Kyrie Irving, formerly of Duke University, currently LeBron James’s wing man in Cleveland, recently did a podcast with two Cavaliers teammates in which he repeatedly declared that the Earth is flat.

Flat. As in … sail long enough and your boat will go off the edge of the world. Flat as in “not round”. Flat as in “13th-century science”.

Irving recapitulated the “world is flat” thing on Friday when asked about it by ESPN reporter Arash Markazi.

Kyrie Irving, 21st century point guard and apparent Flat Earth Society adherent.

Until … today. When Irving suggested the whole of it was a sort of joke. A sort of experiment to see if people would, you know, react to his notions of the solar system, and take him seriously.

What happened here?

Kyrie Irving does, in fact, believe the world is flat and that is why he said it. Repeatedly. (Check the 14-20 minute stretch of the podcast.)

It is not a majority view, in 2017, but some people still believe that. A few. And apparently Kyrie Irving is one of them.

He said: “The Earth is flat; Earth is flat. … Because it’s right in front of our faces. I’m telling you, it’s right in front of our faces. They lie to us.”

At some point, he and/or his people must have became aware of a reaction to his declarations … which would put him in the category of “guys who say the Earth is flat”.

A crank, that is. A nut job.

So, today he paddled back upstream on the story and, essentially, told everyone he was just messing around.

“The fact that that could be news all over the world just shows you how it is,” Irving said the day before the All-Star Game in New Orleans. “The fact that it’s a social phenomenon — ‘Kyrie thinks the world is flat’ — is hilarious to me. … That it could actually be news.”

The day before? He told the ESPN reporter: “I think people should do their own research, man. Hopefully, they’ll either back my belief or they’ll throw it in the water. But I think it’s interesting for people to find out on their own.

“I’ve seen a lot of things that my educational system has said that was real that turned out to be completely fake. I don’t mind going against the grain in terms of my thoughts.”

He may want to check in on the Volvo Ocean Race, a round-the-world sailing event that begins later this year.

The VOR boats sail around the world; no one falls off the edge. They sail tens of thousands of miles, always east, and at the end they are back where they started, in Europe.

“The Earth is flat” is pretty much the gold standard for “misinformed person” — which Kyrie Irving apparently just discovered.