DeAngelo Hall Gives "That Work" To Teammates, Barack Obama, J.J. Redick
Posted by Matt Terl on August 25, 2009 – 10:10 am
DeAngelo Hall was sitting in the ice tub yesterday when he said that he was hoping to play basketball with President Obama; it was only incidental that he mentioned how he used to take care of former Dukie and current Orlando Magician J.J. Redick back in their Virginia high school basketball days.
“I used to do J.J. Redick,” Hall said. “I used to give him that work.” (When Hall talks, you can hear the italics pretty clearly.) The assembled media — me and Dan Steinberg of the DC Sports Bog, basically — weren’t clear on “that work,” so Hall clarified. “Kill him. I won the state championship over him. He was like the best player in the state. He had averaged like 32 a game. I went for 31 and he had like 12.”
And Hall doesn’t see why defending Redick was such a problem. “He was so easy, you just deny him the ball. He wasn’t quicker than me or more athletic than me. I don’t know why guys didn’t do that the whole season, just deny him the ball and run a box-and-one. That’s all we did and I locked him up.”
And when Redick was setting college scoring records? “I was still telling my wife how I used to whip his [behind].”
Pleasant as it was to hear about J.J. Redick getting destroyed, I found myself more interested in the idea of DHall vs. Obama, and how he hoped to schedule that particular matchup. “I’m trying to make it happen. I got a guy who knows his head of security,” Hall said.
This is a serious challenge, too, not just an attempt to rub elbows with the leader of the free world. “Everybody think I’m gonna take it easy on him,” Hall said, shaking his head. “Nah, I’m gonna give him that work. Why not? I ain’t takin’ it easy on him. For what?”
In addition to giving the President “that work,” Hall also has plans to talk some trash to the Commander In Chief of the United States Armed Forces. “You best believe it,” Hall said ” I’m a cornerback, ain’t got nothin’ else to talk about. ‘Hey, good foreign policy!’ Nah, [heck with] that. ‘Come on, Prez, D it up! Get it on!’”
Speaking of trash talk, you might ask how Hall stacks up on the hardwood against his teammates. Or, more likely, you might be able to predict his answer. “I done played with Smoot and them before. Smoot, ‘Los [Rogers] … Jason Taylor came and played with us one time. I came out talkin’ a whole bunch of [stuff], and I went out there and gave ‘em all that work.”
(Smoot, in case you were wondering, refers to himself as Jellybean Bryant during these games.)
For all the people Hall has given (or plans to give) “that work” to, perhaps the most interesting factoid from his interview came out when he was talking about why he gave up basketball — the sport that he called his “first love, for real.”
“My junior year in high school,” he explained, “I was trying to do track, basketball, and baseball, and my momma’s just like, ‘Dude, you can’t do it all.’ And she made me pick, and that’s when I had to quit basketball.”
The fact that Hall’s mother — at least in his recounting — calls him “Dude” … that’s somehow more surprising to me than anything else he had to say.
(Well, anything else except for this, on the subject of basketball fandom: “I like the Lakers. I just like Kobe, man. Kobe’s swag is off the chain. I’m not a big LeBron James fan. But it’s funny, because I actually know LeBron personally, and don’t know Kobe at all. But I just like Kobe, somethin’ about Kobe that I like.”)
Tags: basketball, DeAngelo Hall, DeangeloHall, obama
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