Donald Trump got the thank yous he wanted from three UCLA players caught shoplifting in China. The father of the most famous player won’t be doing so anytime soon, it appears.
LaVar Ball didn’t have much time for the idea that the President of the United States helped his son, LiAngelo, out of a potentially crippling situation for his basketball career.
“Who?” Ball told ESPN. “What was he over there for? Don’t tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out.”
LiAngelo Ball, Cody Riley and Jalen Hall were all caught shoplifting during UCLA’s trip to China to play a game against Georgia Tech. All three players returned to the States this week and are indefinitely suspended by the program.
After being detained and confined to a luxury hotel while their UCLA teammates went home, the charges were eventually dropped and the bail money was returned. Trump tweeted that the players were facing 10 years in prison before he spoke with Chinese president Xi Jinping about the situation. ESPN reported that multiple sources said the players were likely to only be held at the hotel for another 1-2 weeks before Trump’s “intervention.”
Still, all three players thanked Trump during a press conference after they returned to Los Angeles. LaVar Ball downplayed the whole situation, just as he had done while in China.
“As long as my boy’s back here, I’m fine,” Ball told ESPN. “I’m happy with how things were handled. A lot of people like to say a lot of things that they thought happened over there. Like I told him, ‘They try to make a big deal out of nothing sometimes.’ I’m from L.A. I’ve seen a lot worse things happen than a guy taking some glasses. My son has built up enough character that one bad decision doesn’t define him. Now if you can go back and say when he was 12 years old he was shoplifting and stealing cars and going wild, then that’s a different thing.
“Everybody gets stuck on the negativity of some things and they get stuck on them too long. That’s not me. I handle what’s going on and then we go from there.”