Brett Kavanaugh's Latest Defender: The Eminently Useless Chris Dudley

Yale alumnus and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh: he’s terrible! In addition to his hideous record of jurisprudence, his extremely-bizarre-Washington-Nationals-ticket-buying-habits, and his work in a former life suggesting that Ken Starr ask the president if he jerked off into a trash can, he's also been accused of sexual assault, by increasingly more women. Kavanaugh’s emerging malfeasance is showing the asses of all kinds of people: The President, Republican leadership in the Senate, the entirety of the conservative media infrastructure. They are all doubling down on this motherfucker even though there are another dozen Heritage Foundation goons who could do the exact same shit Kavanaugh would do, sitting around waiting for a call.

But no one has been exposed right now like Yale University has. Say what you will about Harvard, but at least it isn’t Yale, a school whose only real function is churning out the horseshit secret society creeps who run our country into the ground. Look no further than the professional athletes each school has produced. Harvard has managed to primarily churn out weirdo cult heroes like Ryan Fitzpatrick, currently in the midst of a yardage bender for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, NBA Asian-American trailblazer Jeremy Lin, dignified senator and all-time NBA memoirist Bill Bradley (Correction: Bradley went to Princeton, but is still a very good memoirist. We regret Dudley-ing that up.). Yale, on the other hand? The most famous sporting figure to emerge from the school, bar none, is Chris Dudley.

Dudley apparently knew Kavanaugh back in his college days, and considers him a "great friend," recently helped run interference for him, telling the Washington Post that, actually most of the other people they interviewed for this article are wrong, and Kavanaugh WASN’T a "sloppy drunk" who was routinely spotted slumped over asleep at parties. and could have NEVER done some heinous shit under the influence of alcohol that he wouldn’t remember.

Dudley is the grandest failure who ever lived, a 6'11" heap of fuck ups at the highest level, a dude who has spent his life tripping face first into mud puddles while everyone points and laughs at him. Dudley’s emergent association with Kavanaugh is probably the best-so-far sign that he absolutely won’t get confirmed, simply because everything Dudley touches withers and dies. Take, for instance, his free throws:

I hate to be the kind of pedant who says a shitty free throw shooter should shoot underhanded, I really do, but Dudley was special. He managed a career 45 percent rate in the NBA, and his form somehow made it worse.

Watch him gather the ball, raise up, set it over his head and… and…. and… shoot the ball, flashing a hitch that feels like it’s ten seconds long. On his second attempt, Marv Albert takes a few seconds to roast his hideous form on television, right as the ball drifts in a massive arc and still only taps front iron. After a Knicks player commits a lane violation and makes him take another one, Albert twists the knife. “You know, I get the idea that Chris would rather not have this extra free throw.”

Weirdly, after getting every ounce of dignity drained out of his body on TV, the extra shot manages to go in, a mild success that was turned into a crowning moment in Dudley’s elite-level, Yale-Constructed mind palace, fortified by gold leaf paintings that say “YOU ARE DOING GREAT, CHRIS” and “YOU DESERVE ALL THE SUCCESS YOU’VE BEEN AFFORDED!”

But hey… Dudley wasn’t just a miserable failure on the court. Off the hardwood, he was the NBA Players Association treasurer during the 1998-99 lockout, a labor action that ended with the players getting absolutely dominated and set up a president that would lead to them getting wrecked AGAIN in subsequent CBA negotiations. Of course, maybe Dudley was just dogging it, steering the union into disaster because his heart and soul were just so deeply aligned with management.

“I’m ready to lead our comeback.” After his retirement from being a crappy basketball player, someone in the Oregon Republican Party approached Dudz about running for Governor, like so many mediocre Yale men who came before him. For a while, he didn’t do that bad: his opponent, John Kitzhaber, was a machine politician who was an easy target for an outsider candidate. But, in politics as in basketball, Dudley was a stiff who got heaps of terrible ideas in his head, like, airing ads that featured comically corrupt NBPA chief Billy Hunter.

Dudley’s failed run at governor would probably be the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to him, if they had never legalized dunking in basketball. Because, friends, this dude LIVED to get dunked on:

Here’s Shawn Kemp rising up over Duddles, arms in the air, just waiting to take a slam, bringing shame to Portlanders everywhere who live only to see Seattle defeated in sports.

Oh hey, here’s Glenn Robinson getting some, executing the platonic ideal of driving the lane and throwing it down on a grimacing, overmatched big man. Look at Dudley’s face as he walks away from this disaster. He knows this will live forever, a totem of his shame on display for everyone.

Even Dudley’s own dunks manage to seem like Dudley getting dunked on. Here he is kind of… angling over Bill Cartwright, who absolutely couldn't care less. Two hands, looping over the body of another player, just baaaaarely making it. He doesn’t even celebrate, probably because a Yale Man never shows emotion in public, only in private, with his friends, while they all jerk off into microwaves filled with dead squirrels.

Oh, but nobody—NOBODY—has been more destroyed by any one person's single act than Dudley was when he was on the receiving end of The Shove. It is poetry in motion: Prime Shaq, in shape and looking like a fucking tank made out of nightmares, catches the ball on Dudley. He posts up, and takes Duddles DEEP in just a few short motions. He then turns around, raises up, and dunks on Dudley while thrusting his entire crotch into Chris’s midsection.

As he lands, Dudley stumbles and Shaq, who is an IMMACULATE asshole, plants two hands right in Dudley’s chest and sends him flying into the hardwood. Dudley proceeds to scramble up, soaked in his own blue blood, pick up the ball and heave it at Shaq, coming about as close to hitting the biggest dude in the league as he did on those free throws earlier. No one comes to his defense. Shaq just jogs back on D, they both get techs, and Dudley is left to stare irritably at a dude who just defined his career and life on national television.

It is, in my mind, the greatest NBA dunk of all time, just a wild tangle of peak power and bad feelings, spilling out of the screen. It works as one little piece of something, a GIF of pure domination you can play in a loop forever. It works as a short story, a tale of one man turning another into an embarrassed pile of mush. And it works as a synecdoche of the two men’s careers and lives, Shaq having paraded through anyone and everyone who stood in his way night after night, while Dudley collected fat-ass checks to be totally unnecessary, both as an NBA big man and a shitty Republican lackey, and just getting fucking owned in public over and over. Hopefully, his streak will continue in the future, both near and long term.