What's happening here? No one pictured was quite sure, at first. Marcel Mutoni tweeted this out on Tuesday, and the sportswriters in the first row had no clue what the deal was, so, like the reporters they are, they chimed into get Robert Horry's comment. Howard Beck (now on the Brooklyn Nets beat for the New York Times) is on the left, Tim Brown (a baseball writer for Yahoo) is to his right, and legendary Lakers announcer Chick Hearn (RIP) is in the guy on the other side of Horry, loving it. Beck couldn't recall when or why this happened, so he asked Horry on Twitter.
Horry also could not recall when or why this happened:
Indeed. This is the San Francisco Chronicle article from 2002 that explain why the Lakers' couldn't keep their pants on:
The Times says Robert Horry played several possessions in Game 5 with his shorts nearly falling down. At one point he held them up with one hand; later he had them taped. In Game 7, Kobe Bryant was forced to the bench for nearly a minute when his drawstring snapped in the second quarter. While teammate Lindsey Hunter held up a towel for cover, Bryant pulled on a new pair in front of thousands of fans and a national TV audience.
"Every time you fall or take a charge," Horry told the Orange County Register, "the string breaks, and the way the material's made, the shorts slide right off you. I don't know what the deal is."
But Horry was still incredulous:
He came around, though:
He's talking about "Tonight is the Night." Twitter is a wonderful thing.