My Bonzi Wells story

[Scoot]

True story that is relevant given the addition of Bonzi Wells to the T-Wolves:

I spent a couple years at Ball State in the late 90's while going to grad school there. I played BB every day after I put in my time at my office. One day we had a good team together and I noticed the next team up, the team that'd play the winner, had Bonzi Wells, a backup center from team, and three no-named dudes. My team won, so we played Bonzi's team. They stepped onto the court and the other four guys on my team ran over to anyone other than Bonzi and loudly declared "I got this guy". Me, being the clueless fool from MN, I was lucky enough to guard Bonzi.

I decided the only chance I had to not get totally embarassed was to deny him the ball the best I could. Since he put in no effort at all, I kept him from getting the ball until about 2/3 of the way through the game. He shoved me back and got the pass from the point. He made one little wiggle and faked a drive, never leaving his pivot foot or dribbling. I didn't want to get beat to the rack, so I went flying back trying to not let him get past me- I'm sure I looked like a scared fool. He smiled and passed the ball off to another guy.

A few minutes later the same thing happened-- he shoved me back and caught the ball on the wing. As I hustled back to try guard him I suddenly realized he had already blown by me and watched as he two-hand tomahawk dunked while flying down the middle of the lane. It was an incredible dunk! One bucket later (scored by another guy), his team won and our team left the court.

The moral of the story: I shut Bonzi down! I held him to two touches and one bucket!

[FrankTheTank]

Which could explain why the Wolves released him before the season started.

Way back when.... When I lived in LA I used to play pickup ball every Saturday at a local high school with Luscious Harris (Nets). He never did much in the NBA but against average joe's like myself it wasn't fair.

[nofishfisherman]

Thats pretty funny.

Reminds me of my first ever college track meet. I was running an indoor meet at the U of M that invited some tops athletes from all over the country. The coach offered to let me sit out that meet as he did all Freshman since we might be facing competition that was a little out of our league but I said heck no, I'm here to run.

I was entered into the 55 high hurdle race and they went through the lane assignments over the loud speaker announcing each runner. The announcer announced me in lane 3 and he must have known me from high school since he threw in some background info on me, I thought I was pretty cool to get a little special treatment from the announcer. Then he announced the guy next to me in lane 4. This guy was the current national record holder for that race, plus about 6 other records that I don't recall anymore. I had no idea who he was since I was young and stupid but I got to hear every single one of his accomplishments over the loud speaker. It seemed like they were listing off his records for a solid 10 minutes, I have no idea how long it really was but it was at least long enough for me to fudge my huggies.

After all that I ended up running a pretty decent race but this guy just blew my doors off. He made me look like I was running with 2 broken legs.

When I walked back to the team after the race the coach was there just laughing his backside off. The coach wasn't as clueless as I was and knew the guy and knew I was more than a little over matched. Glad he got a good laugh out of it. And I got a good story out of it.