Prince’s Bryant Junior High basketball photo is pretty much everything

Dave Chappelle and Charlie Murphy made comedy history when they shared the mythological tale of the time they were challenged by Prince and the Revolution to a game of roundball, only to have their asses handed to them (and handled) by the blouse-wearing Minnesota Globetrotters led by the gravity-defying Prince himself. Everyone has assumed that the skit was just some purely imaginative tear-inducing hilarity, but a new photo making the rounds online today has some thinking perhaps the skit might have been more of a “True Hollywood Story” than anyone imagined!

The picture features Prince on the Bryant Junior High School basketball team, and the Paisley Park cager has every single ounce of Princetacular majesticness already in place!

The photo comes courtesy of the St. Paul Star Tribune‘s Libor Janey, who dug up the old Prince profile piece from the Star Tribune archives and posted it on Twitter. Prior to the photo, he shared this excerpt and referenced the Dave Chappelle Show’s prophetic sketch:

From the Strib archives: Chappelle was right. pic.twitter.com/icXBFGWkij

— Libor Jany (@StribJany) March 3, 2015

From the article:

Though music was his calling, Prince mostly hung with the jocks at Bryant Junior High and Central high. He played football, basketball and baseball and, in ninth grade, he even coached a grade-school basketball team at church. He was good enough as a freshman to make the Central junior varsity basketball team with Duane, who was a foot taller and went on to play at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

“Prince was an excellent player; he was like the sixth or seventh man,” said Richard Robinson, his basketball coach. “He was an excellent ball handler, a good shooter and very short (5 foot 2). Probably with a different group of people he would have been a starter. But, as they turned out, they were probably the best ball team that ever came along at Central. I knew he wanted to be starting and I felt he should be starting, He was unhappy and he expressed that many, many times.”

And just in case the photo above was just a little too cluttered with non-Princeness, here is just the Princetrulescence with all the other stuff cropped out:

Perhaps it was Prince’s frustration over not getting any playing time that motivated him to spend more time with his music? While we ponder that Earth-altering question, let’s all revisit perhaps one of the Top Ten funniest comedy sketches in television history: “CHARLIE MURPHY’S TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORIES – PRINCE – UNCENSORED”