Comedy icon Adam Sandler appears to be enjoying his time on the North Shore, as evidenced by a recent sighting at a park in Roslyn.
YouTuber and engineer Robert Whitehorn of Huntington, whose Instagram handle is @RoboBball3, posted 44 seconds of footage to Instagram on Sunday showing Sandler, clad in a pink T-shirt, playing a pickup basketball game at Christopher Morley Park in Roslyn.
Sandler, who Newsday reports is shooting a movie for Netflix at Grumman Studios in Bethpage, was playing on one side of the half-court at Morley, Whitehorn told Newsday.
“He walked in very low-key, and one of the people I was playing with said, ‘That’s Adam Sandler on the other end of the court,'” Whitehorn said. “I noticed the pink polo shirt with the baggy shorts and I wasn’t sure it was him, but he turned his head and I saw his face and I knew immediately.”
Sandler’s team won a half-court game and played another team full-court, Whitehorn said.
While Instagram story content cycles out after 24 hours, sports journalist Anthony Puccio obtained the video from childhood friend Whitehorn and posted two excerpts on Twitter on Monday.
Whitehorn told “Inside Edition” on Tuesday that he is hoping to use the viral interest to convince Sandler to appear in a charity basketball game.
“Mr. Sandler, if you’re even seeing this, so many people pulled up around the park to see you, so I think it would be awesome if you had any free time at all to do a charity basketball game on Long Island,” Whitehorn said. “I would love to help him put that together because he obviously has done a lot of charity, [and] I’ll take care of it. Just let me know. If you would ever want to do that, I’m here for it.”
The sighting came less than a month after Sandler unintentionally starred in another viral video on the North Shore, in which a Manhasset IHOP hostess lamented over TikTok that she didn’t recognize him when he came into the Northern Boulevard restaurant with his daughter and left after she told him it would a 30-minute wait.
Sandler later joked on Twitter that he had left because the restaurant’s unlimited pancakes promotion did not apply to milkshakes, which the chain rectified in a special nationwide Milkshake Monday promotion that resulted in Sandler reuniting with the hostess at the Manhasset IHOP.
The Brooklyn-born Sandler has shown off his basketball skills on the island before, including a game in Morley Park in June 2017, with one of his fellow players describing him to Newsday as a “well-rounded” player with a “high basketball IQ.”
In June 2019, Sandler stopped by Hofstra University’s gym in Hempstead with friend and frequent co-star Rob Schneider to shoot hoops with students before a show at Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater.
