Who is “Fake Klay”, Thompson’s double who warmed up with the Golden State Warriors

From our correspondent Davide Chinellato

June 15
– San Francisco

His name is Dawson Gurley, but everyone knows him as Fake Klay, Klay Thompson’s impersonator. Presumed, because on closer inspection the similarity is actually not so striking. But Gurley remembers Klay just enough to fool a lot of fans. And also the security of Chase Center, the San Francisco arena that hosts the Warriors, which on Monday morning before Game 5 of the Finals between Golden State and Boston let him enter the arena, even allowing him to get on the court and get to shoot for a basket. A stunt that cost him a lifetime ban from the arena.

The joke

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Gurley had become popular with Golden State fans during the 5 consecutive Finals. His resemblance to Klay Thompson had turned him into a special fan making him popular. “Once I looked at it I thought Klay had eaten a few burgers too many,” Steve Kerr joked. Thanks to the injuries of the original, the fake Klay had disappeared from circulation, devoting himself to the jokes that helped turn him into a YouTuber with over 8 million subscribers to his channel. The return of Thompson and the Warriors to the Finals, however, convinced him to reprise the character of Fake Klay and to try what he had never experienced before: pretending to be the Splash Brother of the Warriors to the point of reaching the field. So on Monday morning, several hours before the tap-off, Fake Klay showed up dressed in perfect game gear, with the most training sweatshirt with a hood covering his face better, at the entrance of employees and media on the East side of Chase Center, has passed security smoothly as documented in a video that is already filling up with YouTube views and has made it to the pitch without any problems. Where he started shooting, as the real Klay would have done. A few triple, a couple of layups for about ten minutes and then back to the changing rooms.

The announcement

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Except at that point security realized it wasn’t the original Thompson and asked him out. Fake Klay remained in the Chase Center area for several hours, posing for selfies with the fans (some aware, others convinced they were facing the real Warriors player) and even for some TV interviews waiting to be able to re-enter the arena to watch. in race-5 with a ticket that says he paid over 10 thousand dollars. Before the doors of Chase Center opened for fans, however, the VP of arena safety brought him a letter announcing his lifetime ban. In the video that Fake Klay posted on YouTube, you see a person explaining to Gurley that he went further this time, that he couldn’t get away with “posing as a Golden State Warriors employee in a deliberate attempt to access restricted areas of Chase Center “. Fake Klay did not take it too well (although he later wrote on social networks that the Warriors were right to ban him, and that it was still worth it) and consoled himself in a bar not far from the arena where they were. gathered several Celtics fans. The video of him closes with a promise: to go to Boston for Game-6. Will he also be banned from TD Garden?