To Rizz, to Seek, to Find, and Not to Yield

“IS BABY GRONK THE NEW DRIP KING, OR IS HE JUST GETTING RIZZED UP BY LIVVY?”

You read something like that, you start to feel off. Not just older than the young generation creating the latest popular slang, because you recognize a few of these words. You know one of the subjects of sentence, or think you do. But the syntax entirely escapes you. Your own language starts to feel foreign to you. You sit with your thoughts. When you’re with someone you feel safe with, you ask them what it means. They don’t know, either. You think about this tweet for days. You feel uncanny.

But then, as thousands of others express their own confusion publicly, you begin to feel solid ground underneath you again. At last, you see others critiquing the post as try-hard at best, and factually inaccurate at worst. You regain some confidence in your ability to parse the language of your fellow citizens. Now, you are ready to dive in.

It’s time we broke down the Baby Gronk tweet that shook Twitter last week.

This isn’t my usual content. I’m usually here talking about history and literature, but as I did last week I’m breaking into professional-writer-word-nerd mode. I’m convinced that I can fully break down how bad this headline is, but I’m going to do it in the form of an editorial critique. Let us now attend the tale of Baby Gronk, together, as speakers and readers of the English language.

What is the headline trying to convey?

We’re going to have to run through almost every word here, people. Stay with me.

Baby Gronk: A 10 year-old boy (whose real name I won’t repeat here because he is an actual minor) who is a “star” elementary football player from Texas. Texas, to my knowledge based solely on having watched Friday Night Lights, eats and breathes football, so if you were to tell me that the “top children’s football prospect” was from Texas, I would instantly believe you. However… I still wondered how children’s/peewee football could possibly attract the attention away from enormously talented high school or college players. After perusing Baby Cronk’s social media (yep, that’s a 10 year-old with an Instagram account, or rather, one in his name) I can safely determine that the “attention” has been ruthlessly driven by his father (manager? Dad-ager?) who routinely DMs football programs, recruiters, and media accounts to get a spotlight on his son. Baby Gronk seems to be quite good at peewee football, but the media attention is inorganically skewed by his father’s management. His dad is the one who nicknamed him “Baby Gronk,” which itself is a reference to the real nickname of Rob Gronkowski, the enormously talented tight end for the Patriots and, later, the Buccaneers. It is also, I believe, key to mention that the boy’s real name is a reference to a popular sports video game (which itself is named after a well-known football icon). That’s right: the dad legally named his son, basically, Football Game Jones. I don’t want to delve directly into the psychological implications of that, but I will hint at them relentlessly through this post.

Drip King: “Drip” is a slang term to mean fashion/fashionable/fashionable clothing, depending on the context. Thus, when I initially looked at this tweet, I thought I understood that much. But then I noticed that Drip King is capitalized, which suggests that it’s a proper noun. Who, then, is THE Drip King? And over which realm is he sovereign? According to this very informative Defector investigation into the major subjects of this tweet, the Drip King is Caleb Hammett, First of His Name, a lacrosse player at UMass. Your immediate question might be, “How did a college lacrosse player get dubbed THE Drip King?” but I beg you to wait on the answer for just a little bit here.

Rizzed Up: I had to delve into this one a bit. I’m already familiar with the term “rizz,” which is slang for “charisma” (see what they did there? Cha-RIZZ-ma?). But I was confused by the subject/object of the usage. I knew you can have rizz (“She’s got that rizz that makes her a star.”). I can understand how you could familiarly change it up to be “rizzed up” (“She had a rizz up/She had a glow up.”). But how does someone rizz another person? In this case, how does Livvy rizz Baby Gronk? Does that mean she helped him to gain charisma? Did she get him a new wardrobe/style? (This was my initial supposition, because of the reference to the aforementioned Drip King.). When I googled “rizz up” I was surprised by the lack of example sentences that popped up, so I really struggled with the sentence structure here, and failed to come up with an answer until I found out a whole lot more of ridiculous context to this headline that swept through my Twitter feed like a Canadian wildfire. The answer will, likely, disappoint you in a little bit.

Livvy: This was an easier one. “Livvy” is Olivia Dunne who is known by her nickname among college athletes. She is a top earner in NIL for female athletes as a gymnast for LSU. She is very beautiful and has 7.5 million followers on her social media.

Now that we have baseline definitions for the words, we’re still nowhere with this headline. We have a basic understanding of who Baby Gronk is and who Livvy is, but when and where did the rizzing happen? How are they connected to the Drip King? How are Livvy and the Drip King connected to football at all if they play different sports?

Again, all the answers are to be found with a little digging, but they will disappoint you.

Let’s start at the beginning…

In March 2023, Baby Gronk filmed a meeting with Livvy. She interacts with him on the campus of LSU and knows who he is by his internet reputation. This video is posted to Baby Gronk’s social media and is titled “LIVVY DUNNE KNOWS I GOT RIZZ” and includes a text box that says “Rizz Game [Strong Arm Emoji].”

Also in March 2023, a TikTok user known as h00pify posts a video including stills from Baby Gronk’s video. His brief video names ridiculous achievements by this child football star (which I cannot verify but seem to be… made up to me) and calls Baby Gronk, “The number one football prospect in the country.” He further says, “On his visit to LSU, Livvy rizzed him up” and states, “He might be the new rizz king.”

h00pify is the handle of Henry De Tolla, a lacrosse player for UMass-Lowell. He appears unaffiliated with the school or the school’s media program on his TikTok.

