LiAngelo Ball says that UCLA made him thank Trump

“If they didn’t tell me to do it, it wouldn’t have been in there.”

Former UCLA basketball player LiAngelo Ball has said that the only reason that he thanked US President Donald Trump for helping him get back home after being caught shoplifting in China was that his school told him to do so.

“My school wanted to hear it, too. Before I went up there, it was like, ‘you got to thank him.’ So I just threw him in there real quick before I gave my speech,” Ball said during a radio interview on Wednesday. “If they didn’t tell me to do it, it wouldn’t have been in there.”

Earlier this month, Ball spoke openly for the first time about the shoplifting incident at a Louis Vuitton store in Hangzhou which caused a bit of international drama last month, saying that he only stole a pair of sunglasses because his teammates had done it first.

Ball and two of his teammates were released back home with surprising speed with US President Donald Trump taking credit for the situation’s quick resolution, claiming that he had saved the teens from long prison sentences by speaking with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

While all of the players thanked Trump at a press conference soon after arriving back in Los Angeles, outspoken father Lavar Ball has refused to do so; instead choosing to troll Trump at every possible opportunity by questioning how much of a role the US president really played in his son’s release, causing Trump to tweet that he should have just left the players in jail.

Granted that it is certainly likely that Trump helped to speed along the UCLA players’ return to the US, Chinese law experts have said that the teens were in no real danger of actually being jailed in China. Contrary to Trump’s tweets, shoplifting is a relatively minor crime in China. Considering the fact that the trio were high-profile foreigners who had been invited to the country by Alibaba, it’s almost certain that Trump actually only saved the teens from being confined for another week or so to their luxury hotel in Hangzhou.

At his father’s behest, LiAngelo has left UCLA and is apparently on his way to play basketball in the small Lithuanian town of Prienai with his brother, LaMelo, where, fortunately, there are no Louis Vuitton outlets.