The Charlotte Hornets scheduled a Christmas-themed on-court skit for a break in the second quarter of their home loss Monday to the depleted 76ers. The setup involved Hugo, the mascot of the Hornets, learning what a couple of participating children most want for Christmas, and then delivering the goods. The payoff, as far as I can tell, was supposed to come with the final wish: A kid tells Hugo, sadly, that his father is moving the family to Philadelphia, and Hugo saves the day by producing a new father, clad in a Hornets jersey, to keep the family in Charlotte. You're rolling your eyes now, but someone at the Hallmark Channel is rubbing their hands together greedily while their assistant speed-dials Luke Macfarlane.
To set up this joke, the skit had to first demonstrate that Hugo had Santa-like powers. The second and penultimate child to interact with Hugo, a 13-year-old named Jack, asked for and received a Playstation 5. In the same way that the children in the punchline did not get to keep the actor in the Hornets jersey, Jack was never intended to keep the Playstation 5; the expensive hardware was meant to establish Hugo's generosity, in order to set up the gag about how a Hornets-loving dad, to replace your regular, crappy one, would a great and wonderful gift. The Hornets were giving the gift of entertainment, to the audience, with a skit! They were not giving a PS5 to a child. Alexei Phillips, Jack's uncle, told Queen City News that after the skit the Hornets took back the PS5, and instead gave his nephew a Hornets jersey.
The problem is that nobody with the Hornets articulated this ahead of time to poor Jack, who believed that he was being gifted a PS5 by a gigantic blue wasp. "Someone from the fan team reached out to us, said, 'Hey, do you guys want to be on the court with Hugo?' And we said, 'Sure,'" explains Phillips. Then, once they were already on the court, someone with the team whispered to Phillips and the parent of another child in the skit that the kids would not keep what they got, but would get a jersey later. Things were moving quickly, Phillips and his nephew still didn't know exactly what was happening, and there was a lot of confusion during and after the skit. According to Phillips, even the team's cheerleaders were congratulating Jack on his new console. Then a representative came to trade the PS5 for the jersey. "It got pretty awkward," says Phillips, "because eventually [the team representative] had to make it clear that he wasn't joking."
This is a terrible spot for an uncle. All you wanted to do was take your nephew to a dang basketball game, and now you are responsible for emotionally supporting a child through A Ruined Christmas. Word spread of Jack's plight among family and friends, and finally a tweet from a friend of the family went viral Tuesday, describing Jack as "crushed" and the Hornets as "a cheap sports organization." After enduring a few hours of online opprobrium, the Hornets finally issued a statement and promised to deliver unto Jack the PS5 he'd been so cruelly denied. You are advised to read the following statement in the style of the team's awful shrieking play-by-play man:
During last night’s game there was an on-court skit that missed the mark. The skit included bad decision making and poor communication. Simply put, we turned the ball over and we apologize. We have reached out to the family and are committed to not only making it right but to exceeding expectations. We will be providing the fan with the PS5 that he should have taken home last night along with a VIP experience to a future game. Our goal is and will remain to elevate the guest experience for every person that enters Spectrum Center, and to show our fans how much we appreciate their relentless support.
This was not, strictly speaking, a giveaway. It was a skit. It's fine to offer a spectator a little dipshit part in a skit and to pay them with a jersey. If what you have to hand to people is jerseys, and what you want them to do for those jerseys is to walk over there and then stand there and then be handed a thing and to smile and then to walk away, and they accept those terms, then you're fine. If you say to someone, "In exchange for doing two minutes of acting, you will receive a jersey," and then the prop for their two minutes of acting is the skull of Yorick, and then they decide that because they were allowed to handle the skull of Yorick it must now be their personal possession, clearly they are in the wrong. Clearly it would be fine for you to remind them of the agreement and to trade the skull of Yorick for a crappy Hornets jersey.
Things get more complicated when the person you are asking to do the acting is a child. They get even more complicated if you are asking the child to act as the recipient of a gift in an on-court giveaway, and they get vastly more complicated if the gift the child is receiving in the on-court giveaway is something any child would prefer one jillion times over to a crappy Hornets jersey. If you are an NBA franchise valued at $3 billion, simply do not ever put an expensive and enormously coveted gift into the hands of a child and then attempt to replace it with a crappy Hornets jersey.
For failing to follow this best practice of fan engagement, the Hornets have been made to eat shit and to give to a wounded child a Playstation 5 video game console. The Hornets have also invited Jack to attend another Hornets game, presumably in retaliation.
