So six weeks ago I’m minding my own business watching a basketball game when Julie notices a player missing several free throws. Out of nowhere, she proclaims in a completely serious way that she could hit 70% of her foul shots if given the chance.

I’ll give you a moment to process that statement before I proceed.

 

 

All set?

And it wasn’t even one of those situations where it’s like “Oh would ya look at that? This cute little sports-ignorant woman just threw a random number out there while trying to sound intelligent. She doesn’t even know what she just said.”

She knew exactly what she was saying. She was calculated with her statement, and she even went so far as to add “I might be underestimating my own abilities with 70%.”

Let me put her outrageous claim into context:

• The average free throw percentage in women’s division 1 college basketball is around 69% (or 1% less than Julie can knock down in her sleep, apparently)
• Julie’s 70% mark would put her at about the 60th-best free throw percentage this year in women’s division 1 hoops
• There are almost 4,000 women playing division 1 basketball
• Hitting seven of every 10 foul shots would rank Julie as the 108th best free throw shooter in the NBA, just one slot behind Carlos Boozer
• Julie hasn’t shot a basketball in at least nine years

Now before you get mad at me for throwing Julie under the bus in such a public setting, you should know that I gave her plenty of opportunities to back out of these comments. Just yesterday I brought it up hoping she would laugh it off and say she clearly wasn’t serious. Instead she just dug a deeper hole. When I told her about how good she would be compared to those college players, she replied, “Yeah, but that’s because they focus on being well-rounded in every phase of the game, not great at one thing. I’m just really good at this one thing.”

Maybe you think this isn’t blog worthy. But I’ve been thinking about her comments for nearly two months, and I just can’t get over it. This is the woman who once claimed she could tell with 100% certainty whether a TV was on or off in someone’s house just by walking past the house and “sensing it.” Not because she can see in the window or hear the noise from the TV. Just that when she’s walking along a sidewalk, she can pass any house and know for sure if there’s a TV on. And yet I still think the 70% free throw shooting is the most absurd claim she’s ever made.

I feel like everyone makes one of these obscure statements thinking that they’ll never get called out or challenged to prove it. My probably-can’t-back-it-up claim is that I have better eyesight than almost anyone on the planet. Not sure how to prove it, but I’m willing to go up against anyone in a…seeing contest? vision competition?

Rather than call Julie a lunatic without having the evidence to back it up, I’m planning to get her on a basketball court sometime soon to test this out. She’s already told me it doesn’t matter if she uses a men’s ball or women’s ball (Of course it doesn’t matter! We’re talking about the Ray Allen of white women for Christ’s sake!). She wants 100 shots, and she promises to hit at least 70 of them. I promise that I will be videotaping the entire debacle.

I asked one unbiased person who knows Julie pretty well, and his estimate was that she could hit about 30% of her shots. I personally believe I can shoot a better free throw percentage than her, and I wouldn’t expect more than 20% from me (I also haven’t picked up a basketball in a very long time).

I was going to put up a poll on this blog for you to vote on how I should have handled this comment from Julie (let it be, make her prove it on the court, etc). But you people don’t really like voting on polls on this website apparently. So let’s just call this blog post a precursor to the post I’ll eventually put up about Julie’s attempt (and probable failure) at making 70% from the foul line.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make sure my couch is in good enough shape to handle someone sleeping on it for the next 30 days.