Wednesday our Stadium Style expert Adam Rapoport finally put to rest the half-century-old question of whether you, the GQ reader, can pull off a fur coat: Hell no—not unless you’re Magic Johnson circa 1986. Well, this must be Give Your Favorite Basketball Players A Pass On The Rules By Which The Rest Of Us Are Inextricably Bound Week, because to the otherwise hard and fast law that you should never, under any circumstances, refer to yourself in the third person, we recently discovered the one exception. (And no, it’s not this guy.)

The new rule is this: If you speak nine languages and graduated with a dual degree in linguistics and diplomacy from Georgetown University while spending your summers interning at Congress and the World Bank and setting an all-time Hoya record for most blocked shots in a single game; if you went on to enjoy a stellar, nearly-two-decade long NBA career, earning eight All-Star nods and establishing yourself as one of the greatest defensive forces to ever step foot on a basketball court; if the tens of thousands of shots that you swatted into the press box or otherwise altered for the worse by dint of sheer intimidation were far, far outnumbered by the millions of lives you touched during each offseason (among those aided: a group of underprivileged youth in Johannesburg who live in the dorms your foundation re-furbished, the hundreds of thousands of children throughout Africa who’ve attended your basketball clinics, and your fellow countrymen who now receive improved care at Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital—named for your late mother—the first new hospital to be built in the Democratic Republic of Congo in nearly forty years); and if you were just named to the recently-created post of NBA Global Ambassador, whose essential mission is to help unite the world through basketball… then your name is Dikembe Mutombo, and you, sir, are the only man we know who is perfectly entitled to refer to himself in the third person whenever he damn well pleases.

by Laurence Lowe
www.gq.com

Wednesday our Stadium Style expert Adam Rapoport finally put to rest the half-century-old question of whether you, the GQ reader, can pull off a fur coat: Hell no—not unless you’re Magic Johnson circa 1986. Well, this must be Give Your Favorite Basketball Players A Pass On The Rules By Which The Rest Of Us Are [...]