Ron Artest has come a long way since his legendary days as the NBA’s number one troublemaker, when he didn’t listen to coaches, drank Hennessey at halftime and then capped it off with his infamous role in the Malice at the Palace incident. Fortunately for the world, with the passing of time Ron-Ron has morphed into an interesting man bent on helping the community, that is when he’s not driving tiny race cars through Los Angeles.
My old buddy Ron was recently recognized by the city of Las Vegas for helping out charities that have to do with people with mental health problems, even starting an academy called Xcel University, where high-risk adolescents are taken in as the faculty tries to turn their lives around. Artest has done so much that Las Vegas has decided to give him a ‘key to the city’.
Lucky for us, nobody has informed Artest that the key on a plaque he received is in fact useless, as he recently spouted off about how he was going to waltz into people’s houses and try on their jewelry and then collaborate with Celine Dion. Can someone in Vegas pull some strings and make this actually possible? If I were a Las Vegas resident I’d like nothing more than to wake up in the morning to see Ron Artest staring at my parrot cage as he muses, “You don’t know who I am, parrot? You some kind of monk!?”
“I’ll probably just walk in everybody’s home,” Artest said to the Los Angeles Times after practice Tuesday at the Lakers’ facility in El Segundo. “I’ll go to Floyd Mayweather’s house first and put on some of his jewelry.”
“After I get the key to Vegas, maybe now I’ll do a song with Celine Dion. Or maybe after she sees all the good things I’ve done, she’ll do a song with me.”
“I don’t know what it means,” Artest conceded. “Hopefully I get some free meals.”
And we’re hoping Artest keeps being himself.
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Ron Artest Given Keys to Sin City, Has Plans to Use Them [The Last Angry Fan]
