‘I’ve eaten worse’: How a Clippers blogger went viral and ate his own words, in his own words

On Sunday, as the L.A. Clippers cruised to a 15th win in 18 games, an unbelievable turnaround from a 6-21 start, Clippers fans began a chant that has never before, at any prior point in sports history, been chanted: Eat the tweet. Eat the tweet. Eat the tweet.

Kawhi Leonard, asked about this moment after the game, said, “I don’t know how healthy that is for you.” Clippers head coach Ty Lue insisted that any tweet-eating be streamed live. John Collins suggested fiber before this truthful moment. Nearly everyone who’s anyone in the team’s orbit — players, employees, fans — acknowledged this social media post made just over a month ago. This one.

On Monday evening, Robert Flom printed out this once-unassuming post he’d made last month on X and ate it on camera. Flom has written and podcasted about the Clippers for more than a decade; since 2018, he has been the managing editor at 213Hoops, a Clippers blog that years go branched away from SB Nation. This viral moment, Flom told me in a conversation shortly after consuming his own post, was as surreal as any he’s experienced in his time covering the team. For anyone sick enough to watch, you can see it below.

For everyone else, those interested in more mature topics such as what this moment felt like, why the hell he did it, his chosen dipping sauce for eating printer paper, and, yes, what it actually tasted like, here’s our 19-minute conversation from Monday evening. It has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

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You ate your tweet. I watched it happen. How’s your stomach at this exact moment?

It’s hard to put into words because I’ve never eaten paper before. So I don’t know the exact feeling, but it does not feel good. Like, on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being like on death’s door, one being normal, it’s a five, maybe? So it’s not awful, but it does not feel good.

A five is still higher than I expected! Like, what type of kid were you? Did you at least eat Play-Doh or anything you should not be eating?

Probably when I was really young? But, to my knowledge as a kid that I can remember, not really. I was not one of those kids who just ate a ton of random stuff. But my parents might have a completely different story. Probably do, honestly.

OK, there’s three things about this tweet that crack me up. And feel free to butt in on any of these, I’m just going to list them off. First, it’s so funny to me how strangely precise the number is. And you’re replying to someone. But 15-3, that’s a great stretch of basketball. Nobody, five years later, is going to look back at any season and say, Remember when we went 15-3? But because of context of this tweet, 15-3, which normally means nothing in the NBA, became so important.

Yeah, it is so random and, I don’t know if you’re even going to get there, but it was in the context of a DeMar DeRozan trade, which was—

—that was my second one! It’s a reply to a DeMar DeRozan fake trade being tweeted at you.

Yes, which is a trade that is presumably not going to happen now. It had nothing to do with this Clippers run of basketball at all. But, yeah, the 15-3 stuff, it is a really good stretch of basketball. But it’s 18 games. It’s pretty significant, but random teams probably have similar-ish records every year and nobody cares. So, yeah, it’s a very, very, very odd number that is somehow famous for 48 hours.

The third thing that stood out to me, I keep laughing at it, is how terse your tone is. Like: will print and eat this tweet. No ‘lol’, no ‘I’, you didn’t bother with a pronoun. Just, Will print and eat this tweet. Like, I can tell from your tone how you were feeling in the moment. Like, Fuck off, that’s not gonna happen.

(laughs) Yes! Yes.

So, as an extension of this aspect, I want to go back to the beginning. Remind me, as a Clippers fan, where this team was when you sent that tweet and what your mood was, what you were feeling in that moment.

Sure. They were 6-21, and I know that very precisely, for one, because the 15-3 hilariously happened immediately after I tweeted that. So the key thing about the tweet is that I said anytime they go 15-3 this season, and then it happened the second I tweeted that.

Imagine how anticlimactic it’d have been if they went 14-4 and you just had to wait.

The original tweet I quoted was Ty Lue saying they were aiming to go 35-20 the rest of the year, which would get them to 41-41. They have not been under .500 since Blake Griffin’s rookie season in 2011. So it’s been 15 years. It’s a point of pride in the organization, understandably.

And so that tweet, I was, like, That’s lofty. I didn’t think they’d get there. I didn’t think it was insane, but somebody else made the comment about the DeMar DeRozan trade, going 15-3, and I was like, That’s just not going to happen. This team was horrible. You know, 6-21 was exactly a third of the NBA season. That’s 27 games. And they were, I can’t remember exactly, probably third-last in defensive rating, 24th in offensive rating.

It was bad. It was real bad. [After the interview, I checked: The Clippers had the league’s fifth-worst defense and fifth-worst defense on Dec. 18, the day they lost their 21st game to fall to 6-21.]

