Dez Bryant took a trip to Blaze Pizza on Wednesday—and somehow, it ended up starting a brief Twitter spat between him and ESPN’s Jemele Hill over national anthem protests.
Bryant visited the Blaze Pizza, purchased some food, and left a generous $75 tip for the woman who took care of him during his visit. That woman then turned around and sent out a tweet about how she appreciated the gesture on Bryant’s part, even though she hates the Cowboys. Bryant responded by jokingly saying that he wouldn’t be visiting that particular Blaze Pizza again.
Innocent enough, right? Not quite. About 12 hours after Bryant sent his tweet out, Hill saw a story that was published about his Blaze Pizza "boycott" on theScore and issued a short response to it. She wrote this:
Hill didn’t specifically mention what her tweet was in reference to, but she has been critical of Bryant and his social views in the past:
And she was likely using her most recent tweet to respond to some comments Bryant made last week. The Cowboys wide receiver was asked for his thoughts on the national anthem protests that have been taking place throughout the NFL, and he said he didn’t want to talk about them:
He later clarified his statement and said that he felt he was asked about the protests at the "wrong place and time." But he also said "I got a family to feed," and suggested that he won’t be taking part in the ongoing protests anytime soon:
So when Hill saw that he was boycotting a Blaze Pizza but not taking part in any important protests, she sent out the aforementioned tweet. Bryant fired back at her on Thursday morning, tweeting this:
Hill responded by sending this back at Bryant:
While they haven’t exchanged words beyond that, they have both addressed the situation by talking about the issue at hand with others. Hill had this to say:
Meanwhile, Bryant said this:
While all of that was going down, the original tweet from the Blaze Pizza employee was deleted, and Blaze went out of their way to apologize for their role in inadvertently starting all of this in the first place:
It was kind of crazy to see all of this come full circle, but if nothing else, it started quite the conversation on both Bryant and Hill’s Twitter timelines.
