Philadelphia 76ers fans love to #RaiseTheCat, but raising a couple of cats of his own didn't exactly go so well for Ben Simmons.
If you're a Sixers fan, you're well aware of the #RaiseTheCat movement that took over the Philly basketball world beginning last season. A couple of Sixers fans on Twitter, inspired by photos of Simmons with his two Savannah cats, started the craze of lifting their cats after a Sixers win.
The movement had momentum. The Sixers put it on T-shirts. There was even a #RaiseTheCat camera on the jumbotron at games.
People loved the cats.
Turns out, the cats were a little too... wild.
Savannah cats sure are beautiful animals. They were first bred in the 80s and are ancestors of the wild African serval. But they may be a little too wild.
The Undefeated's Marc Spears wrote a piece today about Simmons' love of animals and goes in depth about his experience with the cats that inspired a city to get arm workouts in every time the Sixers won.
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Turns out, they were a real pain in the butt for Ben's brother to deal with:
"So, we start with one. It’s all good and everything is cool,” the 31-year-old Tribe said. “Then Ben being the 20-year-old that he is, says, ‘He needs a friend. We need to give it a friend.’ So, he gets a male one this time. And this cat is crazy. It doesn’t want to eat. It’s hiding from us. Every time we go near it, it’s scratching. You can’t go near this cat. You give the cat a bowl of fruit and it’s clawing at your hand when you put the fruit down. It’s like a wild animal.
“We had them for about four or five months and I told Ben, ‘We can’t have these cats anymore. This is crazy.’"
Yep. Ben had to get rid of the cats.
But the story doesn't end there. There's a Planes, Trains, and Automobiles type incident to end the cat tale in which Simmons' bro had to take the cat to the airport and it gets out of its cage and bloodies him up pretty good.
So Simmons and Sixers fans have something in common. They appreciate the effort it takes to raise a cat.