Cooling off hot takes
Segal likes making fun of those who make ridiculous sports statements.
ROYAL PALM BEACH— Brock Osweiler is a Super Bowl quarterback.
The LeBron James/Dwyane Wade/ Chris Bosh experiment was a failure from the start that only a stick of dynamite could fix.
Tim Tebow > Aaron Rodgers, Jonny Flynn > Stephen Curry, Jay Cutler >
Matthew Stafford.
Every couple of minutes, someone commits a crime against sanity in the world of sports.
When they do, Fred Segal steps in. He doesn’t carry a whistle or a flag. He carries a laptop.
He also carries a handle. You probably don’t know him by his real name, but you might know his handle: He’s the “Freezing Cold Takes” guy on
Twitter, aka “@OldTakesExposed,” the one who constantly reminds the world that for every “hot take” in sports, there’s an equal and opposite foot stuck way deep in someone’s mouth.
Segal, 37, is the Sultan of Second Guess, the social media smart aleck armed with a MacBook Air laptop, a photographic memory for bold predictions and the realization that from the dining room table of his Royal Palm Beach home, he has struck a nerve.
Speaking of bold: Did we say Segal gave up a six-figure income as a lawyer to dive deeper into this schtick?
“No one really says anything to me, but they probably think I’m crazy,” Segal says.
People actually think a lot of things about Segal and his online persona. Some laugh when he dredges up pronouncements that turned out to be silly. The sourpusses who don’t find him very funny usually are the ones who made those predictions and were banking on short memories.
Fred Segal? Oh, he remembers. He’s the kind of guy who will be sitting right next to you but call your
cell anyway just to watch you dash across the room to find your phone.
“I do all sorts of stuff to annoy people,” Segal says with a mischievous grin. “That’s just my personality.”
So when someone says (fill in the name of any Cleveland Browns quarterback in recent memory) is a can’t-miss prospect, the Honcho of Hindsight strikes, often simply retweeting and letting the ridiculousness speak for itself.
So go ahead, Maryland, boast about that “unbelievable” strength coach you just hired. Tweet to your heart’s content, Brooks Koepka, about how LeBron will never win a ring. And New York Daily News, don’t worry about those “A Star is Born” headlines for Geno Smith and Mark Sanchez, because there’s no way they’ll bite you in the butt (fumble).
Fans, it would appear, love when people whiff. Segal has 187,000 Twitter followers who not only devour his wisecracks, they faithfully tip him off to anything he might miss.
“I didn’t expect this to be something that was going to be this big,” he says. “I thought it was just going to be something I was going to make fun of people about, on the side, for fun. That’s it.”
(A wiseguy would point out the irony of how terrible a prophecy that was by Segal, but we’re not going to do that.)
Thanks to outlets such as ESPN, Fox Sports and sports-talk radio, this is an era in which hot takes are, well, hot. Scores, highlights and headlines? People don’t wait for “SportsCenter” anymore. They get them via alerts on their phone. This explains why a talking head such as Skip Bayless commands a seven-figure salary from Fox to fire off as many opinions as his mouth can ramble.
“He creates something to talk about,” Segal says. “I don’t think he’s necessarily concerned about whether it’s going to be accurate or not.”
As the most-opinionated curmudgeon in sports, Bayless could fill Segal’s timeline if he let it. Segal views Bayless in the same light a stand-up comedian might view President Donald Trump: so easy a target, “it kind of takes the fun out of it.”
That leaves Fox’s Colin Cowherd as a favorite subject, especially since Fox’s PR people regularly post cut-ups of Cowherd’s wisdom.
“Greg Oden is faster than (Kevin) Durant,” Cowherd said before the 2007 NBA Draft. “... Quicker . ... Any talk-show host, any e-mailer, any caller that goes on and says Durant should be No. 1 isn’t doing their homework.”
Segal grew up in North Miami Beach, so there’s a warm spot in his heart for takes involving the Dolphins. He retweeted an old comment by Jon Gruden, who called John Beck “one of the bestkept secrets in football.” Beck still is a secret, joining a long list of Dolphins’ quarterbacking flops in the post-Dan Marino era.
Speaking of Marino, when Segal is asked to name his favorite cold takes, he recites a column by Greg Cote of The Miami Herald, who argued in 1993 the Dolphins should trade Marino and hang onto Scott Mitchell, who had been filling in capably while Marino nursed a torn Achilles.
“Keep Scott Mitchell — I don’t know how many times Greg Cote wants that to continue to be mentioned,” Segal says.
When the Big Three Era for the Heat kicked off with a loss to Dallas in the 2011 NBA Finals, columnist Jason Whitlock threw up his hands.
“It’s over,” Whitlock wrote for Fox.com. “Wade’s brainchild and Pat Riley’s free-agent coup is a failure. The right thing to do is to blow it up before it dies as a result of friendly fire.”
The Heat won the next two championships.
There’s a freezing cold take, it seems, for every occasion. Contrary to a popular “myth,” Segal says, he doesn’t maintain a file of potential material in his computer.
The stuff Segal doesn’t remember, he digs up via refined Google searches. If a coach gets fired, Segal will look up rosy predictions from the date the coach was hired. Likewise for breathlessness when teams make major signings.
“Nice job by Houston with Osweiler,” analyst Bill Simmons once tweeted. “I like that guy, thought Denver would have won SB with him, too. That’s a real QB.”
Actually, Osweiler currently is in a real jam, clawing for a secondor third-string job with the Dolphins.
Segal loves the classics, like the sports editor in Salt Lake City in 1979 who promised to “buy anybody a steak dinner” if the Utah Jazz were still around three years later. Then there was a tweet by Michael Wilbon of The Washington Post and ESPN, who said he would take Brice Johnson “100 times out of 100 on my NBA team” over Ben Simmons. Wilbon didn’t take kindly to being called out, insisting to “clowns out there” that he was referring to “COLLEGE BASKETBALL.” Segal retweeted Wilbon’s first tweet, this time circling the words “on my NBA team.”
Too many in the media, he says, are thin-skinned.
“They don’t like the tattletale culture,” he says.
Segal’s retort: “The whole premise behind it was to account for journalists who would always pat themselves on the back and say they were right about certain things” while glossing over times they were wrong.
Occasionally, Segal ventures outside the sports world. Occasionally, he steps over the line himself. When a pedestrian bridge was damaged at FIU, Segal quickly posted a comment that had been sent to him days earlier boasting about the bridge. Segal hadn’t yet learned it was a catastrophe involving six fatalities.
“I don’t mean to upset people,” he says.
Too good to pass up was a 2010 tweet from political activist and author Donna Brazile: “Bill Cosby is a gracious & warm soul — a world class educator, humanitarian & devout family man with luv for us all. Believe in the truth.”
Segal graduated from the University of Florida, spent three years in law school and eight years as a full-time lawyer specializing in health care, such as doctors’ contracts with hospitals. Along the way, he decided it wasn’t as much fun as being a sports cut-up. He has two young kids (Brady, 8, and Violet, 6) and a wife, Nichole, who is a full-time lawyer and is “very supportive” of his change in careers, he said.
Segal still does a bit of part-time legal work because he isn’t making much yet with online sports, but he has plans to branch out to more profitable endeavors, including a website that will allow him to write rather than just tweet.
One could predict Segal’s writings will be among the most-reasoned, intelligent discussions on sports anywhere online. Of course, anyone predicting such a thing would never be saying that just to guard against someday becoming a freezing cold take, too.
Nah.