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@sfbahawk Ya know, to be fair, I don’t think I’ll know enough about JRGiddens to be able to assess his true character. So to call him a “thug” is hard for me to do (he may or may not have been during his KU years). My connotation of thug is a person who will try to get away with whatever he wants, regardless if it is illegal or not, and may have violent tendencies. Usually I equate this to criminals/drug dealers, etc.
Now there’s plenty of wannabe’s out there who simply want that “street tough” cred, and will sometimes get caught trying to do something to build said “cred”, which usually means they aren’t very good at it. Giddens got busted shoplifting in OKC before he ever got to KU, then there’s the knife/barfight thing…
Another example of “wannabe” would be Allen Iverson, with all the painful “gun-toting” bad PR he gave himself trying to represent that same “street tough” cred. What a joke I thought in the 90s, and still think it today. But always a new crop of kids every year trying to “show” they are tough.
Bottom line: My observational “guess” is that JRGiddens was a pretender. He had no reason to be a thug, nor was he any good at it, which tells me he wasn’t for real. I think whatever went down at the bar, he got scared with the facts, didn’t tell daddySelf the whole truth, and paid a price.
Apparently it took a year of rehab for his leg to fully recover. I felt sad for him. We rooted for him. For a while, he wore our jersey very well.
