Because the ESPYs are a celebration of ESPN's ability to celebrate celebrities, and exist in their own state of acute unreality, it's always fun when the real world—the one ESPN's reporters cover, often aggressively—decides to intrude. In 1998, it arrived in the form of Norm Macdonald lighting the whole room on fire during his monologue, joking about O.J. and Anthony Mason and Jordan and golf hustlers and statutory rape and the Cowboys and crack and strippers. Last night, there was a lesser messenger—Drake—with a lesser gag—a Donald Sterling rap—but things still got really awkward anyway.
The video's up there. The song spliced together sentences from Sterling's Anderson Cooper interview while Drake rapped "Donald Sterling never loved us," set to Drake's single "Worst Behavior." My god, this was terrible. Nothing wrong with a good Donald Sterling joke—a few earlier in the night worked fine, not least thanks to the reaction shots of Blake Griffin. But this wasn't so much a joke, or even a joke-like object, as... who knows? No one knows.
The song played into a commercial break, with Drake running off stage while the crowd sat in complete silence before offering some strained applause as the video ended and presumably agreeing to never speak of this again.
[ESPN]