Professional athletes are in the comfortable position of being confident people with lots of money, which means they can celebrate their birthdays in a style typically found in the dreams of little kids and the realities of young royals. They can have big parties full of famous people and ring up bills that rival most peoples' annual salaries. It is the lifestyle.

Even those athletes who don't go crazily opulent, though, can have some fun with their birthday cakes. That's exactly what Toronto Raptors shooting guard DeMar DeRozan did for his 24th birthday on August 7. As the photo above shows (from Raptors Cage), DeRozan's cake features an Air Jordan sneaker (identified by Trey Kerby of The Basketball Jones as the Air Jordan VI in the Olympic colorway, because he knows these things), the Raptors logo on a basketball, a jersey with the Canadian maple leaf, and an Eazy-E-style Compton cap. That is a very personal, very cool cake.

Of course, it does not come close to topping Rip Hamilton's cake of various versions of Rip Hamilton playing poker against each other, but that's a tough bar to clear. No one who paints a chapel expects to beat out Michelangelo.

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