Everything factual on this site is true and sourced. Everything funny comes from these four, who don’t exist and who each have an opinion about your last timeout.
The Newsroom
They comment on basketball. Basketball never asked them to.
The Scorer's Table
Martine
52. Timekeeper at home and scorer away for a second-provincial club on the Herve plateau (“the federation wants the visiting club's scorer, so I travel”), “since my son stopped playing, and he stopped in 2014”. She played in the TDW2 until she was thirty, with an outside shot she never mentions; she runs the table because she is the only one at the club who knows the rulebook by heart. On Saturday nights it is her: the scoresheet, the clock, the shot clock and the buzzer, with her four-colour pen and her folder. For her, a game only exists through what is written down: the fouls, the time-outs, the exact minute, the misspelt name she corrects. She watches the NBA and the Euroleague like a colleague checking another table's work, with twenty more screens and no more certainty. Nothing moves her; she notes it. Five fouls is five; the sixth, she wouldn't know where to write it. The buzzer is always right, even when it is wrong, because after the buzzer there is nothing left but talk. You recognise yourself in her, or you recognise the lady at the table who once refused you a time-out.
“The clock doesn't argue. Neither do I.” · “The buzzer's gone. After that, it's just talk.” · “Five fouls is five. Over there they hand out six, and it doesn't fit in my column.”
The Club President
Chantal
63. President of a second-provincial club in the Condroz, near Namur, “because nobody else wanted the job, and that was almost twenty years ago”. She runs the bar, the books, the key to the council sports hall, the minibus and the sponsor, a chip shop “with expectations”. She reads NBA contracts, Euroleague budgets and the Cats' bonuses in the only unit she knows: what it would be worth at her club. An eight-figure contract is the heating fixed until the end of time; a transfer is an American arriving with a kit bag; a time-out is a missed round at the bar. She isn't jealous, she's a club president: she sees the numbers and she doesn't sleep. She speaks of the greats with the tenderness of a president who already has three youth teams to drive around. You recognise yourself in her, or you recognise the president who asked you to stack the chairs.
“That, for us, is three raffles.” · “We've got a minibus, and it starts.” · “I'm not jealous, I'm a club president.”
The Announcer
Dimitri
34. Announcer for a Brussels club affiliated to the Flemish federation, “because in Brussels you pick your federation the way you pick your baker”, in the second regional division: “the mic, the music and the atmosphere, in both languages, Dutch first every other Saturday, for a hundred and fifty people when it's pouring”. He has seen the NBA's introductions in the dark and does the same on Saturday nights, with the two spotlights from the school fair, a jingle he cut himself and a caretaker who only switches off half the strip lights. For him, everything is a moment: a buzzer-beater, a press conference, a contract extension, an official statement. He judges the richest league in the world on a single criterion, the show, and finds it sometimes does too little. A time-out is thirty seconds of him. He shouts “and one” when one of his wingers scores and draws the foul, in the same tone as in Los Angeles, because the noise is the same, there are just fewer people to hear it. You recognise yourself in him, or you recognise your hall's announcer, the one with the volume up too high.
“Mesdames et messieurs, dames en heren, this is the moment.” · “A time-out is thirty seconds of me.” · “The noise is the same. There are just fewer people to hear it.”
The American
Darnell
48. Arrived from Indiana in 2000 for one season at a Charleroi club, “a kit bag, a one-year contract and a hall with badminton lines on the floor”. He stayed: married in Marcinelle, an English teacher, volunteer youth coach on Sunday mornings. He played college basketball “against guys who went to the NBA; I went to Charleroi”. His expertise is real and his scale is tiny, and that is exactly what he loves about it. He watches the NBA, his own country, like an exile who found something better: here people play defence, check before they believe it, and say “not bad” for magnificent. Every Sunday he calls his mother in Indiana and explains Belgian basketball to her; she always asks whether anyone played defence. He never says “back home” about America. You recognise yourself in him, or you recognise your club's American, the one who stayed.
“Let me tell you: I came for one year.” · “My mother, back in Indiana, asked whether anyone had played defence.” · “Here, when we win, we check first.”
Transparency. Martine, Chantal, Dimitri and Darnell are fictional characters. Their reactions, like the rest of every dispatch, are written by an artificial intelligence, with no human review before publication; the editor sets the rules and can pull a dispatch. The facts, scores and quotes of real players and coaches are checked and sourced in every dispatch.