On 6 June 2023, @BenShh1 tweets out the h00pify video along with the caption, “This video is making me feel schizophrenic.” This is a post that gets tens of thousands of likes, retweets, shares, and proceeds to go viral as it spreads to bigger and bigger accounts.

On 7 June 2023, SB Nation posts the immortal Tweet. As of 12 June 2023, it has had over 17 million views.

In a matter of one day, both my husband and I had separately viewed this video and eventually asked each other what the hell was going on. @BenShh1 is a privately owned Twitter account with general interest posts and opinions about movies, books, etc., and appears to be unfocused on sports media.

The SB Nation Twitter post is a headline linked to an article by James Dator on their website. The top of the article appears like any other sports opinion/speculation piece, but if you can manage to read to the bottom it devolves into an absurdist word salad of slang and nicknames. Intentionally written to be comedic, then. SB Nation is a general sports blogging website owned by Vox Media. Most of the articles shown appear to be serious analysis, predictions, etc., so it… doesn’t appear to be a comedy website.

The responses to the tweet are what initially caught my attention. The replies and the retweets focus on the unintelligible slang (“This tweet makes my head hurt.”) and the mystery of the celebrity subjects of the headline (“I’m 50. All celebrity news looks like this: ‘Curtains for Zoosha? K-Smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt.’”). Upon initial read I had to agree. Weirdly enough, however, I had to know: could I be so far out of the loop that I had never heard of Baby Gronk? That I was not, as I believed, using “rizz” correctly in my daily speech?

So now we have the most basic building blocks of the word translations, as well as the timeline associated with the viral headline. Let’s put these together with some context born of internet sleuthing and my pathological hyperfixation.

SB Nation is a real sports blog, aggregating real sports news. A quick perusal of their Twitter feed linking to their articles shows pretty standard sports headlines and news. I think the average follower or casual observer would assume that the news they are alerting their readers to is either newsworthy or mildly interesting. I don’t think these same readers would expect to find a comedy piece tweeted to them in the exact same manner, so people assumed it was a “real” article. Again, the reader had to read about seven short paragraphs before encountering the very obvious descent into absurdity—when was the last time you knew someone to read an entire article before sharing it to Twitter? (I’m joking, but also not really.) So that is what I think initially caused people to share the tweet into viral oblivion—they were captivated at the thought that such a strange headline could be real news.

There is a concept in parody and satire where the comedic work cannot too closely resemble that which it seeks to parody/satirize, or else risk being mistaken for serious work. That’s exactly what happened with the SB Nation headline, unfortunately. Whether the poor effort at comedy was done purposely or earnestly makes no difference.

There is, however, another possibility, which is that SB Nation unintentionally satirized a satire.

Baby Gronk is the only known entity here, as weird as that is to say. As I have learned while digging into this, he has been something of a fixture on the “prodigy children with questionably dedicated parents” circuit since he was a very large eight year old playing peewee football against much smaller foes. Baby Gronk’s dad has been posting videos of him and working various media and sports teams to get him noticed for his skill and, importantly, his rizz. Rizz is in the eye of the beholder, but the kid is a genuinely strong football player. For a ten year-old.

Livvy is a real athlete with a really huge social media following. Whether or not she actually knows Baby Gronk, thinks he should commit to LSU seven years too early, or clocks his rizz factor is unimportant—her part in the original video is as a straight up LSU cameo to lend credence to Baby Gronk’s dad’s mission to make it look like his son is touring colleges to select his future team. When I fact-checked this with my husband who is a sports watcher, he informed me that occasionally child athletes who achieve viral fame will get clout and attention from real college programs and their media teams, but that any real offers to play are symbolic in nature, unless the child is able to maintain an extremely long and unlikely streak of success. So, the “commitment” to LSU is real but is not expected to actually hold up seven years down the road.

Now back to the original commentary video from h00pify. Further perusal of his TikTok feed reveals that most of his videos are jokes with his mom or other non-sensical sports bits like the viral video. They are compelling, however, for their precise aping of current journalism on social media. His unblinking stare, faux-casual appearance, and rapid-fire monologue, interspersed with zoom-ins on Baby Gronk’s social media presence. Liberal use of Gen Z lingo, and in the case of “rizzing up” Baby Gronk, creating an indistinguishably invented addition. It’s not hard to figure that the mention of the UMass lacrosse player known as the Drip King is an inside joke to fellow lacrosse player h00pify and his original viewership (more of which is explained in this interview he did with Max Read upon going viral, and where he confirms that his video was “100%” intended to be a joke). In many ways, h00pify’s performance is too good. Again, the satire is too similar to the real thing.

Presumably @BenShh1 on Twitter, and then SB Nation, were caught just as so many others were. They had to satirize such an odd video.

Thus the entirely nonsensical SB Nation headline was born. A satire of a satire, so that all semblance to reality (and any ounce of comedy) was lost.

I don’t feel good to know all of this. I didn’t really need to know who any of these people were. But I did need to know that I wasn’t completely losing my mind trying to understand it. I do feel I can rest now that I know there is no sense to it. I don’t feel great about Baby Gronk, whose dad claims to have trained him to be a pro player since he was six years old and whose goal is for his son to be a millionaire by the time he’s a senior. I do feel pretty great for Livvy, who is now a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and by all measures a genuine success.

To circle back to the original headline, we can confidently conclude that it’s terrible. It uses too much slang to be readable by general audiences, and ultimately leads to no information for its readers, as the site satirizes a satire. It’s lazy and silly, and has consumed my afternoon in the writing of this.

While the headline and tweet obviously got their account plenty of clicks in the short term, I wonder what these types of clickbait articles do for a news site in the long term?