Real Just Needs to be Checked

Years ago I was staying at a friend’s house out of state and he told me he had another friend who played professional basketball overseas.

Obviously I wanted to meet this dude. I had been playing overseas for years at that point, and whenever you found another American who had done it, there was always this instant connection, like maybe they dealt with the same ridiculousness in this strange little world. I was genuinely excited to meet.

Except the whole thing was strange immediately. We were supposed to meet and then he couldn’t make it. Then he was around but somehow we still didn’t meet. There was a lot of weird avoiding going on before we finally ended up at my boy’s wedding. He was tall, probably around 6’6”, definitely tall enough where if somebody told you he played basketball you weren’t immediately calling bullshit. I went right up to him excited to talk basketball because that’s just how I am. I’m pretty naturally outgoing. A lot of that developed from spending my entire adult life being almost seven feet tall in public spaces. People talk to you everywhere. Eventually you either become a complete recluse or you learn how to talk back. You also get pretty good at realizing when something feels off.

I already knew he supposedly played in France, which was unfortunate for him because I knew French basketball really well. My brother played for Mulhouse and I had…you know been there. I asked who he played for and he named one of the top teams in the country. At first I was like, holy shit, good for this guy. Then, as I kept asking questions, the answers kept getting stranger. It wasn’t some giant obvious lie where he told me Rudy Gobert was his backup, it was little shit. The way he talked about the experience didn’t sound like anybody I had ever met who actually played overseas. Then he told me he basically lived in France full time and hardly ever came home because the team bought him some huge mansion.

That was fucking it for me.

I didn’t call him out or embarrass him. I just kept listening and walked away thinking, I’m pretty sure this dude just made up an entire professional basketball career.

Years later I understand why overseas basketball was probably the perfect thing to lie about. I really did play overseas for almost a decade and even I can barely find some of my own shit online. There are teams I played for where I know games happened because I was physically standing on the court, but good luck finding the video now. Websites disappeared, leagues changed, old stats vanished, half the videos from that era looks like my dad filmed it on a handheld camera. So if you told somebody twenty years ago that you played professional basketball in France, what were they really going to do?

Which is exactly why this story about the guy accused of pretending to play for the San Francisco 49ers blows my mind.

It’s 2026…You can find an NFL roster while they are still finishing the sentence. You can find where he went to college, when he was drafted, every transaction, every game, every injury, probably what he ate at training camp and whether somebody on X thought he looked slow during warmups.

How in the world do you just take that one on good faith? What planet are we living on?!

We have more access to information than any people in human history and somehow a giant chunk of society has decided research means reading the headline that they agree with and nothing else.

Somebody posts something, and we instantly believe it because that person has a blue check next to their name. Somebody makes a video and speaks confidently into the camera, apparently that’s fucking Walter Kronkite now.

Just fact check!! What are we doing?!

Check the story, then another source. Look up the person and find where they claim they came from. And don’t only fact check the shit you disagree with. Fact check EVERYTHING, especially the shit you desperately WANT to be true.

Twenty years ago I can understand somebody getting fooled by a fake overseas basketball player. Today you can’t tell me you got fooled by a San Francisco 49er when the actual San Francisco 49ers roster is sitting in your fucking pocket.

At some point we have to start using the tools we spent thirty years begging to have.

With OverseasX you never have to walk this journey alone.