“He had on a waistlet”: Eddie Murphy’s bizarre basketball game with Prince
There are only a few occasions in which Eddie Murphy has actually been starstruck.
There was a period of around 20 years in which he was the most famous person in Hollywood. After exploding off of Saturday Night Live when he was still too young to drink, Murphy had an immediate starmaking turn in 48 Hrs, which essentially set the standard for what all future buddy cop movies would look like. With Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop, and Coming to America in quick succession, he became so famous that he even wowed other celebrities.
A criticism that emerged against him was that he had become so powerful that he wasn’t able to take chances, as anything he was involved in was demanded to be a success. Murphy ended up getting sharply admonished when one of his films didn’t perform, even if it was something like Boomerang that ended up having a cult audience, so, after a while, he began to navigate towards safer choices that provided him with less of a challenge.
His creative turmoil isn’t entirely unfounded, as it is hard to imagine that he was ever in a room where he wasn’t the most famous person, with one exception being an incident where he was face-to-face with Prince, arguably the biggest musician in the world.
“We had on club clothes, and Prince had on that outfit that was in the ‘Kiss’ video, where he had the little short shirt and the leather jacket with the buttons and stuff,” Murphy recalled, “He had that outfit on, and a little gold chain around his waist. A waistlet, I think. He had on a waistlet, and he was like, ‘Yo, want to play some basketball?'”
Murphy said that it took him by surprise that Prince was so casual that he’d be willing to engage in some friendly competition with his fellow artists, but he also said that the singer was unlikely to start any game that he wasn’t likely to win.
“We had one dude on our squad that could play named Larry, and he didn’t have no shoes, so Prince gave him some sneakers, right?” Murphy said, “Prince wore maybe two, three sizes smaller than Larry, but Larry was so excited to have Prince’s sneakers on. He put them tiny sneakers on his feet, so he couldn’t do his game. He couldn’t execute.”
The funnyman revealed in his interview with Jimmy Fallon that Prince was much funnier and more playful than he had been perceived to be, and despite having an unusual public persona that was shrouded in secrecy, he was known among Hollywood folk like Murphy for having a great sense-of-humor. While they didn’t have any close collaborations, the two began directing films with mostly Black casts in the 1980s, which have gone on to become cultural touchstones for the generations of viewers who grew up with them.
Murphy has remained working, but hasn’t had many notable projects recently, given that a majority of his recent films have gone directly to streaming services. However, Prince has still been an enigma that has yet to be cracked; although a Netflix documentary about his life was in production, it was shut down by the artist’s family estate, and will likely never be released. Hollywood has been churning out countless biopic films based on the lives of famous musicians, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone could fill the shoes of ‘The Purple One’.
