Pro Donkey Basketball League Set to Tip Off

KNOB NOSTER, Missouri.  Pro basketball scouts and agents flocked to this small town in central Missouri this spring, making for crowded conditions at the Motel 6 on State Highway 50.  “I had to put two guys into the same room with a rollaway bed,” says owner Gene Ray Hampton.  “They said they didn’t have any privacy, but that’s how we board the donkeys in the barn, and they never complained.”


Clell “World” Furnell

 

What the scouts came to see is the man who is expected to make donkey basketball, a variation of the American indoor game played on the backs of Equus asinus, the domestic ass , as popular as the NCAA’s Final Four tournament.

“Donkey basketball is the next major sport, and Clell ‘World’ Furnell is going to be its George Mikan and Michael Jordan rolled into one,” says David Nurvine, a one-man promotional whirlwind.  Nurvine has bankrolled the Missouri Mules, who will begin play tonight as part of the National Donkey Basketball League.


Mikan:  He changed the way the game is played, without using a donkey.

 

For smaller cities across America who clamor for the glamour and excitement of major league sports but don’t have a local billionaire who can front the money for a baseball, football or NBA franchise, donkey basketball is seen as the next best thing.


Twenty-second manure time-out.

 

“We’ll have eight teams to start,” says NDBA President Horace Schuster, “Chicopee, Mass., Troy, New York, Birmingham, Alabama, Paducah, Kentucky, Hot Springs, Arkansas, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Cairo, Illinois” and the Missouri entry.  “We hope to go global by 2019,” he adds.  “There’s a lot of donkeys in Mexico.”


Kevin McHale

 

Furnell, who signed with the Mules, has a low center of gravity combined with an extraordinary reach that is drawing comparisons to Kevin McHale, the Celtics forward of the ’80’s who could tie his shoes without bending at the waist.  “Clell has the perfect body for donkey basketball, and he’s going to revolutionize the game,” says Schuster.


“The Mules are on the clock with the sixth pick.”

 

As the league’s tipoff approached, there were rumors of teams trading a bundle of future picks to get at Furnell, who says he will buy his mother her first double-wide house trailer with his signing bonus, which league sources say was in the mid-four figures.


Home Sweet Home–at last.

 

“We been livin’ in rented trailers as long as I can remember,” says Furnell.  “If I have anything left over, I’m goin’ out to the QuikPik and get a Big Gulp Slurpee.”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “This Just In–From Gerbil Sports Network.”

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