A feud between 49ers defensive tackle Javon Kinlaw and longtime Bay Area sportswriter Grant Cohn melted down in spectacular fashion on Tuesday, with Kinlaw confronting Cohn at practice and then berating him later on the writer’s livestream.
Cohn, a second-generation team gadfly who now writes about the 49ers for a Sports Illustrated blog, has been deriding Kinlaw as an injury-prone bust since nearly the moment he was drafted in 2020. According to Cohn, Kinlaw stared him down at Niners OTAs in Santa Clara on Tuesday. As Cohn recounted with a huge smile on his face, he responded by asking Kinlaw “Why are you looking at me like that, Javon?”
At that point, Kinlaw apparently decided he had heard enough. Kinlaw allegedly responded by calling him a “bitch-ass” N-word and knocking the hat off his head, according to Cohn. AP writer Josh Dubow, who was there, confirmed Cohn’s account.
In a video recapping the first confrontation with Kinlaw, Cohn freely admitted that he’s said a “hundred negative things” about Kinlaw, including saying he has an “80-year-old knee.” But when Kinlaw appeared on his stream hours later, Cohn pretended not to know why the player was mad. This is the difference between Cohn and the truly Jim Rome-grade trolls: He couldn’t keep his story straight.
Kinlaw eventually hopped on Cohn’s evening stream — while eating — and that’s when things got truly wild. “Do you think you’re representing the 49ers well right now?” Cohn repeatedly smarmed. “Do you think the 49ers are proud of what you’re saying right now?” Kinlaw responded by cutting wrestling promos while dinner was spilling out of his mouth.
Kinlaw more or less admitted Cohn’s version of events from practice was accurate. With a little color added.
“When I pressed up on you in f—king person, you f—king shaking like a coward, voice lighter than my f—king baby, fam,” Kinlaw said to Cohn. “What’s up with that?”
Cohn, in the safety of his home at this point, asked Kinlaw if he thought he was scared of the 6-5, 320-pound NFL player.
“I don’t give a f—k if you are [scared] or not,” Kinlaw answered. “All I know is when I walked up on you, your f—king body temperature was cold as ice … your f—king balls had shriveled up, little dick [N-word].” (The size of Cohn’s genitals was a theme Kinlaw revisited frequently on the stream.)
Under all the insisting that “my nuts is bigger than yours,” Kinlaw had a fair point. “Stop talking about me like I’m an animal or something,” Kinlaw asked Cohn. “Nobody f—ks with you. … You need to find a new job.”
For his part, when he wasn’t whining about being supposedly “threatened,” Cohn was reveling in the attention.
“Javon Kinlaw called me a ‘sucka ass bitch’ today. You can’t say that. To me, it was one of the better days of my life,” Cohn said. “Definitely one of the better days of my career. I’m honored that Javon Kinlaw thinks I’m a sucka ass bitch. I’ve worked so hard in my life to attain this status. Thank you, Javon.”
Later in the stream, Cohn admitted he was thrilled to have made Kinlaw so angry, and that he learned his tricks as a legacy blowhard.
“My dad was in the industry,” Cohn said of his father, Lowell Cohn, a notorious longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and Santa Rosa Press Democrat who once compared PED users to murderers, among many other things. “He put me up on game when I was very young. Because if [Kinlaw] touched me, if he pushed, me, dude … I could retire today. That’s what went through my mind: I’m about to be a multimillionaire thanks to Javon Kinlaw.”
Niners defensive end Arik Armstead, who has been fed up with the younger Cohn since he worked at his father’s paper, shared that part of the livestream in disgust. “This is the type of low life we let into our building,” Armstead wrote on Tuesday night. “He would rather antagonize and provoke players into hitting him so he can retire instead of doing his ‘job’ of journalism.” Long snapper Taybor Pepper said Cohn’s writing was “low effort s—tposting.” (Several NFL players on other teams, including a longtime 49er, agreed.)
Deebo Samuel wrote on Instagram that he had blocked Cohn, while another 49er, Brandon Aiyuk, pointed out Cohn’s cowardice in handling the whole thing. “If you gone say some bout somebody stand on that s–t,” Aiyuk wrote. “Don’t backpedal and start playing victim.”
The 49ers and Cohn did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday, although Cohn spent most of the morning complaining in a Twitter Space.
