GREEN BAY — Josh Sitton couldn't help himself.
When the Green Bay Packers smart-aleck left guard saw the team select University of Alabama safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix with its first-round pick in the NFL Draft Thursday night, Sitton took to Twitter to crack a joke.
Sitton won't get points for originality from his new teammate, as Clinton-Dix has heard more than his share of similar jokes.
When he was asked at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis in February what the worst thing about being named Ha Ha, he answered with the subject Sitton was referencing.
"The whole President Clinton with Monica Lewinsky thing," Clinton-Dix said then. "I didn't know much about that."
Which makes sense, since Clinton-Dix was only 5 years old when the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in Washington, D.C. Nevertheless, the double entendre his hyphenated last name creates was especially timely since Lewinsky was back in the news this week,
having written about her affair in Vanity Fair .
That said, the story behind Clinton-Dix coming to be known as "Ha Ha" is considerably more interesting than the Clinton-Lewinsky punchline. Clinton-Dix's full first name is Ha'Sean.
"My grandmother gave me that name when I was three or four years old," Clinton-Dix said of being called Ha Ha. "She got tired of pronouncing my name, which is Ha-SEEN, but it's spelled Ha-SHAWN. So about age 3 or 4, she started calling me Ha Ha, and it just went from there."
Jason Wilde wrote: