https://youtu.be/9tEkjd-xw5I
Reggie Jackson is consistently one of the sweatiest players in the NBA. Basically from the minute he steps onto the court, sweat is spurting like a geyser from every single one of his glands. Not just his sweat glands, either. ALL of his glands are generating sweat for him. Five seconds after the opening tip he’ll be damp to the touch, two possession later he’ll have soaked through his headband and jersey, and by halfway through the first quarter he’ll be leaving a snail-trail of goopy sweat behind him while he runs around. After he stands at the line and takes two free throws, forget mops, the entire key needs to be shop-vacced before the ball next comes down the court.
Sweating is an advantage in the NBA. It makes players more reluctant to defend you because they don’t want to touch your sweaty gross body. It also makes you harder to defend because you just slide off people who are making contact with you. It’s sort of like those pig-catching contests where the pig gets greased up beforehand. Jackson knows that his sweat gives him an edge, so he doesn’t even try to wipe it off at timeouts. When somebody tosses him a towel, he wipes it on his ass crack one time and then throws it back in their face. His mantra is, “if god didn’t want us to sweat, he wouldn’t have given us eyebrows.”
In recent memory, I think only Thon Maker and Khris Middleton were sweatier. However, I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the sweatiness of every NBA player past and present, so I could be missing some exceptionally sweaty players in my analysis. All I know is, Jackson has a long way to go to be the SOAT (Sweatiest of all Time), a title which currently belongs to Patrick Ewing. That man turned sweating into an art form. Legend has it that he started sweating profusely when he was three weeks old and never stopped. All the up-and-coming sweaters who are coming up through the high school and AAU ranks, they should be looking to emulate Ewing.