NBA

Ron Artest Wants To Sell His Championship Ring To Help Schools

Remember how, in his first post-NBA-Finals interview, Ron Artest felt so indebted to his psychiatrist for helping him focus and be at his best? Well, he wants others to have that same kind of advantage, and he’s willing to go to great lengths to make it happen.

How great? He wants to sell his 2010 championship ring as part of an effort to get more mental health professionals into the nation’s schools. He’ll receive the ring next month, and is then, in his words, “never going to put it on.” His explanation of his reasoning:

“You work so hard to get a ring, and now you have a chance to help more people than just yourself, instead of just satisfying yourself,” he said. “What’s better than that? For me, this is very important.”

It wasn’t long ago that the idea of Ron Artest promoting mental health would have just been seen as a giant goof (and to some, it still might) – even in his writeup, nba.com’s Scott Howard Cooper has to say, “there is no punch line.”

But there isn’t, so we have to hand it to Artest here – he’s doing a good thing here, he’ll probably get quite a bit of money for that ring, and we hope there are more such actions from him in the future. And people are taking notice – Trey Kerby at Ball Don’t Lie tried to find the right words for Artest’s actions and came up with, among others, “awesome,” “better than cool,” “splendid,” “no words,” and finally, “astonishing.”

As for us, we’ll just say again, good for Artest. One of the league’s most infamous head cases seems to have a lot more going on up there than a lot of people ever would have suspected – and as we so often wish athletes would do, he’s using his powers for good.

H/T Reddit

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