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Enterprising young man hits Michael Jordan with 'WHAT ARE THOSE?!' meme at his own camp

Dan Devine
·Senior NBA writer

When the ball swings your way and the opportunity comes, you can't be afraid to take your shot. You've got to step into it with confidence, let it fly and deal with the consequences, because the process is more important than the result. This is just as true of jokes as it is of jumpers, and young Bryce Lyle showed Monday that he has absorbed this bit of basketball wisdom well.

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During a question-and-answer session at Michael Jordan's Flight School summer camp, young Mr. Lyle got the chance to ask the GOAT one question. He chose to do it for the Vine.

"WHAT ARE THOSE?!" is a footwear diss that's been around for a minute now, but has found new life due to a spike in joke clips posted on Instagram and especially Vine over the past couple of months:

This, evidently, was a trending topic with which the 52-year-old Jordan was not familiar:

After getting brought up to speed on the nature of the question and admitting he's "lost on that Vine stuff," Jordan offered a pretty strong response.

"What are those?" he answered. "These are XX9 Lows" — an as-yet-unreleased pair of Air Jordans, a version of which he'd previously shown off during his summer camp shootout with Jimmy Butler. (Makes sense that the guy they named the shoe after would get first dibs on the exclusives.)

If you're the kind of Internet dinosaur who prefers watching a story unfold in one minute-long clip rather than two sub-30-second versions, here you go:

For his part, 17-year-old Lyle told SLAM's Michael Reiner that he wasn't taking shots at His Airness' shoe game, but was genuinely curious as to what the Hall of Famer had on his feet:

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SLAM: Was asking Michael Jordan “What are those?!?!” something you had planned?

Bryce Lyle: It was kind of like a spur-of-the-moment type thing. I’ve been coming [to MJ’s Flight School camp, where the stunt took place] for like three years so I knew he was going to do a Q+A, and I was just thinking of a question. I really liked his shoes—I just couldn’t really find out what it was, and I just figured, like, Well, this is something that I say with my friends, so why not just bring it out because I wanted to know what they were. [...]

SLAM: Did you get to talk to Mike afterwards about it?

BL: No, actually, today we had an autograph session and I walked by him and I wasn’t gonna say anything and he didn’t say anything, so I’m pretty sure he just completely forgot about it.

Ah, Bryce. Bryce, Bryce, Bryce.

This is the kind of thing that makes you think that young folks aren't especially familiar with Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan doesn't forget things. Michael Jordan — even after a half-century on this planet, even after one of the most successful professional careers in basketball history, even in the midst of being officially stamped in history as perhaps the greatest to ever do it — remembers everything. (Ask O.J. Mayo how M.J. handles unruly campers.)

In that respect, then, getting on the record as merely appreciating the kicks is a savvy bit of management by the youngster, who I think it's fair to say has acquitted himself well here by managing to produce a story that involved the terms "michael jordan" and "meme" that somehow didn't include this. More than anything, though, I think we can all agree that it's stunning that the first time we've got documented evidence of someone pointing at Michael Jordan and asking "WHAT ARE THOSE?!" the item in question wasn't his pants.

Hat-tip to Tom Ley at Deadspin.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!

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