


Perhaps you caught it on an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Where did you first see this video? I honestly can’t tell you where I first saw it.
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In bygone internet parlance, it is simultaneously a “fail” for the child and an “epic win” for the player.Ī couple of months ago, Defector staffer Dan McQuade asked me to suss out the origins of what he knows as “basketball.avi.” The shorthand reference is telling: “basketball” is so vague and generic that it implies that this footage comprises the only basketball video that matters, and “.avi” is a decreasingly popular video file format developed for Windows it also happens to be the preferred video format of the National Archives.įor the record, the full title that Dan was thinking of is “Basketball (so funny you’ll pee your pants).avi.” The video is one of those truly immortal viral videos that never goes away, an artifact from a time when video bandwidth was expensive, and only the cream of the crop was deemed worthy of server space. A one-in-a-lifetime freak accident that is also a flawless piece of slapstick. It is a perfect and devastating subversion of the cathartic buzzer-beater video. It’s not difficult to explain the video’s appeal. In the bleachers, where the cameraman is, everyone throws their hands up in alarm. It hits him in the head so hard that it knocks him off his feet. Instead, in a bizarre alignment of circumstances, the ball collides with a small child running down the baseline.

You can instinctively tell, just from the trajectory, that the ball is going to fall short of the net. The ball arcs through the air, but there is little suspense. A player rebounds the shot, turns, and flings the ball across the court. Still unclear? Let me describe it to you.Īn unspecified quarter of a high school basketball game is about to come to an end. We still suggest you read this article first, then the sequel.ĭo you know that video of the kid who gets nailed with a full-court basketball shot? That might sound vague, but I suspect that anyone who remembers the pre-YouTube internet, when there were like five videos in total, probably does. The true story of who got nailed by that basketball is more complicated, and even more interesting, than what’s written here. 19, 2022 Defector published a followup to this article, revealing that the recollections of several of our sources were incomplete or based on false memories.
