The Loop
Stand-up comic Colin Quinn is now the world's funniest sports Twitter troll
You probably know Colin Quinn best from his stint as the host of SNL's Weekend Update, or the short-lived but awesome comedian roundtable show Tough Crowd on Comedy Central, or perhaps you've seen his stand-up act. But in the year 2018, Quinn has re-defined himself as an hysterical NBA Twitter troll. His schtick is that his tweets sound incredibly earnest, like something you might hear from the world's most banal analyst, but are tailor-made to be so incredibly misguided and wrong that they enrage everyone who doesn't get the joke. Check out his best work from the past couple weeks:
After one of the many times LeBron went into God Mode:
At the start of an incredibly shoddy game 7:
On playing styles:
On the intangibles:
After he didn't predict the game five Houston-Golden State result, but tried out the "TIMESTAMPED!!" gambit anyway:
On the Raptors:
And finally, on national secession:
That's beautiful. Granted, I'm a sucker for a good troll (Nathan For You is the funniest show of all-time, and if you disagree you're a bad person), but I think this kind of commentary transcends mere trolldom. Quinn is a bona fide Twitter artist.
More superlatives!
Best Sport If You Want to be a Cheater: NCAA Tennis
The entire known tennis world revolted against a college player named Borna Gojo this week, and the fact that literally nothing happened to him proves that in this age of governing bodies and drug tests and instant replays, there is still one sport that is a perfect fit for cheaters. Let me explain.
Because I'm a weirdo who would rather die than go to a live NFL game, and who has no desire to spend more than approximately $3 to attend...well, anything...I've recently become a pretty big college tennis fan. I'm in a good location for it—North Carolina's research triangle is home to Duke and UNC, and they both have extremely good men's and women's teams. Plus, with six singles matches happening at once on a single bank of courts, it's an extremely good sport for someone like me who is easily bored.
That said, one of the quirks of college tennis is that each player calls his or her own lines. There's a chair ump, but they mostly stay out of the way. If one player disagrees with a call, he/she can appeal to the chair, and the chair can overrule. There's a penalty system in place to keep a player from just calling everything out and making the chair overrule, but it's not enough—there are still more than a few players who blatantly cheat, and count on the chair not paying attention. Which, unfortunately, happens a lot, and when the chair is caught in space, they never overrule the call.
Which brings me back to Wake Forest sophomore Borna Gojo, an excellent singles player who helped lead Wake to a team national title. I have seen parts of two Gojo matches (in person and online), and it so happened that he played UNC's Will Blumberg (last year's NCAA singles runner-up) in both the ACC championship match, and the NCAA singles quarterfinals. Here's a call he made at a crucial moment in the ACC:
And below, see the one he called out in the quarterfinals on a game point (the UNC men's Twitter account initially posted the video, which made it even clearer that the ball was comfortably in, and then deleted because Wake Forest probably got mad). This led to him being called out as a cheater by Pam Shriver, Patrick McEnroe, Brad Gilbert, Chris Evert, and Taylor Fritz:
And these are not isolated calls—Gojo apparently got overruled four times during the match, and those were just the times he got caught!
Now, I can't say conclusively that Gojo was cheating—maybe he legitimately saw it out, and has terrible or extremely selective eyesight. What I would ask, though, is: How would it look different if he was? Also, which scenario is more infuriating: That Gojo made the bad call, or that the chair wasn't paying close enough attention to overrule it?
Anyway, if you're a cheater, and you don't want to risk getting tested for steroids or whatever, college tennis is the sport for you.
(Note: In a bit of karmic justice, Gojo got beat in the national championship match by his teammate Petros Chryosochos, who I've also watched a bunch, and who I'm pretty sure doesn't cheat.)
Biggest Loser of the Week: Anyone Who Ever Doubted LeBron, Ever
Today, I am purposefully not searching my old sports blog for the word "LeBron," because I really don't want to confront whatever takes I had on him circa 2009/10. I'm sure they were unimaginably stupid even back then, but now that he's led a team of 55+ rec players from the Skokie, IL YMCA to the national championship, they'll look especially bad. And I'm sure there are a million of us out there in the American sports universe.
But seriously, can you imagine being Skip Bayless right now? I mean, really, I wouldn't want to be anyone who is on record as having questioned LeBron's toughness, or greatness, or clutchness, or anything. It's kind of weird to even think that we were having arguments about whether he was the greatest player of all-time pretty recently. But I especially would not want to be Skip Bayless. As an example, I could quote all the times he doubted LeBron's heart after a loss, all the times he said he choked under pressure, etc. But I think I'm just going to go with this one, because it's by far the funniest:
If you ran the world's best Skip Bayless parody account, you could not invent something that perfect.
"And Yet, We Can't Ignore This" Counter-Narrative of the Week: Jayson Tatum
Heaven help me, this is so vicious from the Celtics rookie:
That's part of your legacy too now, LeBron. That's part of your legacy too.