It sure looks like Kendall Jenner is back with her Australian NBA star paramour Ben Simmons, and fans of his team, the Philadelphia 76ers, are already losing it.
Please enjoy some excerpts of the change.org petition started by one Aidan Powers, presumably a Sixers fan, to ban Jenner from their home stadium, apparently triggered after the team lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers (“[B]etter known as the Island of Misfits toys Lebron left behind”).
It reads like Kendall is sitting courtside squirting sauce-pentagrams on her hot dog and whispering “MISS MISS MISS” every time Simmons sets up a play.
“It is not a coincidence that the Sixers, who had started the season 10-0 at home, lost their first home game of the year the first time Jenner shows up. … It was inexplicable and Jenner’s detrimental behavior is clearly to blame. To make matters even worse than worse, Jimmy Butler left this embarrassing showing with an apparent knee injury. At this point, Jenner is not only damaging the future of this franchise but the livelihood of innocent men as well. It is disgusting behavior on her part.
If the Jenner/Kardashian family has any shred of decency left, Kendall will never again show her face at the Wells Fargo Center. … A 20 game home regular season win streak has been snapped, Ben Simmons’ career is in jeopardy, and an innocent man in Jimmy Butler is injured. The madness must stop. BAN KENDALL JENNER FROM THE WELLS FARGO CENTER.”
I mean, if you squint really hard – or just read the comments – you can detect notes of the weird, shrill misogyny that certain types of dudes start emanating like skunk spray at the merest mention of the Kardashians, a family of reality-TV-famous women whose audience is overwhelmingly women, and whose ethics are certainly questionable when it comes to, say, Instagram endorsements, but who are perfectly entitled to publicly support their partners in their professional endeavours.
But if he’s writing with tongue firmly in cheek, the hyperbole is pretty funny.
As are reports that Jenner was gleefully booing her sister’s partner and famously shit dude Tristan Thompson, who plays for the Cavs.
Whether the “Kardashian curse” is real or not, there are almost certainly knock-on effects to dating one of the most famous and photographed women in the world – here’s Houston Rockets star James Harden on why his life got better after he broke up with Khloe Kardashian in 2016:
“I didn’t like all the attention … It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it wasn’t me. I don’t need pictures of myself when I’m driving my car. Who cares? What shoes am I wearing? Who cares? Where am I eating? Who cares? It was unnecessary stuff that I think trickled down to my teammates. I had to eliminate that.”
So it’s either that it’s just really tough to focus on improving your jump shot when you find yourself adjacent to the mega-famous and a constant target of the paparazzi, or Kendall Jenner is a witch on a mission from the Dark Lord and/or LeBron James to wreck the Sixers’ season. Definitely one of those two.