DEADLIEST PUNCH IN NBA HISTORY
This is a story of how one punch changed professional sports. It was on the night of December 9, 1977, where two men's lives collided. A fight occurred between Kermit Washington - power forward of the Los Angeles Lakers, and Rudy Tomjanovich- an all-star forward of the Houston Rockets. The brawl took place on the Lakers home court. Tomjanovich ran up right behind Washington, who turned around to deliver a nearly fatal right-hand punch to Tomjanovich's face that knocked him to the floor, leaving him in a pool of blood. Basketball was a tougher, more physical game then. But since that one punch, the NBA and other professional sports organizations began cracking down on fighting with penalties for players. John Feinstein has written a book called The Punch, which chronicles what happened that night, and the impact it had on both men's lives.
LAMAR ODOM'S CANDY PROBLEM
We all know of Lamar Odom's drug addiction which is generally the reason why he had to stop playing basketball. However, Odom had a much more strange addiction that not a lot of people have talked about. Lamar Odom was borderline addicted to candy. This all started in the 2009 playoffs, where Odom claimed the reason why he played well in games 5 and 6 was that he ate candy for breakfast. Candy is not the best pre-game meal. It might even be one of the worst choices for the first meal of the day. So this was definitely news to some people. As reporters dug deeper into this, they found out that Lamar did not just eat candy occasionally, but that his whole diet revolved around candy. This topic even got its own ESPN segment, showcasing how much candy Lamar needed to fulfil himself. Teammates revealed that Lamar would bring bags of candy to every practice. This habit got to the point where Lamar would wake up every day at 3 AM to eat candy in order to refresh himself. Yikes.
JASON TERRY AND HIS ODD SUPERSTITION
It is definitely normal for athletes or anyone at all to have superstitions. Whether it be to eat the same meal for good luck, whether it be to pound your head against the wall before games for good luck. These superstitions are 1 thing, but Jason Terry's was something else. It was very bizarre. During the season on nights when his team has a game the next day, Terry has to go to sleep wearing the shorts of the team he is about to play. These can't even be shorts that anyone can buy at the store, they have to be real NBA shorts worn in a real NBA game. In order to get the game-worn shorts from the rest of the 29 teams in the NBA, Jason has established a network of equipment managers and former NBA players that hook him up before games. This superstition has been so well known that the San Antonio Spurs have tried to trick Terry with the shorts they give him. So the Spurs gave him practice shorts to sleep in instead of game shorts. After sleeping in the practice shorts, the following day, Jason's team did, in fact, lose to the Spurs the next night. This proves that Spurs' coach Gregg Popovich is always 1 step ahead even when it comes to weird superstition.
JASON WILLIAM'S UNPLEASANT HANGOVER
When Jason Williams was first drafted to the Phoenix Suns, he had no intentions of going there what so ever. Cameras even caught him screaming "oh no, no I'm not". He did not want to leave in PEhonex and waited for the last possible second to bail out. When he finally flew to Arizona he decides to get really drunk to forget about his problems. In fact, he got so drunk that when he woke up, the next morning he completely forgot where he was and thought he was still in New York. So when he looked out the window and saw nothing but desert, he started to freak out because he thought the US was hit with an atomic bomb. He tried to contact family and friends, but couldn't reach them. When the General Manager walked to the door and when Jason saw him, he ran to him and asked, "What happened? They dropped a bomb on us, where am I?"
So those were some odd and crazy NBA storied for you guys. My NBA blog is finally finished. It has been an honour to write about the NBA every week, usually on the last day of the week. Thank you for reading!!
