Also note: Don’t make fun of Al Harrington for wearing K-Mart brand “Protege” shoes any more … it seems that he’s ditched those for Nikes. Now keep reading…
If you’re local to the DMV area, you’ll remember Othella Harrington. He left the South from Mississippi in 1992 to be the next ‘big’ big for John Thompson in D.C., in line with Ewing, Mutombo and Mourning. But while Othella had a productive four-year career with the Georgetown Hoyas, and a tenured NBA career (709 games over 12 seasons and five teams), a famed basketball big man he was not.
Al Harrington entered the league out of a New Jersey high school in 1999 and has appeared in over 830 NBA games spanning 13 seasons. Different Harringtons to most, a bullet point on the mental cheer sheets of a couple courtside hecklers aided by libations on a Tuesday night at the Verizon Center. As you can gather (and as the title of the post gives away), the most oft-shouted quip by said hecklers was to call Al ‘Othella’ — they really David Letterman’d it, over and over. And over.
Al took exception as soon as that magical zinger was found by the heckler’s inner heckler early in the game. He retorted, “I’m not Othella, you dummy!” to the degree where you wondered if he really thought that they really thought he was Othella.
Tags: al harrington, Denver Nuggets, heckers
