Basketball, Twitter and the Era of the Athlete Commentator
Amnesty THAT
— Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) February 24, 2013Sports journalism is reaching an awkward, hormonal stage in its evolution: one where entire articles annotate tweets; the dreaded [sic] imposes itself on every quote; and post-game interviews reach silly levels of non-candor.
Over the past decade, the antidote was fan blogging. Bill Simmons famously challenged Boston’s WEEI radio pantheon, and Henry Abott gained notoriety with TrueHoop. Now in 2013, Simmons is himself an established brand and Abbott oversees a network of TrueHoop blogs. Writing on Simmons’ own site Grantland, Carles delivered a eulogy for the fan perspective:
The rise of any realm of the blogosphere means the rise of the singular, independent voice. I’ll miss the NBA’s awkward transition decade and the Internet media evolution that prepared its demise. I’ll miss the early days of the NBA blogosphere, even though many of those blogs have established new opportunities for talented people. Even though we’re seeing an established media tone on aggregated blog networks, large-scale content farms, and the ‘bro it down and break it down’ voice that is widely used on television, I’ll always remember that it came from the formative, now-extinct NBA blogosphere. But I guess none of that really matters to the casual fan, anyway.
Carles is right; ultimately most of us don’t care. In fact, as fan we’ve come to expect our sports fed to us with a certain superficiality.
There’s a reason for this: In most cases, though, fan journalism articulates truths and feelings that traditional media — in its obsession with adhering to professional standards of journalism — used to ignore.
But at the center, and most fundamental, is a gradual shift in editorial authority, from traditional news outlets to athletes themselves.
In athletes, we are discovering an entirely new sphere of information we’ve have never fully had insight to: the inner thoughts of the most elite athletes in all of humanity.
This is something historic, I think. In the history of sports, we tend to view athletes as non-people, or martyrs. See: Greek heroes in the Colosseum. More recently, David Foster Wallace stated that athletes catalyze the awareness of having a body. In this view of sports, it isn’t about athletes at all: it’s about us and our obsession with playing out narratives.