On the morning of July 4th, I was laying in my bed in my mom's basement, scrolling through my phone while dealing with a reoccurrence of diverticulitis, when a Twitter post reminded me it was the 5th anniversary of Kevin Durant's decision to fire a Roman candle into the ass of all Oklahoma City Thunder fans, and announce he was fleeing Tornado Alley for one named after silicon instead.
Always the Internet troll / bitter scorned lover, I took about 15-seconds to send off the following tweet:
Seriously, couldn't KD have picked any other day than the 4th of July to announce his legacy-ruining next chapter? As a result, it's now pretty much impossible to attend any 4th of July cookout in the Oklahoma City metro and not have some semi-drunk Debbie Downer like me, or one of my brothers, or basically anyone else who actually cares about the Thunder, mention something to the effect of...
"Wow. Can you believe it's been X years since Kevin Durant, an all-time great, made one of the most cowardly moves in sports history and ran off to join the team he choked against in the playoffs just a few months before? That sure did suck, huh? Anyway, who do you think OKC will take with the 6th pick in the draft?"
About 4 minutes after I fired off my tweet, my watch sent me a notification that made me do a double-take. Check this out:
As we know, Kevin Durant has a reputation for engaging with disgruntled fans on Twitter through both his burner and real-life account, so I quickly hopped back on that terrible app to see if it was the real Kevin Durant who liked my tweet. I was hoping so. Even though I can't stand the guy anymore, and happily cheer for him to fail, that would still be cool in a "Hey look, a famous person likes this tweet I shared that made fun of him" type of way, and give me something to write about on a Tuesday following a three day holiday weekend.
That's when I learned KD not only liked our tweet, but also trolled another fan who replied to it!
Check this out:
I'm not going to lie, that's pretty awesome. If I was a balding, uber-rich professional athlete with self-esteem issues, I wouldn't even be on social media, much less engaging with former fanboys who called me out for my selfish, foolish decisions that will put an asterisk on my career, but it is kind of neat to see KD having fun with the all the Thunder fans like me and "Darwin" who are still butthurt by his cowardly decision to join the team he was never good enough to beat. As a troll, I respect that.
After KD replied to Darwin, the Twitter algorithm decided to expose our tweets to legions of KD fanboys, trolls and Twitter bots, leading to a bombardment of comments, insults, replies, accusations, etc., that left me entertained while lying in bed, wondering if my stomach could handle a can of Ensure for lunch.
In a strange way, I guess you can say it turned a bad 4th of July into a good one, and almost makes up for KD ruining the one from 5 years ago. Although I still wish the plot of Thunderstruck comes true, and he somehow loses all basketball powers and abilities to some middle school loser and/or sick blogger, I guess I should thank him for that.
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