Trading in Basketball Shoes to Dance with the Stars

In recent news, Los Angeles Lakers star Ron Artest has just announced that he’ll be dancing with the stars this year. During Monday night’s live Dancing with the Stars announcement in L.A., they revealed that Artest will, indeed, be dancing with the best and worst this year.

Artest explained how he came to this decision. While the idea of dancing was not appealing to him when the idea first arose, he explained that “my daughter Diamond was like, Daddy, you should do it.”

And the rest was history. Diamond, Artest’s 8 year old daughter, battled cancer when she was 4. Artest saw the Dancing roll as a chance to fulfill his daughter’s wish and to raise money for cancer research. As he said to People magazine, “I’m going to donate the profits.”

Dancing’s new season will kick off on Monday, September 19 on ABC.