How My One Tweet About Lebron James Set Off A Week Long Internet Frenzy
It’ll be 10 years in the blog game for me on August 14th. 11 years if you include my year in the minors writing on For Sure NOT. I’ve spent the vast majority in the mud. Since nearly day 1 I’ve been feuding and fighting. Taking heat from enemies both foreign and domestic. From blindos to hondos to Al Jazeera…Yankees fans (Incarcerated Bob) and Patriots fans (McGillicuddy)…all the way down to my own coworkers and my own family. Its been a tumultuous life so far on the internet. And as the years have gone on, and as Barstool has grown, each subsequent feud has gotten more and more controversial and reached further than the last. The latest was a week long frenzy about Lebron James losing a shoe on the basketball court. One tweet. 218 characters. Patient Zero, the epicenter of an outbreak of internet content:
We are now on day five of this shitstorm, with a handful of mainstream outlets covering it, several professional athletes weighing in, thousands of tweets and comments, and hundreds of DMs from absolute lunatics.
At this point when you see the latest reports on Barstool Sports, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by these frenzies. Everything we say and do attracts a lot of attention. But this one surprised me, a bit. And maybe the better way to describe it, is intrigued me. This controversy, stemming from a single tweet, which relatively speaking is HARMLESS compared to the rest of my disputes, about a guy who is constantly a lightning rod of controversy. I thought it was par for the course, considering Barstool’s past with the King. Some of the Lebron takes over the years that have come out of Barstool Sports blow this shit out of the water! Dave once said he’s an alcoholic who’s a bad father because he was turning his kids into alcoholics as well. He accused him of being a terrorist too, I think. But this was the one that caught the eyes and ears of pro athletes, mainstream journalists, and millions of NBA fans across the Internet.
I find that fascinating. The anatomy of going viral. It’s a total crapshoot. Why does one thing spread like wildfire and something else never sees the light of day? The Butterfly Effect that occurs with something like this is pretty intricate.
Most people dont get this latest controversy at all. A lot of the level headed Stoolies who understood my point – Lebron isn’t a bad human or a bad father, he’s just kind of a weird dude who behaves strange because he’s always either already got the spotlight on him or he’s drawing the spotlight to himself – have been reaching out telling me they’re shocked that THIS was the take that launched a thousand tweets. And while I understand their point, I’m also not an idiot and I know how the internet works so I can also see why this happened. First off, on a very literal level, the make up of the tweet mattes. I embedded that video in my tweet, and I didn’t quote tweet whatever tweet from which I originally saw it. I think that made a huge difference. Quote tweets just don’t move like regular tweets. Because when other people quote tweet YOUR quote tweet, it loses the original video, and the further degrees of separation muddy the waters. That tweet of mine stands alone, completely on its own. And rather than looking like I’m just reacting to something on the timeline, it looks much more deliberate and intentional like I’m making it for the sole purpose of slandering Lebron. Something that Skip Bayless or Dave Portnoy would purposefully concoct to assassinate the King’s character. When in reality it was much more of a quick, off the cuff, reactionary tweet. I’m usually the one actually defending Lebron, and certainly dont make my bones railing on the guy. But if you look at the structure of that tweet, it looks very Skip Bayless-esque.
Which brings me to the actual words in the tweet itself. “Childlike.” Thats the one, Marv. Thats the silver tuna. In my opinion, thats the one word I think set this all off. Some dude who was one of the first replies trying to turn this into a racial issue said something along the lines of “you did everything except call him “boy” in this tweet” which is one of those heavily loaded words that triggers racial disputes. I scoffed at that idea, nothing about that tweet is racial. Nothing about my tweet says hes a bad parent, nothing about it is racial. But if I had to guess, me calling him “childlike” is what triggered that. I thought about if I saw some race baiters like Trump, or Clay Travis or Tomi Lahren use that word I could definitely see people thinking its racially charged. So once I’m outside the Barstool bubble, I probably just look like any of those people. Just another white guy they think is talking down to a black man. I guess? I dunno thats my best bet. But I would venture to guess that if I used a different word there, one that doesnt sound as condescending and smug, this controversy either a) never takes off or b) is greatly reduced.
So you take those two things – the structure of the tweet, and the words of the tweet – and combine it with the guy who wrote the tweet. Just as this was spun into a racial issue, it was spun into a parenting issue. And any time I speak about parenting or family issues, that gets spun into “you cheated on your wife, so you cant talk about parenting.” Which is wrong for a shit ton of reasons. 1) I never critiqued his parenting 2) I think hes a great dad 3) the notion that I cant comment about sex/marriage/families/parenting because I was unfaithful is crazy to me. If anything my perspective is way more in depth because I’ve seen it ALL. The good the bad and the ugly. But the point still stands – this thing went exxxxtra viral because every Lebron stan in the world felt like they had the ammo to unload on me, giving it extra life and extending it on to what seemed like every single goddam Twitter user’s timeline.
