Uwe Blab, 1989 NBA Hoops
So let’s say you’re Uwe Blab. It’s 1977 and you’re living in West Germany. Your name is Uwe Blab. You are 15 years old and like, 12-feet tall and have red hair. You have never seen a basketball before. Somebody hands you a basketball. You eat it. Somebody hands you another basketball and explains how to use it. You think the sport is an efficient game, and you decide to make it your career.
You fear the western culture and multi-syllabled names of the United States, but you realize that America is the land best suited for your talent of being 7’1”. You would prefer to inhabit an area of this land that rejects popular culture and accepts dictatorship. You travel to Indiana to play for Bob Knight.
Your teammates struggle to balance the rigors of the season with their academic requirements, but meanwhile you have joined an exclusive fraternity and are on your way to graduating with a double-major in math and computer science, which -- considering that it’s now 1983 -- basically means that you invented the computer. You create the first known website after uploading videos of your jump hook shot directly from your camcorder to your computer, and you call this website: UweBlabtube.
You make it to the NBA, where you proceed to average just over two points-per-game for your career. You cannot shake the constant comparisons to Bill Walton. But all of that becomes trivial because during a trip back home in 1989, based on a dare posed to you by your best friend Lek Glurg, you symbolically dunk over the Berlin Wall, knocking it down entirely and uniting the country of Germany forever. You missed the dunk, but still.
Did you know?
After Uwe Blab refused to address speculation in 1982 that Bob Knight had hit him in the knees with a pipe during practice for failing to grasp the 2-3 zone, an Indiana Gazette headline read: Blab won’t blab.
