A Dish best Served Cold
Duke Johnson waited almost three years to get his revenge on Baker Mayfield, and hoo boy was it sweet
It’s starting to look more and more like Baker Mayfield’s time in Cleveland is over. After weeks of trade speculation, Mayfield took Instagram on Tuesday night to thank Browns fans for their support over the years. It wasn’t a goodbye, but it sure felt like one as Mayfield spoke of “memories” and “God’s Plan" (and as soon as “God’s Plan,” gets brought up, you know it’s about to get messy).
If the rumors are true and the Browns do indeed discard Mayfield, it will be quite the fall from grace for the quarterback who led the franchise to their first playoff win since 1994. There is one man, however, who won’t shed a single tear. In fact, he might even enjoy it. That man is Duke Johnson.
That’s the tweet Johnson sent minutes after Mayfield’s Instagram post on Tuesday night. It came out of the barrel so fast, it was as if it had been sitting in the chamber for years, just waiting for the perfect moment for Mayfield to step into the metaphorical crosshairs. As it turns out, that was exactly the case.
Johnson's dig was three trips around the sun in the making, dating all the way back to June 2019, when the former Hurricane requested a trade from the Cleveland Browns. “You’re either on this train or you’re not,” said Mayfield of Johnson's request at the time. Now that train has jumped the tracks.
If this is Johnson’s own version of the “Jerk Store” episode of ‘Seinfeld,’ he did it a whole lot better than ol' Costanza. He didn’t fly to Ohio with a bowl of shrimp cocktail as bait. He knew there was no such thing as a "jerk store." He bided his time. He resisted the urge to pounce time and time again. And when the moment finally came, he stuck the landing on Twitter. If that isn’t textbook trash talk in the year 2022, we don’t know what is.