Back in February, Kyrie Irving raised a lot of eyebrows—and pretty much stole the show during 2017 NBA All-Star Weekend—by matter-of-factly revealing that he believes the Earth is flat. "This is not even a conspiracy theory," he said. "The Earth is flat."
His comments caused chaos for middle school teachers all across the country, as suddenly, middle school students were left to second-guess everything they had ever been taught about the Earth.
Fortunately, Irving clarified his "the Earth is flat" comment in late September and shed some light on why he said what he did in the first place. He revealed that he was simply trolling in order to try and prove a point about how far too many people believe the things they are told without questioning them at all.
"All I want to do is be able to have that open conversation," he said during an interview on The Toucher and Rich Show in Boston. "It was all an exploitation tactic. It literally spun the world—your guys’ world—it spun it into a frenzy and proved exactly what I thought it would do in terms of how all this works. It created a division… and let all these people throw tomatoes at me or have somebody think I’m somehow a different intellectual person because I believe the Earth is flat and you think the world is round. It created exactly that… It proved what I thought it would."
But was that really what Irving was trying to do? He just managed to make this whole situation even more confusing by adding yet another chapter to it. This week, he was a guest on the premiere episode of UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma’s podcast, and while speaking with Auriemma, Irving seemed to once again challenge the belief that the Earth is round. He admitted that he enjoys questioning things that other people believe to be true, and he suggested that his research has shown that the Earth might not be round after all.
"The whole intent behind it, Coach, it wasn’t to bash science. It wasn’t to like have the intent of starting a rage and be seen as this insane individual," Irving said, according to Boston.com. "When I started seeing comments and things about universal truths that I had known, like I had questions. When I started actually doing research of my own and figuring out that there is no real picture of Earth, not one real picture of Earth—and we haven’t been back to the moon since 1961 or 1969—it becomes like conspiracy, too."
Hmmm… So wait, where does that leave Irving now? He once again said that his goal in all of this is simply to force people to question things, about both the Earth and other aspects of life. But unfortunately, he’s choosing to do it by saying that he has done research that proves the Earth might not be round, and that has, of course, generated some strong responses from those who can’t believe Irving is willingly wading back into this particular topic.
There are also lots of people who are like, "Hey, Kyrie, ever heard of Google?" right now.
Maybe Irving is conducting another social experiment here and we just haven’t realized it yet. Or maybe he really, truly believes the Earth is flat and just isn’t going to budge from that theory. Or maybe, as one Twitter user suggested, he’s trolling for the sake of trying to get a free trip to outer space.
We’re going to choose to believe that this suggestion is the real reason Irving continues to try and tell people the Earth isn’t round. Otherwise, how do you explain what Irving is doing here?
