Media days for NBA groups do not usually lend themselves to viral moments.
There’s often a number of bland discuss gamers “being in the perfect form of my life” or including 10 kilos of muscle. The additions to the roster are pictured of their new jerseys.
Typically unusual moments nonetheless occur.
Jimmy Butler, former Marquette star turned pre-season photoshoots into inventive performances with distinctive appears annuallyand there was this season the place Milwaukee Bucks Celebrity Giannis Antetokounmpo was photographed after cupping remedy, so the spherical marks confirmed up the remainder of the season when his photograph was proven on tv.
Probably the most internet-famous photograph op in Bucks historical past wasn’t technically a part of media day. It was 2003, when Milwaukee’s TJ Ford was within the NBA’s rookie transition program and carrying purple Bucks shorts that have been ridiculously lengthy and dishevelled, even by early 2000s style requirements. The guard’s six-foot top was swallowed up by a uniform higher suited to a robust middle.
Greater than 20 years later, these photographs are nonetheless talked about.
Ford was at Milwaukee Bucks Basis Charity Golf Outing in Kohler final Friday, and he spoke of the lasting high quality of that second.
How TJ Ford Rocked Saggy Shorts in a Picture Shoot
Ford leaned into the humor of those shorts.
“It’s a brand new technology of gamers coming into the league yearly,” Ford stated. “They’re seeing this for the primary time or figuring out who I’m with this photograph for the primary time. It offers me a number of good conversations with the brand new technology of gamers that at the moment are coming into the league.
“It is legendary, man! It isn’t going wherever!”
He was by no means embarrassed by it.
“I at all times agreed,” Ford stated. “Pay attention, your dream is to make it to the NBA. Your dream is to play video video games and play playing cards like I did rising up.
“Once they despatched me the outfit in the course of the rookie transition program, it was the uniform they’d. Both I put that uniform on or my photoshoot is not within the online game or on the rookie card So I stated to myself, “I’m not going to overlook this chance.”
“And look, I believe it is an eternal photograph and picture. You might say it is a part of NBA historical past.”
The place are the shorts now?
Ford thinks he nonetheless has the shorts at house in Texas.
Ford was instructed the shorts ought to be displayed in some form of Corridor of Fame…possibly the Bucks Corridor of Oddities which could embody Don Nelson’s fish ties or the Hulk costume that Antetokounmpo wore throughout a press convention.
“I attempted to get my youngsters to recreate it,” Ford stated. “However nobody actually needs to do it.
“I am attempting to persuade my sons to do it. They do not need to do it. So I suppose possibly I have to recreate a more moderen model now that I am bald and older and the whole lot.”
This text initially appeared within the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: TJ Ford wore dishevelled shorts throughout Milwaukee Bucks rookie photoshoot
