There’s plenty of awareness now of the dangers of hazing in sports, but it wasn’t always that way. Jason Richardson joined the Entirely NBA podcast recently to talk hoops, and he also shared an incredible story about the time that his teammate Gilbert Arenas nearly died over a prank gone wrong.
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Arenas is known for his run-ins with teammates, especially the 2009 gun incident with fellow Washington Wizard Javaris Crittenton that saw both players get suspended for the rest of that season. As Richardson tells it though, Arenas was getting into it with teammates long before that.
Richardson and Arenas were both selected by the Golden State Warriors in the 2001 draft, and they spent their first two professional seasons together before Arenas left for the Wizards in free agency. That time together gave Richardson some wild stories to tell. He shared one on the podcast that would be unbelievable if it didn’t involve the man who would become known as Agent Zero.
According to Richardson, the veterans on the Warriors used to make Arenas buy a newspaper and donuts before every shootaround. Arenas, who was a second-round pick and, therefore, wasn’t making much money, was tired of being subjected to this.
“The next day Gilbert comes in, he’s smiling. He puts the donuts down and he walks right up to my chair and he says, ‘Hey J-Rich, don’t eat the donuts, I licked on every last one of them.’ I said, ‘What?!’ He said, ‘I made them extra glaze-y, I licked on every last one of them.'”
Needless to say, this didn’t go over well once the rest of the players found out, and their plan to get revenge almost ended in tragedy.
Gilbert Arenas almost drowned over some donuts
Richardson recounted how the next day in practice, a bunch of players got Arenas back for the donut incident, which escalated things to an all-new level. They wrapped Arenas up in Ace bandages and then threw him in a cart full of ice water, nearly killing him because he was all bound up.
“They had to push the cart over, and he loses his s*** … Gilbert goes nuts. He goes out and he tears up everybody’s car. He’s taking off the windshield wipers, he’s breaking antennas, he’s trying to flatten tires … Gilbert didn’t talk to anybody for two weeks because he felt like they were trying to kill him.”
Arenas might have been upset over this prank gone wrong, but that didn’t stop him from pulling some pranks of his own later in his career. He once told a story of a time when he was on the Wizards that he almost got teammate Andray Blatche by altering the letters on his jersey to make something slightly less family-friendly.
Given the way that so many of these incidents seemed to end so poorly, it’s lucky that Arenas and his teammates made it out in one piece, and it’s definitely a good thing that pranks and hazing have been toned down compared to how they used to be.
