lebron and embiid have a new handshake with hips in it. jason whitlock called it "masonic gay stuff," then made a 69 joke. sir.

LeBron James, then with the Cavaliers, playing in Philadelphia. Photo: Ian D'Andrea, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via Basketball Network and Whitlock's own upload of the episode

LeBron James is in his 24th NBA season, about to turn 42, and now plays for the Philadelphia 76ers, which is still a sentence that takes a second. Before Thursday's home game against the Cleveland Cavaliers, a game the Sixers won after coming back from 29 points down, he and Joel Embiid did their new pregame handshake: some slaps, then a coordinated little wiggle at the waist. The internet lost it. The league had been warming everyone up for weeks; the NBA's own account posted the two rehearsing it during the preseason under the caption "+100 team chemistry."

Jason Whitlock did not see team chemistry. At 9:39 p.m. Eastern, while the clip was spreading, he posted: "That looks Masonic?"

what whitlock actually said

By Friday morning he had worked out his thoughts. On the Oct. 23 episode of Fearless, his show, he opened with "Didn't take long. LeBron James has already worn me out." About ten minutes in, he played the handshake for his audience.

"This is some Masonic gay stuff," Whitlock said. He then explained, to a camera, that this is how you become "a 33 degree Mason or 69 degree Mason," and added, "that looks gay to me," describing "a 42 year old man out there pumping his hips in front of a seven foot man." Minutes later, after saying he tries to give people endless second chances, he concluded: "I'm done with LeBron James."

We have so many questions, but mostly one. Two grown men did a little dance and the person who brought up 69 was the guy watching it on a loop for his podcast.

this is a whole hobby

None of this is new territory for Whitlock. In January 2025 he named James and Embiid, now handshake partners, to his "Mount Rushmore of who has destroyed the NBA." In March 2025 he wrote that Stephen A. Smith and James "don't care if they promote a culture that sends your kids to jail and turns them gay." So the handshake is less a revelation than a sequel: the man has been worried for some time that LeBron is making things gay, and now he has footage.

Basketball Network, which wrote up the segment first, noted that the Sixers have looked good with James so far. He put up 17 points, 10 rebounds and three steals against Cleveland. Nobody has yet been initiated into anything.