You're not supposed to know who "Baby Gronk" is
Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King, or is he just getting rizzed up by Livvy?
If you haven’t already heard this sentence, I’m sorry. It’s the headline of an extremely good SB Nation story, which surfaced a series of TikToks dripping in lingo to the Twitter world. Usually, that is bad — Twitter tends to drain TikToks of all their original nuance and context. But in this case, it was very funny. Many of us had a laugh about this word salad.
However, as always happens when a young influencer is introduced to the wider internet, people were very upset. Who are these people? I don’t know them! Get them off my lawn!
That’s the thing, though. I’m going to explain to you who Baby Gronk and Livvy are and what it means to be “rizzed up” and “Drip King,” but you really don’t need to know all of it. There’s no reason to catch up on manufactured drama between young athletes. This “drama” surfaced because the buzzwordy lingo and odd sounding characters were literally just…funny.
You’re not old for being out of the loop here. You are normal.
Now let’s unpack.
First, meet Baby Gronk. He is a 10-year-old who is really good at football. His dad has manufactured a fascinating online presence for him, so he has a few hundred thousand followers. He has posed with celebrities like Shaq and Mark Wahlberg because that is exactly the kind of celebrity that would like to stay relevant by associating themselves with a “young star.” Some people are saying that Baby Gronk has been visiting schools on recruiting trips, as if colleges typically grant scholarships to large fourth graders. He’s good, he could end up being just fine in 10 years, whatever. Doesn’t hurt for coaches to let him take pictures on their fields. I deeply enjoyed this interview The Athletic did with his dad.
BABY GRONK on Instagram: “PRESIDENTIAL”
April 18, 2023
Enter Livvy Dunne. She’s a 20-year-old gymnast at LSU who is among the highest earning college athletes in the country. She’s very beautiful and very good at social media. LSU would be a great school for Baby Gronk to go to one day, for sure. They’re good at football. She “RIZZED HIM UP” (posted positively about him) in a video in March, which just resurfaced. Baby Gronk (or his dad) jokingly posted about going on dates with her. These are VERY CLEARLY JOKES.
BABY GRONK on Instagram: “LSU IS NOW IN MY TOP 3 @lsufootball”March 18, 2023
Now for the villain of the story, h00pify. He’s a TikToker who posted videos about Baby Gronk and Livvy Dunne, reporting on their meetup and using terms like “drip king” and “rizzed up,” which activated fight-or-flight in many of you. Because he’s an AI-seeming, blank-stare-having TikTok drama channel, he riffed on the joke posts about Baby Gronk/Livvy, and went viral. He is the villain because now people feel like they have to give this saga valuable brain real estate.
Another character in the saga is Baby Diggs, the “number one football player for the class of 2030 in the state of New York,” according to h00pify and absolutely no one else. He “called out Baby Gronk to 1v1 him” which means he would like to play football against him to prove which one is better (and thus, the rightful Drip King). This is all pretty much equal to fourth graders talking trash on the playground, but of course, these four graders have thousands of followers.
So there you have it. Now go forth and forget.
I abandoned “And Just Like That” last year because I found it to be too cringe, but ahead of the next season, I caught up. Let me tell you, that show is meant to be binged. The cringe becomes camp right before your very eyes.
See you Sunday PAID party people!!!!
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