Vanessa is a pro - happy to see her get recognized for the good work she is doing reporting on Houston sports. I for one appreciate that she seems to do the homework to understand a lot of the history, context, and even family and friends of the players and teams she covers. This isn't just a smiling face - it adds real value to creating a personal connection to the org and it's players. I fear she will eventually(probably soon) leave us for bigger career moves just like Hannah Storm from those late 80s/early 90s Hakeem years....frankly, judging by the comments, we probably don't deserve her anyway.....but hey, it's always worth cheering along people who seem to take their job seriously and try to do a good job. I'll take that over the pretty face who thinks this job is just to look pretty and be a human microphone stand any day.
There was a time in history when he was "almost unquestionably cool"? I always got cheesy pop artist/actor trying to appeal to the masses pretty much from the start from him - he's just an entertainer doing whatever he has to do to entertain. Agree though that this is a super embarrassing look - someone on his team clearly GREATLY underestimated the cultural relevance of a 56 year old man mostly known as an actor first, a jealous cuck second, and a mediocre music artist a distant 3rd rapping to a crowd in London.
Sorry, i should probably have qualified "unquestionably cool to the UK pop/mainstream audience." He was a MEGASTAR here in his heyday right after the Fresh Prince years, to the point where he escaped the "cheesy pop artist" label of many of his peers (Bad Boys and things like that helped.) Like you could pretty much guarantee if he was on a show the ratings would absolutely POP compared to usual. But yeah his team probably thought he'd get his usual reaction from those days, that was a disaster.
Ohhh interesting - I didn't realize he had become such a star in the UK like that. Thanks for sharing - I would have never known that. I mean - don't get me wrong, he was a huge box office celeb in the US for a while too, but he was kind of like Tom Hanks in that he was mostly doing non offensive, wholesome movies (always as the hero) without too much edge for the most part. Bad Boys was the only thing I remember him doing that veered from that formula a bit since it was in the period where Martin Lawrence was at his peak as the king of the raunchy Def Comedy Jam comedians and was trying to crossover into acting.
He genuinely was absolutely huge here for a good while. The celebrity all the girls were obsessed with etc. Even films that weren't that great like Enemy of the State and things like that still pulled crowds. I can definitely understand why they'd pick London for that kind of performance tbh, just probably a bit too late now because the whole mess the last few years has lost him pretty much all of his standing.
