Troy Clemons threw the cup away, and he was right to. The only weird people in this story are the ones online telling a grown man he should've kept a stranger's half-sipped wine forever, unwashed, because LeBron James's mouth touched it.
Here's the whole incident. In the third quarter of the Sixers' win over the Bulls on November 2, James and Tyrese Maxey couldn't connect on a transition pass, and James's momentum carried him off the court and into the crowd behind the basket, into Clemons, who was walking back to his seat with a drink. By Clemons's account: "LeBron crashed into me, he grabbed me, he said 'My bad,' my drink spilled everywhere. He took my drink from me and he basically just took a sip of it, gave it back and ran back on the [court]." James told it the same way afterward: "I spilled some of his wine, yeah... I crashed into him, spilled some of his wine, so I wanted to see if it was worth it on my arm, how good it was." His review of the wine: "It was all right."
That's it. A quick collision and a shrug. Then ESPN's Kris Rhim asked Clemons what happened to the cup, and told him some people online were saying he should never wash it. Clemons didn't blink: "At the end of the day, he's another man like me. He's LeBron, but at the end of the day, I threw that cup in the trash." Then he went and got a fresh drink.
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RatingThat answer is the right one, and the reasoning behind it holds up. "He's another man like me." This is a guy who's been coming to Sixers games for around four decades, back to Julius Erving at the Spectrum. He's watched a lot of basketball and a lot of famous people. He already has the thing worth having: the moment, the video, and a quote from LeBron James himself confirming it afterward. Keeping a plastic cup of Pinot backwash in his fridge would have added nothing to any of that except a cleaning problem.
There's one argument worth taking seriously. The cup had resale value, and memorabilia tied to a star like James doesn't come along twice. Maybe. But that's an argument for running an eBay auction on a disposable arena cup. It doesn't make Clemons foolish for skipping it. He had a cool thing happen to him at a game and treated it like a cool thing that happened to him at a game. If that costs him a few bucks in a hypothetical auction, so what. He didn't want to be in the souvenir business. That's allowed.
RTGJemele Hill took issue with his demeanor in the interview. I'd point it the other way. The demeanor was the best part. No fawning, no treating a plastic cup like it had been blessed. The people who think treating a famous man's leftover drink as sacred is normal, and throwing it out is the strange choice, have it backwards. Clemons is the only one here who kept his head.
