Pulling pranks on each other inside the locker room shouldn’t come as a surprise, nor should it be news. But some are so hilarious that they deserve special mention. Vlade Divac, for instance, once pulled a two-week prank on his rookie teammate Tony Bobbitt at the Los Angeles Lakers, and it involved famous actress Lucy Liu. It was an embarassing moment for Bobbitt, who was exposed by Kobe Bryant in front of the whole team.
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Divac, who was drafted by the Lakers in 1989, spent seven seasons in his first stint with the team. He then returned in 2004 for one final year in the NBA before calling it quits. It was during that spell that he got to Bobbitt, an incident that was discussed on Byron Scott’s Fastbreak program recently.
Gary Vitti, a former Lakers trainer, shared this absurd tale. It basically involved Bobbitt believing that the Charlie’s Angels actress was interested in him, when it was all a ruse planned by Divac.
Vitti takes us back to a game in which Divac, who is 7 feet tall, was sitting right in front of Bobbitt, who, of course, couldn’t see anything from the bench. But in a front-row seat was Liu. Bobbitt, new to the NBA, was constantly eyeballing her. “He can’t see anything. On the baseline is this famous actress, Lucy Liu, and Tony Bobbitt is eyeballing Lucy Liu,” Vitti revealed.
Somehow, Bobbitt got the ridiculous idea that Liu was interested in him. That’s when he made the grave error of asking Vlade to switch seats with him so he could get a better look and make eye contact with her. “So he starts wearing Vlade out. ‘Vlade, Vlade, switch seats with me. That Lucy Liu girl is over there, she’s looking at me man. I can’t see behind you switch seats with me.'”
Vlade obliged, but only because he had thought of the prank “What he does, Vlade goes to one of the ushers, female usher, and says, ‘I want you to write a note to Tony Bobbitt saying that you want to meet him, and to reach out to this phone number, and sign it Lucy Liu. But the phone number is Vlade’s phone number. Lucy Liu has no idea this is even happening.”
After the game ended, the usher handed a note to Bobbitt and told him that Liu had asked her to give it to him. At this point, Bobbitt made the situation worse for himself by lying to the team, claiming he and Lucy were going out. “‘Yeah I went to dinner with Lucy Liu last night.’ I think it was Kobe said, ‘You went with Lucy Liu? Who paid?’ ‘She paid. I’m a pimp.'”
Vitti said that Lamar Odom was about to break the news to Bobbitt so the kid’s heart wouldn’t get broken. However, since Bobbitt had lied, Lamar decided not to. “Lamar was like, ‘Man f*** that mother f*****. This thing went on for like two weeks,” revealed Vitti, who had Scott and the rest of the podcast panel cracking up at the ridiculousness of the story. Fortunately, Vlade saw a conclusion to the prank.
“Vlade sends him a message saying, ‘I’m sending a limo for you.’ So now, he really thinks Lucy Liu is sending him a limo. And Vlade actually does. He sends a limo to pick up Tony, with a camera filming the whole thing.”
Bobbitt rode in the limo, thinking he was headed to a restaurant to meet Liu. But when he arrived, the entire Lakers team was there.
“Finally Kobe busts him in front of everybody. He says, ‘Listen man. You’ve been talking to Vlade man the entire time. There is no Lucy Liu. She doesn’t even know who you are,'” said Vitti, quoting the Mamba. Funnily enough, the rookie didn’t believe them at first, but was eventually convinced when he saw that Liu did not arrive.
“Finally, when she didn’t show up. Finally, when they convinced him, it was like it was nothing. All he said was, ‘Okay you guys got me.'”
If this story proves anything, it’s that rookies need to read the room before trying to strongarm their way into a position of power. This is the kind of prank there’s almost no coming back from. Bobbitt didn’t last long in the NBA. Did this story break him? We hope not.
