At 3:58 a.m., Nathan Marzion tweeted a meme. In it, his parents are depicted at age 24 agreeing to get married and have a baby, paralleled with himself at the same age waking up before 4 a.m. to watch Giannis’ Greek National Team lose in the Olympic quarterfinals in Paris.
Marzion is the kind of sports obsessive who watches Packers preseason games at a wedding ceremony – something he did and posted about. By leveraging his passion for Wisconsin athletics and all sports, Marzion has gathered a significant Twitter/X audience of over 59,800 followers. He’s now a major voice in the online discourse surrounding the Bucks and Packers.
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His tweets aren’t all jokes either, even if there are a lot of those. One day in July, he invented a formula to rank all 456 men who ever played for the Milwaukee Bucks in order of their impact on the franchise. (No. 1 was Giannis, no surprise, followed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Sidney Moncrief.) And despite his quick wit and go-for-the-joke demeanor online, he’s pretty much a straight shooter in person. Marzion talked about mental health and how he copes when his favorite teams are on a losing streak. “Maybe when I get older, I’ll get bigger priorities,” he says with a laugh, admitting that his devotions have interfered with finding a girlfriend.
The only blemish on the Muskego native’s Wisconsinite Sports Scorecard is that he also root, root roots for the Chicago Cubs. But that paradox led to Marzion’s social media rise. Midway through the 2018 season, the then 18-year-old promised to write a 1,000-word apology letter if the Brewers fared better than his Cubbies. His bet received over 7,000 likes. The Brew Crew, of course, eliminated their Chicago rivals in Game 163 that year, and Marzion followed through on his promise. He even received a tongue-in-cheek thank you directly from the Brewers in reply to his mea culpa.
After that first dose of virality, Marzion’s social media star has only ascended. For some sports statistic nerds, there’s a pipeline from being chronically online to having an actual media job. But Marzion, who works as a marketing analyst, doesn’t necessarily see a career sprouting from his self-generated platform. “I’m a little bit wary [of it] being too much of a job,” he says. “I want to keep it something that’s enjoyable and fun, that doesn’t seem like work.”
Still, he has dabbled in more-traditional avenues, writing for the Behind The Buck Pass blog and hosting “Bucks University,” his own basketball podcast. “I’m always thinking of trying to expand what I’ve built,” he says.
