Well, that didn’t take long. One of the realest to ever talk about sports, a must-follow on Twitter, and newly liberated fuckboy uncoverer, Jemele Hill, had barely stepped her foot off of ESPN’s campus before it was announced that her next gig will be narrating LeBron James’ basketball documentary Shut Up and Dribble.
The documentary, which is set to air on Showtime in November, “is a three-part series is directed by Gotham Chopra (who also helmed the Tom Brady doc Tom vs. Time), and it is among a slew of new projects from James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill Entertainment,” The Hollywood Reporter notes.
The impetus for the film’s name came out of all places, President’s Trump personal YouTube channel, Fox News, after conservative pundit and resident Fox News asshole—which is kind of like saying a sneaker in Foot Locker considering the overwhelming number of assholes at Fox News—Laura Ingraham, claimed that James and Kevin Durant needed to stay out of politics and “shut up and dribble.”
What a way to turn a put down into a come up, which is all we really have left as long as the evil, discarded orange peel is in office.
“I think LeBron, like a lot of people, has been very frustrated by the behavior of this administration,” Hill told The Hollywood Reporter. “[Black Americans] feel very insulted and vulnerable within this time because of who’s in charge.”
THR notes that Hill was initially supposed to be one of the guests in the documentary. But anyone who follows Hill on Twitter (I can’t stress this enough, Hill is a must-follow) knows that the former NBA analyst for ESPN whose journalism career began as a sports writer for the Raleigh News & Observer and then the Detroit Free Press made the unfortunate mistake of calling the devil by his name.
After the violent white supremacist terrorist attacks in Charlottesville, Va., in which the president of the United States not only refused to condemn the violence outright, but noted that there were, in fact, good people on both sides, Hill took to Twitter to note correctly that the president was a white supremacist.
It was a bold statement. It was also a true statement. But we are in a strange time where calling a sack of afterbirth a sack of afterbirth doesn’t go well in the Times New Roman hat font community. Hill was muted on ESPN and moved from a primetime 6 p.m. slot to the black vertical, The Undefeated. The president came for her. His minions also came for her but Hill never backed down. To paraphrase the great urban scholar Nene Leakes, “She said what she said.”
James is this way too. He doesn’t back down from his position as a leader on the court or his obligations to his community. He’s been vocal about his disdain for the ran-over, orange Etonic sneaker in the Oval Office and he openly supported Trump’s greatest rival and the woman whose name he can’t keep off his KFC greased stained tongue: Hillary Clinton.
“Once you’re in the club,” Hill told THR, “it’s something that binds you.”
According to THR, the series will include Isaiah Thomas (not the one who King James hates, the original Isiah Thomas), Charles Barkley, Durant, and entertainment icons including Sway Calloway, Jay Z, Justin Timberlake. James also talks about being LeBron James.
Hill also noted that she recognizes that having a female voice over a sports documentary might seem strange to those who aren’t aware of how James moves.
“Lately LeBron has talked about gender and wanting to uplift and position black women in particular,” says Hill. “I get the sense that this is all part of that. He was raised by a black woman, he is married to a black woman and he is raising a black woman (daughter Zhuri, 3). If you look at the societal ladder, black women remain on the lowest rung. He clearly understands that we are facing a unique battle. It means a lot that he understands the intricacies of that.”
I’m here for it.