@__Kingsleyy5 I didn't ask for your glazed donut face ass to root for me anyway!!!!
— Carmelo Anthony (@carmeloanthony) December 31, 2013
I think back to that moment pretty often, because I'm a Knicks fan, and because I desperately want to embrace my team's best player as he embarks on a pricey five-year journey with New York. Melo is a complicated spectacle on the court, but his off-the-court persona is just insipid. This is a man who says shit like "I want to brand myself as the digital athlete" without a fleck of irony, and who wants us to know he pays people to pick his outfits and deliver them with wearing instructions.
I do not begrudge an individual his wealth, especially as self-made and charitable a man as Anthony. At this point, though, the defining trait of Melo's public-facing personality is "rich," and it appears he wants it that way. And as a fan -- someone who irrationally cares about a stranger a million times more than he cares about me -- that's no fun. It's easier to root for a guy if he seems cool, or at least interesting. And Melo seems like neither ...
... except when, after years of tweeting processed, corporate pablum, Melo snaps and replies to a random call-out with a personalized insult. Why, out of the scores of positive and negative messages Melo gets each day, did he choose to respond to this relatively tame one from @__Kingsleyy5? Look at it in context:
And seriously, did you ever stop to analyze "glazed donut face ass"? It's beautiful! It's so rich, so layered with possibilities! Melo appears to use "face" as a part of a compound adjective and "ass" as synecdoche for the whole person, but what if that's not what he meant? What if Melo was suggesting his attacker has a glazed donut's face on his ass? What if this guy has an ass on his face of the glazed donut variety? Melo arbitrarily pointed a sniper rifle at one out of 5 million people and fired a single, confounding bullet.
It mattered to me, and it still does. I still cherish that strange moment like I cherish the time Melo found out he had to play in 24 hours via a postgame interview and said "shit" with a smile on live TV. Sports are a reality show and I want my favorite characters to be good, but also fun. I know that's silly. This is all very silly.