Ohio State’s Eli Apple is one of the top cornerbacks available in this week’s NFL draft. But he’s not, in fact, the most impressive talent to emerge from his own family. That honor is reserved for his mom, Annie Apple, who is a LeBron James-, Andrew Luck-type superstar-in-the-making at the all-important position of Sports Mom.
There are many different qualities one looks for in a Sports Mom. She should be funny. She should be unabashedly pro-son. She should temper her homerism with stern words of rebuke or instruction when her son is not performing to the levels she knows he can achieve. She should be media-savvy, but not so enamored with her visibility that she’s afraid of dropping true and uncomfortable nuggets of wisdom. And, she should know the proper time and place to embarrass her son: which, generally speaking, is always and everywhere.
Annie Apple combines all of these traits in one, compact frame that would be a lock for the No. 1 spot in a Sports Mom draft. The best way to consume Annie’s brand of Sports Momming is on Twitter, via @SurvinAmerica. There, she kicks her legitimately funny brand of humor, and shows off an impressive command of au courant pop culture references and memes. (As you’ll see, she expertly dropped multiple allusions to Birdman’s instantly iconic Breakfast Club appearance just days after it got big.)
A smattering of examples of her jokes, just from the past month (also, she tweets a lot):
On top of specifically composed jokes, she’s also great at the kind of small observational tweets that, when poorly done, are often annoying, but in the right hands can be some of the best uses of the medium:
As a Sports Mom, the topic of her son naturally comes up. Annie offers funny behind-the-scenes looks at the sports world from her vantage point, defends her son from idiots with the aplomb of a seasoned internet vet, and even gets off a few digs at Eli to boot:
Maybe Annie’s best material comes when she drops the jokes entirely and goes right into real talk mode. She has really good takes:
Following Annie is a full-on multimedia experience. Because of her travels with Eli for the draft, she’s posted a bunch of good pictures, videos, and gifs:
If you have any more doubt about who is the biggest star in the Apple family, just watch this pre-draft interview featuring mother and son and watch how effortlessly Annie’s charm completely steals the show:
(And if her Twitter presence isn’t enough to sate your appetite for Annie’s wit and wisdom, she even has her own blog called Survivin’ America where she writes about, well, everything.)
The NFL draft starts tonight, and some time before the weekend the Apple family will rejoice with the news of where Eli will continue his career—this time for just compensation, as Annie would be sure to point out. And while the spotlight will justifiably be on him, for all of us in the know, it will be the continued growth and development of the Sports Mom that we’ll be most interested in keeping tabs on.