stalwart’s second such public interaction with a star in today’s music landscape, his first being a brief cameo in Kanye West’s video for “Fade,” an artistry-laced Flashdance-like four minutes that heavily features Shumpert’s wife (also a musician), Teyana Taylor. Though the off-the-court Cavaliers had been in the news for much of the summer—a shirtless J.R. Smith on a driving range and a yacht party-hosting Kyrie Irving leading the way—it wasn’t until the Sunday night preview of “Fade,” which featured a beat-dropping shower scene and sheep (separately) that it became clear that this Cleveland Cavaliers team was going to be much, much more than a group of 15 men who attempted to get an inflated ball through a cylinder four-to-five times per week. While the hints were always there, winning the Larry O’Brien trophy this past June lofted the Cavs into an entirely new and untraveled sphere of populism, one that is entirely foreign to fans of the Midwestern, mid-sized market.
The celebrity-based tabloid culture that has exploded over the last decade did so during a time when Cleveland didn’t exactly have much in the way of subject matter. Individuals like Jim Brown and Bob Golic had crossover exposure to movies and television during their respective runs, but these occurred in 60s and 90s. When the Browns of the mid-80s were dominating the AFC, their celebrity, for lack of a better term, was hyperlocal. Bernie Kosar was the flashy quarterback from the University of Miami, but his roots were from Barberton, Ohio, and he and his division-winning teammates had their namesakes featured more as burger spot menu items than anything that would reflect national prominence. The Cavaliers of the early-90s—Mark Price, Larry Nance, Brad Daugherty—were a breath of fresh air for a franchise that had had a sad stretch of history, but they were on the wrong side of a global marketing machine that was just experiencing liftoff.
You could tell what side of history specific fans would be on by the way they reacted to the 18-year-old who was immediately handed the keys to the world.
But much like the teams and individuals who preceded him, LeBron’s celebrity was very insular. When James was with Cleveland between June 2003 and July 2010, he wasn’t on Twitter. Instagram stories didn’t exist. Spring Hill was just a figment of Maverick Carter’s imagination. Sure, there were Nike commercials and puppets that featured a DVD-selling Zydrunas Ilgauskas and friendships with moguls like Jay Z, but it would not be until the summer of James’ free agency, and subsequent defection to Miami, when the true, multimedia-based celebrity would take off.
Fast forward to 2016 in Cleveland, and James is still one of the world’s most recognizable faces. He’s producing television shows and making Kendrick Lamar, arguably the best emcee in today’s hip-hop scene, release and album by merely shooting off a late-night tweet, but James is also the old man (at 31, mind you) in the Cavaliers’ locker room. He spends his weeknights either attending Indians games or shooting off videos of his son’s birthday sleepover. During the season, he’ll meander between dominating the rest of the Eastern conference and hunkering down in Bath, Ohio, with a catalog of movies and his family. Taking his place in the jet-setting and gallivanting are the rest of his teammates.
There’s Shumpert, who’s married to a recording artist and actress. There’s power forward Kevin Love, who is dating a Canadian fashion model who was in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue for three consecutive years. There’s point guard Kyrie Irving who dated R&B star Kehlani and was caught in a bizarre, web-fueled love triangle with PartyNextDoor, a member of Drake’s OVO Sound record label. Topping it all off is the NBA’s reigning Ironman, power forward and center Tristan Thompson, who, in addition to touring Canada with the Larry O’Brien trophy, added Khloe Kardashian to his list of offseason accomplishments, the story first broken this summer by none other than TMZ.
To the Cavaliers’ credit, they have each, at an individual level, done a spectacular job of separating their on-court lives with that of the one that exists beyond the painted lines. James will be the first to admit that without the game of basketball, the rest of his wealth—an amount of money that far exceeds what he has amassed from team-cut checks—would not have been possible. When asked about being in the Kanye video earlier this month, Shumpert quickly pointed out that “all he did was shower,” while it was Taylor who did most of the work. Irving has never really addressed the attention caused by his relationship with Kehlani, but it was the 25-year-old Thompson who may have had the most telling response of them all when asked about the 32-year-old Kardashian.
When asked about a reported trip to Mexico with the E! Network star, Thompson deflected like a presidential candidate in a debate:
“Training camp has been great. I’m glad the fans came out for the scrimmage and everyone was there to support us and Cavs basketball is back, baby.”
Thompson has the right to address (or not address) any off-court items with local media, but this will not stop gossip sites like Hollywood Life and Star Magazine from reporting that the two are already talking about things like children and family, which means that Twitter timelines will be littered with as much in the way of game recaps and sidebar pieces as they will be stories about Kardashian sitting courtside at Cavs scrimmages.
If the 2015-16 season taught us anything, it’s that an 82-game regular season is very, very long. There reaches points where there is more analysis and discussion surrounding who is featured in what Instagram uploads (i.e. “Fitting In”) than there is banal, inside items like pick and roll defense and corner three point percentage. But such is the way with the NBA, where the subculture is thriving and the stars are not only more marketable than the other major sports, but tend to control the narrative of any given NBA season.
In Cleveland, this landscape appears to be headed to even higher levels. Everything James says, tweets, or uploads immediately becomes a headline item. His endorsement of Hillary Clinton for President of the United States is still being discussed a week later. But in addition to having the most powerful man in the league on the roster, there are a handful of individual in the Cavs locker room who have the potential to generate headlines any given weekend. While his teammates give him the side eye and jokingly play “Fade” in the locker room, Shumpert continues to moonlight as a rapper who now just so happens to be in the company of one of the biggest names in all of music in West (while also serving as the pro bono Air BnB for Desiigner). While Irving would rather spend his free time watching Whiplash or Grease, he used this summer to link up with Shumpert and teammate Jordan McRae to form—what they call—the “three amigos,” spending a good chunk of time on the pristine waters of Biscayne Bay and Snapchatting the absolute shit out of it. And then, of course, there’s the clandestine Thompson who, perhaps conversely, won’t discuss much, but instead will let the rest of the world follow along and live vicariously through the lenses of paparazzi across the world. There are already reports that the LA-based star is shipping 270 pounds worth of her belongings to Bratenahl, Ohio, this very week.
The 2016-17 Cavaliers are just weeks away from defending their NBA championship on the court. Are the fans ready to hear about all the news that is generated off of it? They may not have a choice.
7 Comments
I just hope TT doesn’t bring in any Kardashian VD into the locker room. We might want to get somebody from the Cleveland Clinic to spray him down every time he comes to work.
Does this mean we’ll have to get our highlights on Keeping Up With The Kartrashians?
Tristan stole that style from my 7th grade yearbook photo.
Bernie is from Boardman.
It all feels way too much like the first act of Major League II.
are you saying Kay Felder should bring a bag of marbles to shake at Tristan?
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