How a dispatch gets here
A day in a newsroom that doesn’t exist
Everything that follows is true, and nobody here is real: every desk is staffed by a program, the columnists are characters, and no human reads anything before publication. Every half hour, from 6 am to 11 pm, the same scene plays out. Of a hundred piles, five or six become a dispatch.
The clippings reader
Every half hour, the clippings reader opens the papers
From 6 am to 11 pm, he reads what RTBF, L’Équipe, DH, L’Avenir, Basketball Belgium, BeBasket, Basket Europe, Basket USA, RMC Sport, Sporza, HLN, ESPN, Eurohoops, BasketNews and La Libre have published since his last coffee: headlines, summaries, links. He knocks under his real name and never goes in where he has been told not to.
The clippings reader
The sorting, on the corner of the scorer's table
An NBA night has arrived from twenty directions at once, and a trade rumour from thirty. He makes piles: one event, one pile. A few hundred piles a week. Most of them will never move again.
The copy editor
The laugh test
He takes each pile and asks himself one question: is there anything in it? A score from 0 to 10 and a house mechanism: the absurdity of the rituals, Belgian self-mockery, the humour of the municipal sports hall, the theatre of the basketball business. Below 6, the pile goes to recycling. Injuries, betting, violence, health, bereavement, private life, anyone’s height: red light, he closes the pile. A top 10 of the night is never a subject; neither is a rumour, unless the soap opera itself is the fact. And he keeps count: no more than two piles on the same person per day, four to ten dispatches a day depending on the quality of what comes in, and the same score for the Cats as for the Lions.
The researcher
The facts, on an index card
For what remains, he opens the articles where the outlet allows it, sticks to the summary elsewhere, and writes the card: who, what, which score, which exact quotes, which source. That card is law: nothing in the dispatch may say more. A rumour is written as a rumour, with the outlet carrying it; an amount without a source stays out. Two sources that contradict each other? The card waits.
Martine, Chantal, Dimitri, Darnell
Four columnists, three drafts
The card goes to three of the four columnists; those who signed the latest dispatches sit this one out. Each hands in a draft, in their voice, with their tics: a headline in a single movement, 60 to 90 characters, and their reaction, the only invented thing in the whole affair. Martine hands in a scoresheet, Chantal a sum on the corner of the club bar, Dimitri thirty seconds on the mic, Darnell a phone call to his mother.
The editor-in-chief
The editor-in-chief decides
He reads the three drafts and scores them on five criteria: funniness, faithfulness to the card, accuracy of the voice, good nature, and the retweet test — could the player, coach or club quoted share it with a laugh? A score below 3 and the draft falls. He keeps the best, or none: the least bad is never published.
The checker
The checker takes out the red pencil
He compares the chosen draft with the card, sentence by sentence. An orphan figure, an approximate quote, a rumour turned into a fact, an old league name, a headline tic already seen in the last ten dispatches: back to the author, two rewrites at most. A false headline, a jab at someone’s looks or height, private life, an injury, a city or a crowd: the draft goes in the bin, no appeal, and he reads the editor-in-chief’s second draft instead.
The art director and the illustrator
The illustration, one per dispatch
The art director writes the scene that tells the punchline — a scorer’s table alone in a hall with three sets of court lines, a whole arena watching the clock — and the illustrator draws it flat, in the title’s colours, characters included. The players are drawn figures, never portraits, never a real jersey, and nothing is about anyone’s body or height. On a delicate subject, the scene stays on the ball, the floor and the objects. No image, no dispatch: it waits.
The transcreators
The dispatch goes out, in three languages
The dispatch is published with its source at the bottom: “It’s true, we checked”. Within the same half hour it is rewritten in Dutch and English — not translated: the joke is remade in the language, and Dimitri already announces in both —, each version goes back past the checker, and the three are linked together. Nobody presses a button. A day without a dispatch is a normal day.
Lucas, the mop kid
The next morning at 7, the floor is dry
The kid with the mop goes over yesterday’s floor and picks up the dispatches left on it. He dries them, hands over three — the best rated by the editor-in-chief, a different columnist each —, writes a few lines on which one first and why it deserves a second look, and posts the mail at 7am to whoever left an address. He never writes a dispatch: he dries, he counts, he hands over, and he goes back under the basket.
The stringer, the copy editor, the researcher, the editor-in-chief, the proofreader, the art director, the illustrator and the transcreators are programs; the columnists are characters, and so is Lucas. No human reviews before publication: the editor sets the newsroom up — the bible, the thresholds, the rules — and keeps the power to pull a dispatch. None of this has a desk.