Kyrie Irving just made the NBA interesting and relevant again. Hell, he just rekindled hope that professional athletes are more than one-dimensional sound bytes and walking and talking endorsements.
In the long and arduous Winter spanning the bleak vacuum between the start of the next college football season, the Cleveland Cavalier star and Lebron’s #2 man, stunned reporters and fans and provided a ray of sunshine amid the bleakness by sharing his belief that Earth is in fact not a sphere but actually a flat disk.
Maybe, winning an NBA championship triggers endorphins that forever blur the line between fantasy and reality. Yahoo Sports reports that the shooting guard shared his astronomical beliefs with teammates on a podcast and later backed-up his words during an interview. Listen to the Road Trippin’ podcast here, hosted by Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye.
It is unknown whether Irving has joined the International Flat Earth Society, a support group of sorts originally founded by Englishman Samuel Shenton in 1956, who hold a “unique” perspective that the planet is not a globe. “Flat Earthers” as group members are called, believe that the reality that the shape of the Earth is spherical, is simply an ingrained conspiracy based on a massive public disinformation campaign. Who this alleged conspiracy benefits is anyone’s guess. It is ironic that Shenton formed the society three years before Sputnik was successfully launched into orbit.
The beautiful and exciting trait regarding Irving, is that the former Duke University student-athlete does limit his wayward and controversial theories to the flat earth and displays an open and interesting mind, something that is rare at least in the public forum for the ranks of professional athletes. “I’ve seen a lot of things that my educational system has said that was real that turned out to be completely fake. I don’t mind going against the grain in terms of my thoughts,” he shared with ESPN’s Arash Markazi.
Irving addressed other interesting topics during the podcast, including the subject of intelligent life in the universe and celebrity deaths that were actually assassinations. Whether or not this was a simple publicity stunt (we hope not) or the result of being exposed to the high-altitude laboratory of the friendly skies on a higher frequency than the average person, Irving’s thoughts are a heck of lot more intriguing than the languishing excuse for hoops that the NBA currently offers. Celebrities please take note, we our tired of your politics, there are other subjects to pontificate about.
Unfortunately for Irving and other Flat Earthers, the buck does not stop with the plumb bob experiment. According to the geography of the society’s map, an airplane flight from Sydney, Australia to Santiago, Chile would have to travel at twice the speed of sound to cover the distance of the current 12-hour flight, as the two destinations according to the society are separated by an impossible distance for modern aircraft. The conspiracy theorists of the movement simply respond to this fact claiming that no direct commercial flights exists between Sydney and Santiago. Oh well.
Read the full Yahoo Sports story here.
Image- This Passenger Flight Does Not Reach Nearly Over 1,500 MPH
