Athletes fake injuries all the time. Nowhere is it worse than in European futbol, aka soccer, where they’ll pretend catastrophic injury if you even look in their general direction.
But NBA and NFL players consistently do it all the time too. In the NBA, nobody is worse than that wet blanket Chris Paul who is notorious for being a dirty cheap player. And you’ll find NFL players faking injuries after the two minute warning desperately trying to slow the clock down.
And Paul Pierce just revealed one of the most pathetic and disgusting things about why he faked an injury in the 2008 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers.
The Boston Celtics dominated the late 1950s and 1960s winning 11 championships in a 13-year span and star center Bill Russell (who played in every one of them) not only remains one of the greatest Celtics of all time but also deserves to be up on the Mount Rushmore of all-time NBA players.
During the 1970s it was a sprinkling of different teams that included the Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, New York Knicks, Washington Bullets, Portland Trail Blazers, Milwaukee Bucks and the Seattle Supersonics.
Then came the 1980s and that’s when everything changed. Arguably the biggest shift in the NBA status quo came that year when Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird entered as rookies on the Lakers and Celtics respectively.
It was a duel of the fates between those two organizations throughout that decade. Overall, the Lakers won five championships that decade and the Celtics won three. It was pure domination by both.
The Chicago Bulls dominated the 2000s, of course, because of you know who.
Then Kobe Bryant joined the Los Angeles Lakers along with Shaquille O’Neal and they won back-to-back-to-back. Soon after, Paul Pierce joined the Boston Celtics during the Lakers championship run, but it wasn’t until they added Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Rajon Rondo until they became contenders.
Fast forward to 2008.
It’s the Los Angeles Lakers at Boston Celtics in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, a series in which the Paul Pierce-led Celtics surprisingly defeated the Kobe Bryant-led Lakers.
Pierce went down with an injury – grabbing his leg and wincing in pain. He had to be rolled off in a wheelchair. There was no hope. It looked catastrophic. Suddenly, without warning, about 2 minutes later, Pierce emerges from the tunnel on both feet, skipping, ready to return, as if nothing happened.
You can watch the shenanigans here:
11 years ago, @paulpierce34 exited Game 1 of the #NBAFinals in a wheelchair …
“The Truth” returned to the game to help the @celtics defeat the @Lakers. pic.twitter.com/eG5n87Xd4m
— ESPN (@espn) June 5, 2019
People questioned for years about the severity of the injury and whether he was faking it. He was faking it and it was the biggest flop of all time or he miraculously got the healing power of God in that 2 minutes.
Nevertheless, Pierce kept his mouth shut for eleven years until it was literally eleven years to the day when he revealed the most insane and disgusting revelation about that alleged “injury.”
On Wednesday night when the Toronto Raptors were visiting the Golden State Warriors in the bay area for Game 3 of the NBA Finals, ESPN Countdown host Michelle Beadle poked and prodded Pierce to give us “THE TRUTH” about his injury that night – (It’s important to appreciate the irony of “THE TRUTH” considering he finally told it eleven years later and that was also his nickname throughout his career).
Beadle had been egging him on all year. And he finally told the truth.
Pierce simply said, “I just had to go to a bathroom.”
“I just had to go to a bathroom.”@paulpierce34 admits the only reason he left the 2008 Finals in a wheelchair was to go to the bathroom 😂 pic.twitter.com/oIUXgzDzT7
— ESPN (@espn) June 6, 2019
**Blinks eyes rapidly**
Wait, Paul Pierce basically defecated in his shorts and needed to be rolled off in a wheelchair in a massive cover-up scheme?!
It appears so. And it makes sense.
How embarrassed would you be in that scenario? What would you have done? Would you have risked the most shameful and humiliating moment in sports history by waddling your way back to the locker room? Or would you have faked injury with zero consequence, other than rampant speculation, about how bad the injury was?
It was smart. Maybe it was bad food or coffee, but as they say, when you got to go; you got to go.
Twitter came alive when he revealed this “nugget” of information because the ESPN NBA Countdown crew just went on to the next subject without elaborating more than that.
Writer Josh Gondelman wrote, “Getting in a wheelchair to hide the fact that you were taking a sh-t is George Costanza on a first date behavior. Paul Pierce is a legend forever.”
Recently retired Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl champion Chris Long noted, “I’ve always been team Paul Pierce and I did mental gymnastics defending the wheel chair thing in many a locker room discussion. To think it was IBS all along. Wow. Strange times.”
Sports Illustrated Charlotte Wilder hit the nail on the head when she tweeted, “How is Paul Pierce just sitting there continuing to talk like he didn’t just drop the biggest NBA news since The Decision.”
“The Decision” was the epic disaster hour-long spectacle where LeBron James announced he was “taking his talents to South Beach,” when he became an unrestricted free agent with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010.
Pierce’s announcement was unequivocally like dropping the biggest “bomb” you could ever imagine and then moving on to the next question like nothing was even said.
And Charlotte Wilder noted how extreme it was when she wrote, “That’s like Deep Throat revealing himself and then going on to casually talk about how the coffee was in the FBI’s offices.”
Okay, literally anything in sports isn’t even close to something as important as blowing the lid wide open on the biggest cover-up in United States history but this was a highly debated incident for years after it happened. It genuinely spawned conspiracy theories because Pierce came back into the game and was lights out too.
Did he go back there to take drugs? Was he too afraid of the moment?
After Twitter went wild over this uncovering, Paul Pierce re-addressed what he said before the game, after the game.
He tweeted:
Sorry to bust y’all haters bubble but the only 💩💩💩💩Ing I did June 5 2008 was on the Lakers #factz #haterzgonnahate #😂😂😂
— Paul Pierce (@paulpierce34) June 6, 2019
That’s a total public relations move. He’s backpedalling because he realized how embarrassing it was to admit it.
Pierce was likely in the moment and the truth just “slipped out.”
You can probably consider that moment the biggest “plop” in NBA history.
