Pablo Torre

Please enjoy.

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre.

And today we're going to find out what this sound is.

But I wonder if you've used that Muji pen to write down at any point the quote I wanted to actually start with.

Okay.

Which is, of course, from Mike Krzyzewski, Coach K, head coach of your Duke Blue Devils, who said this, quote, Shane was an alien.

I wanted at the end of his career to crack his head open and see if he was really human.

End quote.

You're going to stab people's eyeballs with that fine ballpoint Muji pen.

I would.

I would have.

And just to be extra clear about this, Shane Battier barfing his ambitions into a towel before every game as a 6'8 Duke freshman was a thing that pretty much everybody who cared about him found intensely unsettling, I am told.

And this was true of his college girlfriend, who was now his wife, and it was true of then-Duke assistant coach Quinn Snyder, who is now the head coach of the Atlanta Hawks.

Although...

there was one notable exception.

But when it comes to barf, the first thing that I personally think about when I think about Shane, whose brain, by the way, not unlike Coach K, I also plan to just crack open here.

is a different liquid.

And it dates back to the first time that I ever met Shane, which was at a bar during the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference about maybe a decade ago, which would be around sometime after he played pickup with Barack Obama, which we'll discuss, and probably also around when he was just winning championships with LeBron James, who would call Shane, quote, the number one smartest basketball player and person I've been around, end quote.

But that night, during that conference, Shane Battier introduced me to something else.