Jimmy Kimmel revealed his ulterior motive for accepting Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) challenge to a charity basketball game in 2018.
The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host said he mostly wanted Cruz “to throw up on television.”
The “devastating visual” would perhaps be “just the Hail Mary” that Cruz’s Democratic rival Beto O’Rourke would need to win Cruz’s Senate seat in the 2018 mid-term election, the comedian explained on the latest episode of the “SmartLess” podcast, hosted by the actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett.
But Kimmel lost the game 11-9.
And Cruz won the election.
Cruz challenged Kimmel to the charity game — dubbed the “Blobfish Basketball Classic” — after Kimmel mocked the lawmaker for a series of funny facial expressions while courtside at a Houston Rockets game.
On the same podcast, Kimmel said “the mistake that I made was having no fouls” because “in my head I was imagining him calling fouls on everything and it just being boring and going on forever.”
“I thought that we’d play in a reasonable way, but I should have known that Ted Cruz was not going to play in a normal way because he doesn’t do anything normal,” he continued. “He would put me in a bear hug while I was dribbling.”
Kimmel described Cruz as a “nice enough guy” and said “the whole thing was positive overall,” given the thousands of dollars they raised for charities.
“But I would’ve liked to have won that game and I was ashamed of myself,” Kimmel admitted. “I made the mistake of trying to really become a good basketball player the week before the game. When I got there I already was in bad shape physically and when I left there I was in worse shape physically.”
Listen to the podcast below. Kimmel’s comments about Cruz are at the 37-minute point:
And check out the game here: