Imagine: Your fiancée tells you that former Indiana Pacers player Reggie Miller has been harassing her. He has been texting her constantly and once even followed her to the supermarket! What do you do? Serve him a knuckle sandwich? No. You are the heir to a massive fortune. That stuff is, quite frankly, beneath you. A grander gesture is in order. With this knowledge you have been given, you think to yourself, comes responsibility. You need to do something big. Something that says that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated. Not just with Ali — sweet innocent Ali! With her doelike eyes! — but with any of the decent women in the morally solid county of Malibu, California. You need a plane, you say to yourself. A plane that will fly over the area dangling a simple message:
“REGGIE MILLER STOP PURSUING MARRIED WOMEN”
Yes. At first, you’re quite pleased with yourself. “I think people in Malibu share my views that being a famous basketball player should not provide some sort of shield against inappropriate behavior,” you say proudly, in a restraining order against Miller that never gets filed because …
Your sky message prompts Deadspin to do a story, which prompts the Post to follow up, which prompts Miller’s lawyers to dig up phone records that indicate that, actually, your fiancée was wholly lying to you: She’d been sexting Miller all along. Worse! She sent him pictures of herself in a bikini and in bed, pictures that, in short order, appear on TMZ. “I don’t know who leaked them to TMZ,” Miller’s lawyer told Daily Intel, mischievously. Oh, and then Gawker digs up an old story that makes you sound violently possessive. The worst part of this, you think to yourself, is not even the fact that your visions of an innocent Ali have been shattered.
It’s that now you’re the jackass who ordered a damn plane to basically tip off his own cuckoldom.
So much for grand gestures.
