Curt Schilling eviscerates Twitter trolls going after his daughter
People have called ex-MLB star Curt Schilling a number of things — and they’re not always good. But it’s hard to deny his tenacity, whether on the mound or in one of the Twitter feuds he often finds himself in.
Sometimes Schilling gets himself in trouble by never backing down, even from the trolliest of trolls. In his most recent Twitter fight, though, Schilling dealt a KO to the out-of-line bros who’d been harassing him about his 17-year-old daughter.
It all started last week when Schilling congratulated his daughter, Gabby, for getting accepted into college and starting a softball career. A dad proud of his daughter … that’s benign enough, right? Well, no. Not in the say-anything-and-apologize-later world of 2015 social media.
What followed was a number of sexually suggestive tweets about Gabby fired off to her dad, some of them even implying rape and other horrible things. (You can see some of the Twitter taunts here, most of it isn’t fit to post on The Stew). Schilling’s blood boiled, as any father’s would, and he jumped in the flame war, ignoring rule No. 1 of the Internet: Don’t feed the trolls.
By Sunday, not only had Schilling fed the trolls, but he’d killed them, cooked them and eaten them. He penned a 1,700-word essay about the entire thing titled, “The world we live in…Man has it changed.” He teased it on Twitter by saying “There are repercussions to your actions in the real world.”
Then, his essay proceeded to balance out-for-blood dad with former pro athlete who knows just how crude guys can be. He called out two Twitter trolls in particular, saying exactly who they were in real life. Both have since deleted their Twitter accounts, the modern-day waving of the white flag. Schilling wrote:
[T]weets with the word rape, bloody underwear and pretty much every other vulgar and defiling word you could likely fathom began to follow. Now let me emphasize again. I was a jock my whole life. I played sports my whole life. Baseball since I was 5 until I retired at 41. I know clubhouses. I lived in a dorm. I get it. Guys will be guys. Guys will say dumb crap, often. But I can’t ever remember, drunk, in a clubhouse, with best friends, with anyone, ever speaking like this to someone…
“The Sports Guru”? Ya he’s a DJ named Adam Nagel (DJ is a bit strong since he’s on the air for 1 hour a week) on Brookdale Student Radio at Brookdale Community College. How do you think that place feels about this stud representing their school? You don’t think this isn’t going to be a nice compilation that will show up every single time this idiot is googled the rest of his life? What happens when a potential woman he’s after googles and reads this?
The other clown? He’s VP of the Theta Xi fraternity at Montclair State University. I gotta believe if Theta Xi is cool with a VP of one of their chapters acting like this I’d prefer to have no one I know in it. Also, does anyone attending Montclair State University have a student handbook? If so can you pass it along because I am pretty sure there are about 90 violations in this idiots tweets.
Schilling’s essay continued, obviously, at great lengths, even calling out further trolls who challenged him after he published the piece Sunday. You could make the case that Schilling — who works as an analyst for ESPN and recently beat cancer — should just ignore the 140-character miscreants and you wouldn’t be altogether wrong. The celebrity in a flame war very often has little to gain, even if he or she dominates like Schilling did here.
As Schilling will most likely tell you right now, this wasn’t about him as a celebrity, a baseball player or a cable analyst. This was just a dad defending the honor of his daughter and taking the no-holds-barred approach.
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Mike Oz is an editor for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @MikeOz
