Miami Heat shooting guard Tyler Herro is a lot of things. NBA player. All-Star. Former Sixth Man of the Year. Three-Point Shootout champion. Father. Actor. And often quite a candid interviewee.
Noted astrophysicist, however? No. Nor is he a professor of modern history.
On a live stream earlier this week – a particularly unfocused live stream, even by modern standards – Herro was chatting with a couple of friends (online personalities Adin Ross and N3on), who got Herro to admit on camera that he does not believe in the Moon landings. In fact, when asked about them, Herro went beyond a simple denial, opting for a “hell no”.
If Something Was Not Filmed, Did It Even Happen?
If Herro had just denied the Moon landings, that would be one thing. But he did not. Instead, Herro broadly denied all of history – including everything “before 1950”, despite the first Moon landing happening in 1969 – with specific denials of Christopher Columbus’ landing in America (1492) and Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game (1962).
Wilt’s performance, for what it is worth, was all Herro was initially asked about. The rest was Herro’s unprompted embellishing.
Why Herro would dispute the legitimacy of Chamberlain’s landmark performance is a whole other matter. Presumably, the lack of footage of the performance is what causes him to doubt – or pretend to doubt – that it ever happened. Back in 1962, when the NBA world was still in its relative infancy – and before the ubiquity of television that was to come, itself followed by the internet, social media, and the modern day where we all have cameras on us at all times – few games were broadcast, whereas all are today.
It may be tough for someone born in the 21st century like the enviably-young Herro to imagine such a society. Indeed, the modern world of outrage content creators likes to sow the kind of doubt that Herro seems to be buying, to the point that fake footage has been shared as real. But it is the unfortunate truth – the footage has not been released, because the footage does not exist, because there was a time when not many games were filmed.
Tyler Herro, Modern Historian
This absence of footage does not mean that empirically-documented historical events should be disputed. There are other proofs beyond video, and a modicum of critical thinking should dissuade any serious doubters.
In addition to all the players, officials, coaches, game night crew, radio broadcasters, journalists and arena staff who were there to witness Wilt’s performance, there were also a reported 4,124 people in attendance, plus an untold number listening to the live radio broadcast. Surely, at least one person other than the official scorer among those thousands was keeping count. Surely, if it was all a lie, someone would have raised the alarm over the last 63 years.
Similarly, an estimated 400,000 people were involved in the mission to get man to the Moon. That would be an awful lot of people to work into a conspiracy. A logistical nightmare. Potentially an even harder problem to solve than just landing on the Moon.
Working backwards, Herro’s own thought processes would mean that everything from the Second World War to the Industrial Revolution, from the Boston Tea Party to the Storming of the Bastille, may not have actually happened. Although anyone alive today can still go and see the Great Pyramid of Giza, Herro does not believe – per his own logic – that they were built by the ancient Egyptians. Until such time as video of pharaoh Khufu himself doing some drywall work on his big triangular cemetery is released, there exists doubt, if you want there to be.
But perhaps Tyler Herro knows best.
