The impossible coincidence of “Shawn McCray”

I was helping a junior high student with his English homework. In an exercise to practice superlative adjectives, he had to answer questions about who he thought was the funniest actor, the greatest athlete, etc. He understood the grammar but needed help spelling the names of some of the specific people he had chosen. The problem was that his pronunciation was so garbled that half the time I couldn’t understand who he meant. For example, his favorite actor sounded something like “Asho Spin” — an American, allegedly! — but I never did figure out who that was. He couldn’t remember any of the movies “Asho Spin” had been in, either, which didn’t help.

The greatest athlete, in this student’s opinion, was “Shawn McCray,” which at least sounded more like a real name. I started putting the name as I had heard it into Google, and it suggested “Shawn McCraney.” That turned out not to be an athlete, though, but — of all things — a born-again ex-Mormon who was interviewed by John Dehlin ages ago. (I watched the interview later out of curiosity.)

The student said the “Shawn McCray” we were looking for played basketball for the Memphis Grizzlies, so I looked up that team’s roster, but none of the names were remotely similar to “Shawn McCray.” Finally I just showed the student photos of all the Grizzlies, and he pointed to the one he had had in mind: Ja Morant. I would never in a million years have guessed that that was what he was trying to say!

Here comes the impossible part. Tonight, after listening to the Shawn McCraney interview, I wondered what I’d get if I ignored Google’s suggestion and searched for what I had actually heard: Shawn McCray. The first result that came up was some rando’s Instagram.

Do you see it? There, with the caption “Shawn McCray,” is a photo of a basketball player in a Memphis jersey. My first thought was that there actually is a Shawn McCray on that team, and I’d somehow missed it. In fact, if I’d done this search with my student, I would have told him to write that Shawn McCray was the greatest athlete ever and been none the wiser.

That’s not Shawn McCray, though. It’s an Instagram post by a Shawn McCray about none other than Ja Morant.

The only reason I was searching for Shawn McCray was because that was how I had heard the student’s terrible pronunciation of Ja Morant. Then, just by chance, one of the very first search results for Shawn McCray is a photo of Ja Morant. Absolutely impossible.

Update: I actually listened to two videos about Shawn McCraney. Before the Dehlin interview, I listened to "The Shawn McCraney Collapse & C.U.L.T.," by some Christian bros who are deebly goncerned about Mr. McCraney's "damnable heresy of full preterism" and other such tedious bs. Anyway, at around the 24-minute mark, they show a clip of McCraney's show in which someone says, "I had one foot inside the brick-and-mortar church and one foot outside of it."

It turns out that Shawn McCray -- the random dude who just happened to post about Ja Morant on Instagram -- is the author of an autobiography called One Foot In One Foot Out.