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The Liver King, a social media sensation, inspires headgear for Winner/Colome Pheasants
Winner/Colome's Austin Calhoon wears a barbarian helmet after earning the "Primal Player of the Game" at the Class B state amateur baseball tournament.
(Courtesy photo)

The Liver King, a social media sensation, inspires headgear for Winner/Colome Pheasants

Aug 11, 2022
  

By Ryan Deal 

605 Sports

MITCHELL — Brian Johnson, known as the Liver King, has become a social media phenomenon due to his ancestral way of living, ripped physique and commitment to eating raw organ meat. Johnson regularly sports a viking helmet, which is the inspiration behind Winner/Colome’s headgear for its player of the game. 

This season, the Pheasants began honoring their “Primal Player of the Game” with a barbarian helmet inspired by the Liver King, a social media personality that promotes ancestral lifestyle in order to be physically and mentally healthy. 

“It started off as kind of a joke throughout our whole team and I guess it kind of caught on,” Winner/Colome co-manager Austin Richey said. “We just kind of run with it from there halfway through the season.”


The Liver King has 1.6 million Instagram followers and 2.7 million TikTok followers, along with accounts on YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook. He’s got his own website at liverking.com.

The Liver King’s diet consists primarily of liver, hence the name he’s given himself, along with other delicacies such as bone marrow, chicken hearts and turkey hearts.

A native of Texas, the Liver King lives by nine ancestral tenets — sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight and bond.

Winner/Colome second baseman Reed Harter discovered the Liver King by scrolling through Instagram and found his many outrageous videos. The Liver King will post anything from tribal hunting, working out and eating an assortment of food. 

“I just showed the guys a couple videos and he has kind of like a barbarian helmet like that,” Harter said. “So that’s kind of how it all came about.”


Winner/Colome’s Drew DeMers ordered a barbarian helmet online for the “Primal Player of the Game” and it’s helped keep things loose in the dugout. 

“We are just trying to have fun out here,” Harter said. “It’s no bad manners to any team or anything like that. We are just out here trying to have fun with it.”

The “Primal Player of the Game” is determined by a team vote and they pose with the barbarian helmet for a photo on their Twitter account. 

“It might be the guy that really let it hang out there on the mound,” Richey said. “It might be a guy that had three, four hits, a couple home runs. If a guy hits a home run they get to wear it from home plate into the dugout. We are having a lot of fun with it.”