Reality checks
Flat-earth beliefs are alive and well among some US sports stars.
Given the gilded bubble in which America’s massively rewarded sports stars exist, it’s perhaps not surprising that some of them have a tenuous grip on reality.
For instance, NBA hall of famer Shaquille O’Neal is convinced the world is flat. Why? “I drive from Florida to California all the time and … I do not go up and down at a 360angle and all that stuff about gravity.” And he knows Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America because “when he got there, there were some fair-skinned people with the long hair smoking on the peace pipes. So, what does that tell you?” (It tells me O’Neal doesn’t get his information from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.)
Flat earthery, it seems, has quite a following in the NBA: Wilson Chandler of the Los Angeles Clippers, Boston Celtics point guard Kyrie Irving and Golden State Warrior Draymond Green have all come out as flat-earthers.
Even so, when the Warriors’ two-time NBA most valued player Stephen Curry recently declared that the moon landing did not take place, jaws dropped from sea to shining sea. After all, he’s regarded as exhibit A for the contentious proposition that you can be a multimillionaire sporting superstar and a sensible, responsible adult. As the Washington Post put it, Curry “has fashioned a brand of a thoughtful and informed athlete who does not shut up and dribble”.
When challenged, Curry did a quick backtrack, following up the tried-and-true “I was joking” defence with this showstopper: “I was silently protesting how stupid it was that people actually took that quote and made it law as, ‘Oh my God, he’s a fake moon landing truther’, whatever you want to call it, yada, yada, yada.”
To which one can only say: shut up and dribble.