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Hey everyone, just so you know: Kyrie Irving believes the Earth is flat

Ben Rohrbach
Senior NBA writer
Kyrie Irving is extremely woke. (Getty Images)
Kyrie Irving is extremely woke. (Getty Images)

When you are Kyrie Irving, you have handles like nobody on the planet and you made one of the most famous shots in basketball history to win Cleveland’s first NBA championship, seemingly by divine intervention, it’s understandable why you might have a different view of the world than everyone else.

We learned just how different Irving’s perspective is during his appearance on the Road Trippin’ podcast, hosted by teammates Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye, along with Fox Sports Ohio’s Allie Clifton. A wide-ranging interview that began with a discussion on hotel aliases and childbirth quickly turned to aliens and conspiracy theories, at which point we discovered Irving believes the Earth is flat.

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I don’t know how many flights Irving has taken as a professional basketball player. I’m sure it’s a lot. But I guess he’s never seen the curvature of the Earth. I’m not sure why he thinks he plays NBA games in different time zones, but I now know that he doesn’t believe it’s because the globe is rotating.

Irving touched on several conspiracy theories — some not so wild, like his belief that “there are extraterrestrial beings that exist in the universe,” and some definitely wild ones, like his position that the CIA assassinated Bob Marley because “he tried to bring people together and the fact that it was fundamentally built on love and truth and we kill people for doing the right thing like that” — but things really got interesting when he unveiled his flat-Earth theory. Have a listen, via r/NBA.

After Jefferson and Frye agreed the Earth is a sphere, because they are sane human beings, Irving said, “The Earth is flat,” and then repeated it three times. Insinuating that much of our education is a farce that needs to be independently researched on the internet, Irving launched into a series of truly amazing diatribes, all of which were interrupted by Jefferson or Frye before he could finish his point.

Nobody is more woke than @kyrieirving. Nobody.

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Irving is a man known for his human highlight reels, but nothing will ever top this series of stunners:

“The fact that in our lifetimes there are so many holes and so many pockets in our history. … History is history, and it’s happened long before us, and it’s going to happen after us, and it always repeats itself somehow, in some way. All these things that they keep giving to us, all this information, I’m just saying that all these things that used to put me in fear, it makes you not want to question it naturally, because of how much information you actually can figure out and how much information there actually is out there. It’s crazy. Anything that you have a particular question on, OK — Is the world flat or round? — I think you need to do research on it. It’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us.”

[…]

“For what I’ve known for many years and what I’ve been taught is that the Earth is round, but if you really think about it from a landscape of the way we travel, the way we move and the fact that — can you really think of us rotating around the sun, and all planets align, rotating in specific dates, being perpendicular with what’s going on with these ‘planets’ and stuff like this.”

[…]

“Everything that they send [to space] doesn’t come back. It doesn’t come back. There is no concrete information, except for the information that they’re giving us. They’re particularly putting you in the direction of what to believe and what not to believe, and the truth is right there. You’ve just got to go searching for it. I’ve been searching for it for a while.

[…]

“Everything that was put in front of me, I had to be like, ‘Oh, this is all a facade.’ Like, this is all something that they ultimately want me to believe in … but now there is a certain aspect of life in which I want to tell people about, which is this true journey of really becoming a complete individual and total freedom of thought. Do you know what I’m saying?

“Question things, but even if an answer doesn’t come back, you’re perfectly fine with that, because you were never living in that particular truth. There’s a falseness in stories and things that people want you to believe and ultimately what they throw in front of us.”

OK, wow. I just want to let that breathe for a little bit.

Now, for my favorite Irving gem:

“I have a very firm belief that what they’re putting out in front of us is there for a reason. It just depends on whether you want to believe in the truth or not. The fact that they can make all these movies with alien descriptions, they’re not just going on strictly brainpower and this is just creative things that we’re going to put out to everybody. For what? All to put an alien movie out, for what?”

Kyrie Irving doesn’t think humans are capable of the sort of creativity it takes to imagine what an alien looks like, but he does believe we can create a massive conspiracy to maintain a round-Earth theory.

For what? FOR WHAT?!?!

One can easily tell the Earth is not flat, because there are actual pictures of the Earth from space. Except, Irving doesn’t believe we ever went to space, either. After asking his teammates, “Who’s the guy that walked on the moon?” and they told him, “Neil Armstrong,” the Cavaliers star continued:

“The fact that his footprints don’t look the same comparatively to the boot that is in the museum is ridiculous. I look at this stuff all the time. His boot print is not the same, so you want me to really sit back after you proved it — they have a picture of it and his boot side by side — I need an explanation.”

I performed a quick internet search to find out exactly what in the hell Irving was talking about here, and within seconds discovered the answer to his question was readily available. The footprint of Armstrong’s suit doesn’t match his boot print on the moon, because he was wearing boots over the feet of his suit, and that boot definitely matches the print on the moon. You can see for yourself.

Still, when asked on Friday if he really thought the Earth was flat, Irving doubled down:

I was skeptical of Irving’s notion that there is more truth to conspiracy theories on the internet than most of what we learned in school, but in this case it’s true. Let’s just pray Irving isn’t into some of the internet conspiracies others in sports have adopted, like the 9/11 truth movement and pizza-gate.

Believe it or not, Irving is not the NBA’s only flat-Earth truther, either. Wilson Chandler is on board.

The best part about Irving believing the Earth is flat is that he also believes in aliens. Like, does he think the Earth is just at the bottom of the universe? If we walk in a straight line, does the Earth go on forever, or can somebody fall off the end? Do the aliens live on flat planets? Why don’t we see those flat planets? Why do we we see other round planets? Why is the moon round? So many questions.

Irving has the answers, apparently, and he’s ready to give them to the aliens. “I’ll wake up sometimes, I’ll go outside and I’ll look, and I tell them, if they’re out there, just beam me up already,” he told his teammates in all seriousness. “I’ve seen enough to give you a report on how humans are. Beam me up.” I’m not sure Cavs fans support sending Irving to space, and I’m not sure the human race should have Irving — a guy who believes the Earth is flat and education is a farce — represent us to aliens.

Anyway.

Hey, did you know the Earth’s gravity pulls everything toward its center because it is round? For example, if you and an Australian dropped a basketball, both would fall straight down to the ground. If the Earth were flat, the ball would fall towards the center of the flat Earth’s mass, and the U.S. and Australia cannot possibly both be the Earth’s center. One last thing: Kyrie Irving was born in Australia.

The only thing I do understand is Irving’s skepticism of gravity, because NBA players so often defy it.

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Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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