Report: NBA security mistook Ayesha Curry’s dad for ‘con artist’
In the final minutes of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Game 6 win over the Golden State Warriors on Thursday, Ayesha Curry, the wife of Warriors point guard and back-to-back NBA Most Valuable Player Stephen Curry, took to Twitter to register her displeasure with the officiating for the second straight game. This time, she went beyond protesting the whistle or her husband’s ejection after whipping his mouthguard at a fan, and claimed that the NBA itself “is absolutely rigged.” She quickly deleted her tweet, and later offered a surprising explanation for her agitation:
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Police racial profiled my father and told him to remove credentials and tried to arrest him. It’s been a long night for me. I apologize:
— Ayesha Curry (@ayeshacurry) June 17, 2016
I’m okay that we lost… I just can’t take people coming at my family for absolutely no reason. Something I don’t understand or stand for.
— Ayesha Curry (@ayeshacurry) June 17, 2016
According to Marc J. Spears of The Undefeated, Quicken Loans Arena security personnel checked the credentials of Ayesha Curry’s father because they were “on alert […] to find David Aminzadeh, who previously has sneaked in to countless major sporting events [and] because they thought he looked like Aminzadeh, before determining they were mistaken, an NBA official said.”
“I was just kind of debriefed on what the security thought happened with some guy that poses with fake credentials and gets backstage at a lot of events, the NBA Finals and all that stuff,” Curry told The Undefeated as he departed from the arena. “They kind of profiled my father-in-law and thought he was him. They threatened to arrest him before they checked out his credentials. It’s kind of been an emotional and tough night all the way around.
“That was kind of a traumatic situation where her [Ayesha’s] dad almost got arrested. So it was kind of a tough situation to deal with in a hostile environment. All in all, it’s just a game. I hope that everybody is all right.”
Here’s a side-by-side of Ayesha Curry’s father (left, with Riley Curry) and Aminzadeh, who had reportedly been arrested during All-Star Weekend 2015 in New York after attempting to enter All-Star Saturday Night at Barclays Center with a fake credential:
@bomani_jones I don’t see a striking resemblance. pic.twitter.com/PuRakIAsQ4
— Neal (@CadiLackhee) June 17, 2016
Evidently, NBA security was “on high alert” for Aminzadeh because he’s made sort of a name for himself by conning his way into major sporting events. From Deadspin’s Giri Nathan:
This Tumblr account, which refers to Aminzadeh as a “Con Artist,” as well as a “Sports field Crasher, Fake Credential Maker, Troubled Human,” appears to detail his many uninvited forays onto the field. […]
Neither NBA nor stadium security found Aminzadeh at the event, an NBA official said told ESPN, but a Facebook profile under his name recently shared [a] photo of Beyonce and Jay Z — who attended Game 6 — apparently taken in some area of Cleveland’s arena.
The area depicted in the photo is the Court Club, a private viewing/dining area located on the court level of Quicken Loans Arena that gives premium-spending clientele “the opportunity to get an up close and personal look at NBA athletes as they walk on and off the court during the game and as they exit their locker rooms after the game.” It sure looks like the Facebook photo features Jay Z and Beyonce wearing the clothes they were captured wearing courtside at Game 6, which suggests that, high alert and mistaken-identity credential-checking or not, the security folks on the case might have missed their man.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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