The Newark Board of Education abruptly canceled a celebrity basketball tournament at West Side High School, a school in New Jersey, after a promo video featuring scantily clad women shaking their backsides appeared online.
The tournament, entitled “NBA Baddies Basketball Tournament NJ,” was slated to take place at West Side High School on July 21, with tickets ranging from $50 to $500, according to its Eventbrite page. NBA stands for “Nuttin’ But Azz.”
The game was one of several upcoming events produced by music manager Big Fendi, who is most known for discovering and being the former manager of Nicki Minaj.
It now must find another home after the promo video showed at least 10 women in thongs twerking in the school’s gym. Then a man appears dressed like a referee and says the tournament is not regular basketball, but rather “it’s the big booty three.”
Saying it didn’t go over well with parents and school board members is an understatement.
“I am appalled that a video of that sort was associated with that school or any of our schools,” Newark Board of Education member Daniel Gonzalez said during a meeting on Juneteenth (Wednesday, June 19), according to a report by NJ.com.
“As the only West Ward board member on this dais, I was disgusted,” Board Co-Vice President Allison James-Frison added.
“I opened up Facebook and I thought my eyes were deceiving me. My wife had to snatch the phone away from me,” parent Loucious Jones told the board, according to NJ.com.
Social media users also expressed their disdain for the video.
“This shouldn’t be at no high school, though,” one user wrote in the caption of the promo video when they reposted it on Instagram.
“Please stop this from happening. Students will be attending this school for summer programs. This is giving the school a bad reputation. Sex should never be promoted at any school with underaged children. The board needs to end this,” someone else commented.
The board did more than that. It has now launched an investigation into who approved the celebrity tournament to be at the school and said someone must be held accountable.
A community activist who goes by ‘8 The Gr8’ is the executive director and co-founder of New Direction School of Change, a Newark-based violence prevention program. He expressed his disappointment with the video, saying he contacted the school without knowing the raunchiness of the event.
“This ain’t cool. We ain’t stamping this. I was told that this was gonna be a celebrity basketball game, and they wanted to do it in a gym, so I took it to Westside, and they were allowing them to use the for me,” 8 The Gr8 commented under the promo video.
“So it’s not on the city or WSHS; it’s on me, and I apologize to anyone that this video may have offended. This event was officially canceled days ago when this promo video dropped [100], so y’all can @ me or DM me,” he continued.
For his part, Big Fendi apologized to the entire city of Newark, specifically naming West Side Principal Akbar Cook, Councilman Dupre Kelly, parents and students.
“My deepest apologies,” Fendi said in a video posted to Instagram. “The content in this video, you guys knew nothing about. We were doing the event and things went a little left and out of control and I take full responsibility for that because you guys had no knowledge of what these girls would be wearing … and whoever was affected by this video, I want to apologize.”
