National Basketball Association

Who's that masked streetballer?

Published Jul. 11, 2013 1:00 a.m. ET

foxsports

The AND1 Mixtape Tour was one of the ultimate moments of the previous decade (the aughts), in that it was the closest relationship established between hip-hop culture and basketball culture.

There was freestyle balling akin to freestyle rapping with a soundtrack to match, and the whole deal was basically the same -- who could please the audience the most?

The answer to that, much of the time, was “The Professor.”

The Professor was a crowd-pleasing, white, junior-college-dropout streetball legend from Oregon whose real name was (is) Grayson Boucher. That sentence only sounds fictional. The Professor did what all the greatest streetballers did, which was handle the rock in clever ways. He’d dribble with his knee, do a crossover the wrong direction, bounce it off the defender’s forehead -- make a real fool out of the stooge trying to guard you, is the idea.

They sold 10 DVD volumes of this stuff and got a TV show on ESPN2.

Time passed, various things happened and the AND1 Mixtape Tour became less of a thing. Which brings us to the present, in which The Professor is showing up to random playgrounds and schooling fools while dressed as Spider-Man.

Of course, that’s not all The Professor has been up to. He jumped ship from AND1 to the Ball Up Streetball tour, which is headed to Chicago next weekend.

And he even dabbled in acting, with a small part in the Will Ferrell flick “Semi-Pro,” and even playing the lead in “Ball Don’t Lie,” which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival, although it’s still awaiting distribution.