This was originally part of its own post, but I figured I should add it here so all the Bawling/Balling/Bowling family lore can be in one place, sorry if you’ve seen it before.
So 12-foot-tall Grandma was actually a star basketball player back in the 70s for a very brief period of time– her career as a professional athlete only lasted between October and December of 1972.
The reason for this was because John Basketball, the inventor of the sport, realized that the WNBA had not yet been established, so he asked her to please sit out until the Basketball Elders got a chance to make a space in the sport for women. Grandma thought this was pretty bullshit, but she decided to leave the NBA anyway because nobody could keep up with her balling, and the sport had lost its novelty.
After she settled down in her new-but-less-exciting career as an astronaut, she met Pop-pop on the moon. It turns out that he had been a big fan of her and had recorded all her matches on U-matic, and had fallen in love with the sport.
Anyway things happened, the two fell in love and got married, and Grandma and Pop-pop had a beautiful family together. She became especially close with one of her granddaughters, Ballin’ Jessie, who inherited her propensity for basketball. The two would often dunk hoops with each other, and developed trash-talk as their love language.
Pop-pop also had an interest in the sport, but his height had made it difficult for him to keep up with the others. In fact, he had actually lost about a foot in height as a result of being compressed by Earth’s stronger gravitational pull. Despite this, Pop-pop was never really bothered by this because of his exceptional love for Grandma, who was always more than happy to lend him a helping hand.