They weren’t good at anything. Going 15-3, again, it’s like you said, unremarkable teams can do that. But that team, that awful, awful, awful team, going 15-3—the reason I feel like I get saltier (about bad teams) now, I’m not ancient, but I live on the East Coast and, every year I get older, staying up to watch West Coast games gets harder, right? It’s just, like, I should be going to sleep, I have a 9-5 job. And here I am watching the Clippers at 1 a.m., and it’s so bad when they’re terrible.

When they’re winning, it’s fun, they won, the vibes are good. Instead, sometimes, when I had to stay up to watch them lose to, you know, the Jazz, the first game of the season. Like, Oh my God, I just stayed up to 1:15 a.m. on a work night to watch them lose by 35 to the Utah Jazz. It’s just the worst. At 6-21, I was so done, I was sick of watching the team. I was ready to not watch the late night games the rest of the year, and then, you know, they did this.

It was sparking basketball doomerism! That the Clippers owe their pick to the Thunder!

Yes.

Everyone was going insane. Like, it was a moment beyond the Clippers. Can I get your 60-second explanation of why the Clippers turned it around? Because I want to make clear that you’re not just this guy who ate his tweet. You’re a smart guy who knows basketball, who actively writes about the Clippers, and tell us where.

Something we’ve talked about on the podcast, which is The Lob, The Jam, The Podcast, and on the site, which is 213Hoops, is that there’s three main reasons. No. 1, Kawhi Leonard turning from pretty good player, which he was the first month of the season, to superstar, top-five level player, which he’s been since then. He’s unguardable, he’s really good on defense again, that’s the most important thing. The Clippers got a top-five guy on the roster again.

The second-most important thing, to me, was John Collins. They made this big trade, they shipped out Norm Powell, they got John Collins, they also added Bradley Beal. Won’t get into that. But John Collins was the guy they’ve wanted or, at least, there have been rumors about him for years because he’s a big athletic power forward. They haven’t had that type of player in forever. And he was really bad to start the season. He was bad on defense, he wasn’t making 3s. He kept almost getting rebounds and kept fumbling them. All of a sudden, he became a pretty good starting-level player. You know, John Collins.

Yup.

And then the last thing would be the play of the young guys, specifically Jordan Miller and Kobe Sanders. Some of the veterans went out, Bogdan Bogdanovic has barely played this year, Derrick Jones Jr. has had injuries. The Beal and Chris Paul thing, you know, were disasters. But the past 18 games, it’s been mostly those guys (playing instead of them), and they’ve been pretty good.

OK, we’ve got to focus in on the meat, or I guess the paper, of the matter now. When did your tweet first gain traction? Was it you realizing it? Did you know the whole time? Did someone else bring it back to your attention?

I had an eye on it the entire time. I would say—

Like you knew you might have to pay up!?

Absolutely not. I knew that I tweeted it, I remembered tweeting it, but I don’t think I considered it as a real possibility until, like, they were 7-2 or 8-2? Because even then, even though they had a really easy schedule for the past eight or nine games of this, that’s still going 8-1 (to get to 15-3) for a team that was so bad for most of the year. I still thought they might not do that.

I think it started really being brought up on NBA Twitter through random retweets. Probably a couple weeks ago, when they were in shouting distance of this and the schedule was really easy. It was other people on Clippers Twitter, as well. I think the first non-Clippers people were people from the You Know Ball side of things…

Yup, love them.

…so @TrillBroDude from the YouKnowBall podcast, Sam (@NBABabySecret) from that podcast. Probably them (helped made that tweet spread) outside of Clippers-related people. And Trill’s tweet went really big, and I think it snowballed from there.

I’m gonna go through an incomplete list of Clippers-affiliated folks who also did that: The television announcers; the team’s official Twitter; Ty Lue; Kawhi Leonard was asked about it; Nicolas Batum tweeted about it; fans chanted it; one fan printed out your tweet on a huge sign and brought it to the game. And I’m sure I’m missing others, but did any specific shoutout stand out most? That’ll stick with you? Like, which was most surreal? Or is it all a blur?

It was the broadcast component. I had a feeling Brian Sieman, who’s the Clippers’ excellent play-by-play guy, would mention it. He’s on Twitter, he’s very attuned to the fanbase. I thought Brian might mention it, but I was not expecting a full segment they’d talk about it. I was not expecting five straight minutes. I was not expecting my names. I thought it’d be, like, a Clippers fan, a Clippers blogger, but it was my name. And he mentioned, multiple times, how he thought 15-3, at that time, would also be an unobtainable goal.

Hey, we love honesty! We love honesty from the play-by-play!

He’s, like, the most forward-facing employee of the Clippers! And he said it was a very reasonable thing to say when they were 6-21. He was, like, Be nice to him, he’s a Clippers person. That was the most surreal part to me. Kawhi and John Collins did mention it, but they were asked about it. Kobe Sanders seemed to actually know it, which was interesting to me. Players definitely know about the site (213Hoops). I don’t know if they listen to the podcast, but they’re aware of that stuff. A player being actually aware of the whole thing was a little surprising to me. So that would be the second-most random thing to me, but being talked about the broadcast for five minutes… Crazy.

