Couch Slouch: Simple typo opens up the dark world of sports social media

I made a typographical error in my column last week: I meant to say that we need more sports, not less. In my defense, I’d been washing and folding my American flag and wasn’t focused on my Samsung Galaxy Book S keyboard.

Ugh. So I woke up midday to find 37 texts telling me I was trending No. 1 on Twitter. How could this be? I briefly thought I must’ve slept-walk and robbed a string of minimarts up and down the West Coast.

No.

I was just a victim of Fox Sports’ buffoonish enfant terrible, Clay Travis.

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Travis, the white-hot attention seeker, a failed-lawyer failed-thinker babbler of contrarian nonsense who now rides down the middle of the street on a unicycle shouting, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

Travis tweeted out The Washington Post headline on my column, “The pandemic has reminded us: we don’t need more sports – we need less,” to his 670,000 Twitter followers, while addressing how stupid I am and how much sportswriters like me disdain sports.

This triggered his ready-to-rumble base, igniting the usual Twitter online mob. Thankfully, I slept through most of it, dreaming of athenaeums and student-nonathletes.

In the column – as I have done countless times in the last 20 years – I satirically questioned the oversized role of sports in our culture. Ooh … revolutionary stuff!

Travis’s premise is that I am rooting against the return of sports and hate them. Hmm. How much could I possibly hate sports if I have NBA League Pass? Heck, if you’re watching a New York Knicks-Sacramento Kings game at 10 on a Tuesday night, you might hate yourself more than you hate sports.

Anyway, after awakening, I decided to engage my attacker on Twitter; this seldom ends well.

Following an opening tweet in which I mentioned that Travis was “the smartest man in the room” because I had heard him say that on his radio show, this was our exchange:

Travis: Norman, thanks for listening. But listen better. I didn’t say I was the smartest guy in the room. I said compared to people like you, I’m a genius. Which I am.

Me: My bad, Clay, I misheard this on your March 25 show: “I’m a pretty smart dude … pretty much every test I’ve ever measured, I’m in the 99.9 percentile. … If I had wanted to be, I would’ve been a doctor.” Uh, 99.9% sounds pretty high.

Travis: Thanks for the additional podcast listen, bud, but just step away from the keyboard. You’re making yourself look even (more) ridiculous.

Travis was pulling a page straight out of the POTUS 45 playbook: Say something preposterous, get asked about it, say you didn’t say it, then after somebody reads back the exact thing you said that you claim you never said, deride or ignore them and change the subject.

One of Travis’s favorite longtime targets is ESPN, supposedly a liberal hotbed with an on-air political agenda.

Gosh, I hate when people make me defend ESPN.

Sure, Clay, it’s an ACLU incubator over there – Chris Berman canvassed for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and I know for a fact that Linda Cohn has a Friedrich Engels bobblehead on her desk.

During the pandemic, Travis has railed on Fox Sports Radio about the coronavirus hoax with his “data-centric rational thinking.” He constantly misleads his audience, and after being proven incorrect, simply gives a new set of unimpeachable, flawed data. He loves moving the goalposts, and he’s darn good at it – as an SEC diehard, he knows how to cheat.

Travis operates similarly to the forward-thinking neo-Neanderthals at Barstool Sports, aka Barstool Sample. My column riled them, too; you don’t mess with the stoolies’ sandbox. Over time, I have been variously attacked there by monstrously talented PFT Commenter, monstrously untalented Barstool Nate and the monster himself, Barstool Sample president and lead predator Dave Portnoy.

You can’t fight these guys – never sling mud against people who roll in it. Their M.O.: When you go high, we’ll go low; when you go low, we’ll go lower. Battling these feral bedlamites, and their mindless minions, is like bringing a butter knife to a shotgun fight.

Besides, I don’t have time for this, even in our sportsless here and now. I’m midway binge-reading the Bible – I’m up to the part about the guy with the tablets. Good stuff.

Ask The Slouch

Q. If only essential employees are toiling under these pandemic conditions, why would MLB players be working? And if college campuses are closed to students, why would some students be there to play football? (David Allen; Chicago)

A. Are these rhetorical questions?

Q. What does it say about the current coronavirus-state of sports journalism when I actually look forward to reading your column every week? (Philip R. Hochberg; Chevy Chase, Maryland)

A. Good to know my work only thrives during once-in-a-century pandemic conditions.

Q. Did NFL cornerbacks DeAndre Baker and Quinton Dunbar at least keep their masks on and practice social distancing while allegedly robbing guests at that Florida cookout? (Dan Cantwell; Albany, New York)

A. Pay the man, Shirley.

You, too, can enter the $1.25 Ask The Slouch Cash Giveaway. Just email asktheslouch@aol.comand, if your question is used, you win $1.25 in cash!