BUCK: Mr. Travis, I gotta tell you.
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: I have a little bone to pick here Clay’s saying, “Oh, Buck, you’re talking about how the communists are ruining America and want to throw us all in prison for the insurrection and all this stuff.”
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: “How bad could it be talking about sports stuff? Come on in, Buck, the water’s warm! Let’s talk about sports for a minute together.”
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: He’s goading me into it. I’m saying, “Yeah, sure I got ideas on the sports stuff too.” Here’s what happens when that happens. This was from last week at Mediaite.com: “‘What’s Brave About Not Being Brave?’ Buck Sexton and Clay Travis Go After Simone Biles for Withdrawing from Olympics.” Even better is the New Republic, which is a left-wing lunatic site.
“The Right’s Culture War Against Simone Biles Is a Con — ‘Oh, it’s so brave,’ said Clay Travis” and Buck Sexton, “who took over Rush Limbaugh’s radio slot…” I’m reading what they wrote here. Yeah, they call it a BS, made-up controversy we’re talking about. First of all, I’m sorry. I thought when you’re a globally recognized athlete in the Olympics, people are allowed to have opinions about your performance and decisions you made in the arena. I thought that’s what happens in the sports world. But, apparently not, Clay. How did this landmine get stepped on by yours truly in a way that seems like it’s just crazy?
CLAY: Well, your boy Bill Maher even called you words we can’t say on the radio on his show.
BUCK: He is a little bit sad, a little bit sad. I’ve been on the Bill Maher show. I always appreciate when they have me on. They know I’m a right winger; they know I add some spice into the mix. But I ended up on the blank-blank list, as they said on the air there of other people (who I will not name) who are on the right, or also on that curse word list because I said this, and all I said he was that this seems like the antithesis of competition at the most elite level to pull out of it. So can we just update everybody, Clay, can you tell where are we now on this story, and then we can backpedal into why was this such a huge deal?
CLAY: So Simone Biles is going to compete, I think the plan is, on the balance beam. So let me take a step back, I guess. So there are three different major competitions that happen with gymnastics in the Olympics. There are the team events, and so that happened first, and Simone Biles pulled herself out of the team event and the U.S. women ended up going on and winning the silver medal.
And then you have the individual all-around, where everybody competes having to do all the different events, and that is where the United States won, I think, with the 18-year-old Suni [Lee], if I remember that correctly, an 18-year-old going to Auburn. She did, the U.S. woman did, stepping in with Simone Biles not competing.
And then they have all of the individual events: The floor routine, the bars, the balance beam, and the vault. All four of those. You can win an individual gold medal in all of those. The only one left now is the beam, and Simone Biles is now going to compete in that, and I believe that will be happening early tomorrow morning for the final gymnastics event.
So she has set out everything since pulling herself out of the team event. It’s probably… I wouldn’t even say probably. It’s the number one story by far to come out of the Olympics so far, is that Simone Biles has not competed. So immediately after she pulled herself out, all of these places started saying, “It’s courageous, it’s heroic,” and so we were responding to that idea that it’s courageous and heroic, and you ended up, evidently, taking a lot of the shrapnel.
BUCK: Yes.
CLAY: I think ’cause people are used to me maybe having strong opinions in sports.
BUCK: I think they were upset because Clay Travis has corrupted me —
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: with his sports views, bringing me into his right-wing sports world.
CLAY: I got ripped some, too.
BUCK: Oh, yeah.
CLAY: That’s kind of par for the course.
BUCK: We were both getting ripped. I think they expect that you’re going to take a certain perspective on it.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: I just rarely, in my previous career on radio, talked about sports very much. Kaepernick I think some things that would come up at the national level.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: But to the Simone Biles thing — and this, of course, gets left out — I said there’s never any shame in getting treatment for mental health or anything like that.
CLAY: Of course.
BUCK: Absolutely not. It’s the same as, in my mind, someone saying, “Look, I ruptured an Achilles’ tendon; I’m out,” correct? But I ruptured an Achilles’ tendon I’m out is not, “Oh, my gosh. Look how brave this person is.”
CLAY: Correct.
BUCK: It’s just, “I can’t compete,” right? And then when you get into this shifting story, the shifting narrative of, “Well, actually it was some kind of a…” Initially it was the stress, and if you’re an athlete at that level, you’re supposed to be able to as part of this, to handle the stress of competing. Now, you know, you could retire on a moment’s notice. This is a free world, free country. But then it turned into it was a vertigo issue.
