The segment with LaVar Ball and the Ball family that nearly went off the rails wound up with LaMelo Ball, with a live mic, at one point saying, “Beat that,” and followed with the N word, while his father was running around going crazy teasing that he wanted to fight The Miz.
LaMelo is the youngest of the three Ball sons, and is a high school basketball star at Chino Hills High School in Southern California. He’s committed to UCLA as part of the program’s 2019 basketball recruiting class.
As you can imagine, backstage was chaos.
WWE immediately responded to the Los Angeles Times saying, “The inappropriate language used by a guest during the Miz TV segment was not scripted, nor reflects WWE’s values.”
According to one person backstage, the key people, notably Kevin Dunn and Vince McMahon, were very unhappy backstage when the word was audible to the crowd.