So you ended up going with paper-flavored paper straight from the printer?

Yes, just plain printer paper.

And you made what I view as a very important decision to not go with the site’s dark mode when you printed it out.

I realized I actually don’t like dark mode. But Twitter, for all of its weird oddities, Twitter on my computer was set to dark mode because I never go on Twitter on my computer. I’ve got Tweetdeck or whatever. I had to turn it off before printing it. But, yes, it was regular printer paper. Light mode. I did keep color, so my regular profile picture had a little bit of color.

I was going to ask about that. That’s an important detail.

Yeah, I had to do that. I didn’t eat the whole page of paper. I just ate the part that had the tweet on it.

I think that’s fair.

So it was a third of a page of paper. Thank God, no dark mode, that would’ve been rough.

Yeah. You’ve got a little bit of cyan in your system right now.

(laughs) Yeah. Indigo, is that the other one? I don’t even know printer colors.

I think cyan is the blue. I think it’s kind of lame? It’s red, yellow, and cyan. But I could be wrong on this one.

That sounds correct.

I’ll fact check myself at the end when I publish. [Said fact check: Traditionally, printer ink cartridges use cyan, yellow, and magenta along with black ink, which is called key.] So, I got sidetracked on the podcast’s live: You did or did not use sauces?

So, yes, I did. I made a little soy sauce dip. The podcast I streamed this is called Clips N’ Dip. They have dips usually when they stream.

Got it.

I would’ve done it anyway. I think eating the paper by itself would’ve been extremely difficult. So I made it with soy sauce, sesame oil, sriracha, and some honey. It worked fine. I also did have some sparkling water. I think, without having an actual liquid to get it down, it would’ve been very tough because, you know, you can’t really chew paper.

Yeah, not to do unpaid product placement, do you stand by Spindrift being the best choice of liquid?

Of the options I had on hand, I liked that one best. Of sparkling waters in my fridge, I have a Trader Joe’s sangria, I don’t know about that one.

I’ve had that one. It’s fine.

I had a pamplemousse-flavored La Croix. Maybe a little too bitter, acidic. So I was happy with my mango orange choice, I think that was the best call. Also, it goes best with the soy sauce-based dip. It was good.

Is it correct you did no research on the effects of eating paper on the human body?

No, I didn’t actually type in any research at all. When I was getting close to it, when people were asking me about it and offering suggestions, people volunteered stuff, like, Paper is fine for you to eat, eating a lot of ink is not good for you. That checks out without a lot of research. Eating ink seems bad and paper, it’s paper, it doesn’t seem that harmful. But, no, I did not actually do any research. It was just what people told me. I was, like, Eh, I’ll just do the printer paper.

At the end of the day, using every adjective that comes to mind, what did your tweet taste like?

(long pause) Hm. I was going to say papery, but that’s not good. Um … bitter? Oily?

Oily!?

I think I put too much oil in the dip. Hm, the actual paper. What did the actual paper taste like? Paper doesn’t really have much of a taste, which I guess is part of the pro of it. Yeah, I guess bitter and kind of heavy. It just kind of sits. It’s not pleasant. Heavy, it tasted heavy. Better adjective for heavy. I don’t know. I think it is affecting my brain.

(laughs)

Something heavy and bitter. It was not awful. I’ve eaten worse things than that for sure.

So you tweeted this, others did, it’s not my original thought. But this entire moment felt like old Twitter, like back when it was fun. I’ll do the prologue, feel free to add, but I have found X, since it became that — it’s just a shittier place to spend time online.

Yes.

The way that engagement is artificially incentivized makes so many moments forced, especially viral moments. But this was 100 percent organic, except for maybe the ink. How cool, how neat was it to unintentionally be part of a moment that brought, from my perspective, genuine shared joy for your shared online community?

It was awesome. I mean, it was really, really cool. I will say the thing about it that was so interesting, outside of the fact that it felt like old Twitter, was that a shocking amount of the engagement felt pretty positive. There were very few people telling me to, you know, do whatever, which is usually what you get on Twitter for anything viral. People seemed to get a huge kick out of it. I don’t see the fuss, necessarily, but on Twitter it has 2.9 million views or whatever. People really seem to really love it.

I think bringing joy to people is really cool because it’s not a super joyful time for a lot of people for many, many, many reasons, without going into that much more detail. It’s just really cool seeing a bunch of people get really happy online about a random social media moment. By far the coolest part of the experience, just seeing random people brought together over this. So that was my favorite part. How this felt like a random throwback to a simpler time in social media.

Tim Cato is ALLCITY’s national NBA writer currently based in Dallas. He can be reached at tcato@alldlls.com or on X at @tim_cato.