Ben Mintz showed up to The Yak this week the way nobody wants to show up to work: wheeled in, leg propped up, crutches nearby. It should have been a simple sympathy moment. Instead it turned into a full-blown Barstool bit, complete with its own hashtag, #MintzyStrong, and a chorus of coworkers openly clowning him for looking like he was faking the whole thing.
Mintzy getting wheeled across the gym set under the GET CHARGED UP banner, crutches guy in tow.
The skepticism wasn't subtle. Watching a grown man get pushed through the Barstool facility in a wheelchair is inherently funny, and the cast leaned all the way in. On set, the hosts started firing off comparisons the second he rolled out — Nick wondering why he "looks vaguely 14," Big Cat going with the fat kid from Billy Madison, KB just landing on "Detweiler." None of it was cruel exactly, but it made clear nobody at the table was taking the injury at face value.
The Yak cast riffing on Mintzy's appearance as he's wheeled off the court.
Mintz didn't love being doubted, and he said so directly on the show. "I'm not faking anything," he told his co-hosts, hand over his face, clearly exhausted by the pile-on. It's the kind of defensive-but-still-funny moment that makes for good podcast television — a guy trying to be taken seriously about a real injury while three grown men in a room full of hats and a giant U.S. map treat him like he's running a con.
Mintzy pushing back on the doubters mid-podcast: "I'm not faking anything."
Eventually the show settled the debate, at least officially. The Yak posted footage of the actual injury moment with the caption that it's "not for the faint of heart," pairing it with the #MintzyStrong tag that's now become the umbrella for the whole saga. Whatever happened to that ankle, the show is treating it as legit enough to build a recurring bit around, complete with in-house medical-chair check-ins and a since-lifted "treadmill ban" for Mintz that the cast is framing as a small mercy from Big Cat.
The Yak's own footage of the ankle injury, tagged #MintzyStrong.
The rest of the Barstool ecosystem piled on fast. Clip accounts started running the wheelchair footage next to unrelated stock clips of guys on crutches, treating Mintz's injury like a meme template rather than news. Even Dave Portnoy got in on it, of all people, repurposing a line he'd written about WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert — "a rising tide floats all boats," haters can go find another job — and applying it wholesale to Mintzy, which tells you the office has fully decided this guy is must-protect content right now regardless of how the ankle actually happened.
Viva La Stool declaring the haters in shambles now that the broken ankle is confirmed.
None of this resolves the actual question that kicked the whole thing off — how a guy breaks his ankle badly enough to need a wheelchair and crutches, but somehow still looks fine enough on camera that his own coworkers won't stop making jokes about it. That tension is exactly why it's working as a bit. Until Mintz is walking around the office unassisted, expect #MintzyStrong to keep showing up in the group chat, and expect the cast to keep needling him about it every time he rolls back onto set.