So everybody who said responding to the stress… You’re a jerk if you said, “Oh, look how she’s responding to the stress” and whatever — it’s actually unsafe for her. But that was a couple days ago. Now we’re going back to she’s competing again; so did she manage to conquer the vertigo safety issue in a couple of days, or is that just the narrative spawn that’s kind of a trap for people that were criticizing? I got questions, Clay!
CLAY: Those are fantastic questions, and those are the kind of questions you’re not allowed to ask. CNN had an entire segment. Somehow you avoided getting ripped on CNN. Did you see the headline? “White Men Criticize Simone Biles.” So they just went out and grabbed random white guys. One of them is my friend Doug Gottlieb who does a sports talk radio show.
And he was saying (paraphrased), “Wait a minute. How come…? He did a video talking about the fact that men who decided not to compete would get destroyed? And they pulled his clip, put it on CNN, and it was him and a couple of others. I think Piers Morgan they put in there.
BUCK: (impression) “Was it Brian Stelter, though? Is that a Stelter segment?”
CLAY: I’m not even sure who this segment was with.
BUCK: “Oh, gosh.”
CLAY: But the headline was, “White Men Criticize Simone Biles,” as if because of our race, we’re not allowed to comment on the sport? Think about that.
BUCK: They actually tried to transform it.
CLAY: That’s crazy.
BUCK: This was very clear. They tried to transform it. I didn’t even view this as political. That’s why I was so — and you said, “If Tom Brady in the Super Bowl,” which, if you’re a gymnast, the Olympics is by far the biggest thing.
CLAY: Yes. That’s right.
BUCK: There’s nothing else that comes even close, right? For professional soccer players and people like that the Olympics is, to be honest, kind of meh.
A lot of basketball players in the U.S. team — which, by the way, also lost, lost to France recently. For them, that isn’t the biggest event. The biggest event would be the NBA Finals. But so, we’re just talking about it. We’re just assessing this from a sports specter point of view. Clay, I put on my sports analyst hat for a second —
CLAY: (chuckling)
BUCK: — and I got my hand blown on! Like all of us, ’cause I’m conservative, I can’t talk about an athlete making a decision to step away from a sport as not being something that was praiseworthy? It was fascinating but it was really a window into the mentality of the left which here’s what it really is.
CLAY: They tried to take over sports.
BUCK: You’re not allowed to criticize Simone Biles.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: That’s actually it. You’re just not allowed to.
CLAY: That’s right, and they’ve also tried to take over sports and make it an entirely left-wing owned discussion point, and that’s what they tried to on CNN. They’re trying to apply the same rules of identity politics there where your opinion on an athlete is entirely defined by what your identity is: “You’re a white guy; you can’t have an opinion on a black woman.”
Well, the reason why people watch the Olympics and watch sports in general is to have opinions on athletes and their performance and whether or not they are the best! Sports is mostly argument. That’s why it has a lot in common with politics, because you watch an event, you look at facts, you look at data, and then you sit around and argue with your friends.
BUCK: Yes.
CLAY: What team is better? What quarterback is better?
BUCK: Absent narrative, sports is just fancy exercising, okay?
CLAY: (chuckling)
BUCK: Without actual stories involving humans and their emotions and everything else, it might as well be one of those CrossFit competitions that people watch. I’m always like, you want to watch people lift weights? I don’t get that.
CLAY: I think it’s pretty entertaining, by the way.
BUCK: Look at you. You just know that the CrossFit community is about to rip my head off.
CLAY: I think some of those CrossFit things… You’re gonna climb a rope like 20 feet into the air?
BUCK: I want to be jacked like the CrossFit people.
CLAY: Those people are crazy.
BUCK: I just don’t want to watch them getting jacked through it.
CLAY: Oh. Okay. I understand that.
BUCK: Yeah, that’s a different thing. But the point for me here was, I shouldn’t be taken aback by it at all, but I just thought it was interesting because they made it political under the guise that we were making it political and that actually was just not true. It was not political at all for me.
CLAY: By the way, it’s Suni Lee. I said Suni Kim. I’m probably gonna get… By the way, if Buck said it, not me…
BUCK: Oh my gosh! Clay Travis.
CLAY: Suni Lee, 18 years old, won the Olympic gold. Not Suni Kim. So, congratulations to her. I hope she does well in all this.
BUCK: She’s actually an amazing story and a very happy one in this whole thing so that’s very, very cool.