What happens when the world’s greatest swimmer/pothead Michael Phelps encounters shot-erasing madman Hasheem Thabeet at a New York hotspot? Uh, not a whole hell of a lot, according to the New York Daily News:
During the course of the evening, the champ [Phelps] recognized UConn basketball player Hasheem Thabeet and went over to introduce himself.
“Hasheem had absolutely no clue who Michael was, and [Phelps] walked away looking a little embarrassed,” says [an] onlooker.
In Phelps’s defence, it could just be that Hasheem is too far up Hasheem’s butt to really know what’s going on in the rest of the world. Or, another possibility: maybe the idea of Phelps as some widely-recognized superstar is just another case of self-serving media distortion? Maybe, in reality, no one cares that much about a guy from a fringe sport that only bobs to the surface once every four years before sinking again like the Bismarck? Could Hasheem actually be a cultural canary in the coal mine, alerting us to the utter emptiness of Phelps-hype?
[...] other day he was seen in a fancy New York club, where he unknowingly snubbed swimmer extraordinaire and marijuana enthusiast Michael [...]