We don’t like making posts about us, but since there’s hardly anything to update you on in the disappointing world of Carmelo Anthony, why not attempt to regale you with an lunchtime tale of our nightclub encounter with the NBA’s fourth-leading scorer a couple years ago? Grab your sandwich and gather ’round!

Setting: 40/40 Club in Manhattan
Date: NBA Draft night, 2006

The party was mostly weak until we found this one pretty cool room upstairs. In the middle of said room was this massive pool table, and Paul Pierce of the Celtics was running shit and talking junk at Gary Payton-type levels. There was a video arcade game in the corner, a few couches, and the lights were low.

So we’re solo and scoping the scene, taking mental notes because breaking out the pad and paper would have just been losery. (Plus, nothing noteworthy was happening.) There were a few other players in the room, but the only two that stood out were Pierce and Carmelo Anthony. Melo was hanging out with his future baby momma, mostly keeping a low profile.

We’re standing next to the pool table and some guy is shooting and Paul Pierce appears next to us. Trying to sound cool, we look at Pierce and say, ‘who’s got next?’ and Pierce, looking through us, and twirling the cue as if he’s Tom Cruise in the Color of Money, and exuding a cockiness that Deion Sanders would have been proud of, goes, ‘not you.’ Ouch. (It actually was a fantastic line we suggest you attempt to pull it off someday. He may have stolen that from Dylan McKay right after Dylan got his money stolen at the end of their first year at CU, but we’re not 100 percent sure.)

Wounded, we continued to watch as Pierce lay down several $100 bills on the table, got his challenger to do the same, and then won it all. (It wasn’t that Pierce was fantastic; his opponent was quite bad.)

So we saunter over to the video game (NBA Live, maybe?) and challenge some guy. We may have been the Heat, and the other guy was the Sonics or something. (Yes, we took a team that had just won the title; we’d never played the game before.) We collect a narrow victory and just as we’re starting the rematch, Anthony comes up to the guy and goes, ‘let me get in here?’ and of course this fellow looks up, all wide-eyed and is like, ‘sure, man!’ and here we are, play ing Carmelo Anthony in a video game.

Players take on writers in video games all the time, but those are usually in controlled settings, set up by publicists, where the writer knows everything he says is going to be recorded. Not the case here. So the expletives flew, and the trash talking began early and never let up.

As soon as Anthony went up by five, he said something along the lines of, ‘if I go up 20, we’ll call it.’ Yeah, these athletes can get cocky in competitive settings.

Anthony was so skilled, he would inbound the ball and then announce what he was going to do … and then make it happen. He quickly led by about 15 at the half. We figured the end was near, so we tried a tactic – ‘hey man, your girl is saying it’s time to go, looks like you may to forfeit,’ which prompted him to pull away from the game momentarily and look at her and ask why she had to go – there was no pause button – and then she looked back at him like, ‘huh?’ and during that exchange, we made a triple and then he had a five-second violation and we quickly scored again to cut it to single digits.

‘Oh, so it’s like that’ was his response, and then he ran us out of the gym, talking slightly less smack than Paul Pierce did at the pool table, but in a much more cordial and less confrontational manner.

And then we lost, and left, and told our friends that Anthony seemed like a nice guy and Pierce was a douche. The end. (Unrelated: By pure happenstance, we wear Carmelo Anthony’s basketball shoes. The Wade’s we used to have ended up hurting our feet.)