Shea Serrano, Internet Hero
Meet Shea Serrano, the Dion Waiters of writing. Photo provided.
Written and reported for the Houston Press, November 2017
In his latest book, Basketball (and Other Things), Shea Serrano asks silly sometimes absurd questions about the NBA and then tests those out to the extreme. For instance, in one chapter, Serrano, a Houston Press alum and now a staff writer for the sports and pop-culture website The Ringer, asks what would happen if a bear swapped places with NBA great Karl Malone for a season?
The joke does not end there. We must first establish ground rules. The bear is a black bear. It’s anthropomorphic and can talk. And It would never harm any human. What follows is surprisingly thorough thoughtful exercise on what would literally happen if Karl Malone and a bear switched places.
“You can tell from reading that chapter that I did a bunch of research on bears,” Serrano said during an interview with the Press. “It’s the dumbest thing in the world but I spent two weeks reading a bunch of bear books and watching bear documentaries because I wanted to be able to write about it with some sort of intelligence.”