At least that was the case with the plebeians. Those are the reasons all the common folk reacted to the tweet. The real reason this fiasco went to the lengths it did was because of Jayson Tatum and a handful of other professional athletes responding directly to me:
Shout out to Jayson Tatum for getting us through the last week in July with some fodder for radio and television. Again, kind of a perfect storm. If its not the slowest time of year, does this saga ever blow up? If ESPN was writing about playoff baseball or regular season football, would they have given this as much attention? If the talking heads, like Jason Whitlock, didnt discuss it, would it have just been yet another Lebron discussion that stayed between Dave, Dan and me? I even think Whitlock added another racial layer to it – I was racist for being the white guy saying Lebron was being an asshole, Whitlock was like the traitor for being the black guy saying it. Just more gasoline on the fire.
It was really the perfect storm for, more or less, completely fabricated sports media drama. The Washington Post’s headline was “The latest Lebron James debate isnt about his basketball skills, its about his parenting skills,” which just couldnt be further from the truth. At least from my point of view being the Patient Zero tweet that launched it. I never once said anything about his parenting. I never once said anything about his race. And sure, words can have secondary meaning and you can infer and extrapolate and all that shit, but that says more about the person interpreting it than the person who originally said it. I think these things spiral out of control and people see what they want to see, read what they want to read, and hear what the want to hear. My tweet meant “I think Lebron stomping and flailing around looked like a goofy little kid.” And thats fucking weird to me (no more no less), because I think of Lebron as this rock solid fucking Superhero, like hes the member of the Avengers. I think of him as an assassin. As a cerebral and physical force of dominance. And then you put him in certain social settings – where he cant just rely on basketball skills to be the star in the room – and I think he does weird, socially awkward things in order to try to keep up with his on the court persona. Like hes not calibrated normally, because lets be honest hes not. But people read that as racial, they read it as critical of his parenting, and they read it as an invitation to criticize me for my past. Because on the internet there is only one speed. It goes zero to 100 and its either black or white (in this case literally) and right or wrong.
Like this dickhead who called into radio. I’d say if I had to pick the perfect example of internet lunacy regarding the Great Lebron Debate of July 2019, its this dude. Which is why I am honoring him with the “Why are you hating on Lebron, he doesnt beat his kids!” Worst Argument of the Week award:
And thats just the tip of the iceberg. The DMs were even less coherent than that. Meet Misty. She didnt like that I criticized Lebron so she told me to suck my “Uncle daddy dick”
Then there was Dlugz21, a Thanos fan from the Caribbean who was very upset he could not teleport to New York to murder me:
Quick reminder of some context here: That was a conversation stemming from a dude who lost a sneaker while celebrating a play during a 14 yr old’s basketball game. We touched upon God, Teleportation, genocide, and police brutality. CRAZY.
Jduffy thought I was a bitchmade cuck faggot. But the very rare kind of bitchmade cuck faggot who also votes republican. Cant imagine theres many of us out there overlapping in those two Venn diagrams.
Theres Vollano who called me a “fagget,” which I’d just like to include as a pet peeve of mine. Its INSANE to me to have a misspelling that egregious in such an important, hateful, declaration of war. I feel like you GOTTA get the spelling right. Too big of a moment for a typo:
La Paris just got right to the point. Brevity is the soul of wit. She is one witty motherfucker
And Sam Chance who wants to secretly join the KKK if you ask me. Seems like someone who’s “asking for a friend.”
And then there was Natan, who got his KFC vs the NBA storylines all mixed up, DMing me hate based on my Jeremy Lin take, not Lebron:
Sorry, Natan. The Jeremy Lin Take Controversy got quickly overshadowed by King James. You missed your chance. you IDIOT.
All in all, one of the most memorable weeks in my career. The perfect storm – the perfect blogger, subject, time, platform, reactions, and participants to take one tweet and turn it into an entire week of internet entertainment. Its moments like this that remind me how much I love blogging, How much I love being in the mud and mixing it up. When you’re truly blogging and podcasting right, you’re disrupting the landscape. When you’re engaging deep in arguments and debates, getting death threats and cheap shots. When you’re getting trolled and trolling back. When everyone is making it personal and acting like their next take is life or death. Its an internet war of attrition, and as far as I’m concerned Barstool has infinite resources and unlimited manpower. We will never lose those battles.
PS – it will be one of the greatest footnotes in sports media history that THIS WASNT LEBRON JAMES’ SON!!!!!! I understand the arguments still apply, and the discussion can still occur based on Lebron’s interaction with his son’s teammates as well. But all the discussions about parenting…the talk about how he wants to be a better father to his son because his own dad wasnt around…the talk about his son having his own shine…all that shit…MAKES NO SENSE BECAUSE IT WASN’T EVEN HIM! Just goes to show that we’re all screaming in an echo chamber for the sake of arguing, regardless of details and circumstances. We basically all had a week long argument technically about something that never really happened.