Kyrie Irving Exposes Covid Absurdity

CLAY: New York City has lifted along with many other cities a substantial portion of their overall covid restrictions. But workplace covid restrictions remain in place. There are lots of people who want to work all over the country that haven’t gotten the covid shot and so aren’t allowed to do so. And one of those people is Kyrie Irving, who is a multi-millionare pro-basketball player for the New York Nets, plays his games in Brooklyn.

Buck, on Saturday I was texting you about this because I was like, I bet Buck hasn’t seen this. Barclays Center, brand-new, spectacular arena in Brooklyn, they had the ACC Championship game between Duke and Virginia Tech. Kyrie Irving went to Duke; so he went to the basketball game, sat courtside. On Sunday, Buck, your old team that you used to watch when you were a kid, the Knicks, were playing against the Nets. Kyrie Irving showed up, sat courtside, no mask, drank drinks, had food, visited with his teammates; he could high five them.

Buck, he is not eligible to play in basketball games in the NBA because of New York City’s restrictions, but he is eligible to sit courtside, to high five his teammates, to interact with anybody in the crowd that he wants, to go into the locker room at halftime and interact with his teammates. I’m not making any of this up. This is really going on. Is this not a perfect approximation, personification of the absurdity of covid rules that still exist in our nation’s biggest city, New York?

BUCK: It’s because you don’t comply, they want to punish you. It’s no longer about health, unless someone believes that Kyrie Irving is more dangerous to people on the court than he is sitting next to them off the court (chuckles) from a virus perspective, which no one actually argues. I mean, that’s even beyond what I think Fauci would say. Where’s Fauci, by the way?

CLAY: Fauci is still MIA, still totally absent.

BUCK: It’s like a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids situation. Is he stuck in a dandelion somewhere? Is he flying on the back of a honeybee? I don’t know what’s going on here. But Fauci is MIA. But back to Kyrie Irving and the whole circumstance right now, Clay. The cases are way down, everything else, it’s all still lingering in the background, everyone.

CLAY: They’re not letting it go away.

BUCK: They’re not letting it go away. It’s still on the planes. Their version of the new normal is the moment Democrats — either at the city, state, or federal level if they have the presidency — decide that it’s time for you to mask up and obey and shut your mouth, obviously behind a mask. It’s gonna happen again.

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CLAY: I want to mention this on the Kyrie Irving thing proving how even more ridiculous it is for New York City. Buck, if he wasn’t living in New York City, if he was a visiting player unvaccinated, he’d be able to play. That’s the other ridiculous part of this. So he’s able to go to the games. e’s able to sit courtside. He can’t play, ’cause he’s from New York City, but if he were a visiting player traveling in to play against the Nets or the Knicks under New York City rules, he will be eligible to play.

BUCK: You’re stuck in a Kafkaesque situation in some of these cities where somehow there are rules you are forced to obey but make sense to no one, and that no person will defend but that you are still expected to obey.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Because the system — or as I’ve been saying, the apparatus — doesn’t want to change, doesn’t want to admit that it was wrong. It only moves at the speed that it decides, and it’s very hard to have accountability.

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CLAY: We’ve been talking about the insanity still surrounding covid, in particular in New York City where Kyrie Irving was able to go watch a game from courtside but he’s not able to actually play in the game because of New York City’s insane covid rules. And Kevin Durant is one of the most famous basketball players in the world, and he teed off on New York City mayor Eric Adams for flexing his authority and looking for attention.

I thought this was interesting. He was taking up for his teammate as athletes are finally having enough all over the country with these covid mandates. It’s been now two years that they’ve been dealing with them since everything’s shut down. Listen to Kevin Durant go after New York City’s mayor.

CLAY: I think this is pretty significant, right, when you finally have that. There were so many athletes who felt this way in general, Buck, and coaches, and I would hear from them so much, and they were afraid of how the media would respond, and Kevin Durant is getting attacked over this? But he sounds like a Clay and Buck listener. There’s so many athletes out there that understand their bodies better than anybody else, that recognize that these covid shots have done nothing to benefit them and also recognize how absurd it is that they’re not requiring the covid shot in order to come watch the games. Kyrie Irving is a star player. He can sit courtside, high five his teammates, go into the locker room — if he were a visiting player, he’d be able to play in the game — and yet he’s not able to play? And people are fed up with it.

BUCK: They are indefensible things that we’re talking about now when you’re discussing whether it’s masking on planes. And we all heard Jen Psaki (impression), “Yeah, like, you could, like, fly from, like, one place to another with, like, medium to high transmission and then, like, another, like, low to semi-medium transmission and, like, if you don’t mask on the plane but you do in, like, the craft brewery, like, what’s gonna happen?” It was idiocy, and we all heard it, and we all know it.

CLAY: The craft brewery line, by the way, there was well played. Very well played. Yeah.

BUCK: But I gotta say, these are indefensible positions, and so what you see now is, you’ve used the term many times “memory hole,” and that’s exactly what’s going on. There are the people that have pushed this stuff; they know that without really high numbers and caseloads, they can’t continue with it. So now it’s just, “What are you talking about? Everything’s fine! There’s no problem anymore. We’re back to normal.”