Blake Griffin has had quite the career. As a college basketball player, he won the Naismith Player of the Year Award is 2009. He was taken with the first overall pick in the NBA Draft by the Clippers then won Rookie of the Year and helped turn the biggest laughingstock in the league into a contender.
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Griffin’s NBA career spanned 13 seasons, and after his high-flying younger days that included a dunk contest win in 2011, he reinvented himself with the Pistons in one of the more impressive second acts NBA fans have seen. He’s also shown talent for more than just playing basketball, as he’s been a podcast host, commercial star and an analyst for Amazon Prime’s NBA coverage.
Griffin even had a hilarious voice role in the hilarious 2021 animated movie The Mitchells vs. the Machines, and he’s gotten some good reviews as a stand-up comic, too. He once bumped into famous comedian Russell Peters at the Just for Laughs comedy festival, and as Peters told Byron Scott’s Fast Break, the six-time All-Star didn’t forget what went down.
Peters prefaced the story by saying he’d had a bit to drink, which automatically puts him into trash-talking mode. “So Blake is there, and he goes, ‘Hey man, big fan,'” he recalled. “I go, ‘Oh cool, but what are you doing here?’ He goes, ‘I’m trying comedy.’ I go, ‘Really? But you’re a basketball player, right?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, yeah.'”
Peters decided this would be a good opportunity to roast the wannabe comedian, so he said, “‘What are you? ‘Cause you got red hair, dude.'” Griffin is biracial, with a redheaded white mom and a black dad of Afro-Haitian descent. He explained that, and the fact that he was from Oklahoma, which led to Peters making an off-color joke that Griffin didn’t seem to love.
To top it off, Peters finished with, “Anyway, good luck, stupid,” and left.
Sometime later, Peters was sitting courtside at a Raptors-Pistons game, and who’s on Detroit, but Blake Griffin. “His back is facing me,” Peters remembered, “and I go, ‘Blake! Blake!’ And he turns around and sees me and goes, ‘Ah f*** you.'”
Peters could only laugh at how Griffin responded, and he told Scott, “At least he acknowledged me.” They say doing stand-up comedy takes a lot of bravery, but not as much as it takes to insult a 6’9″ athletic machine right to his face.
In the end, Peters got off easy since Griffin just told him off instead of using him as a prop for his next dunk.
