Alpha-male instincts are at its highest with sports. My-team-is-better-than-your-team countered back and forth between friends (and the occassional not-so-friends) shared over a drink in your favorite bar. You had your team and you defended it ’till the end. The reason your team was superior was justified by anything you belted out at an increasingly higher volume and an occasional sharper tone. No matter how heated the argument got you felt like Mel Gibson avenging his freedom in Braveheart/The Patriot until someone was dead, covered in his own pool of blood. Even if it was false – but that was ten years ago. A lot has changed since then.
Before the All-Star break, ESPN re-aired the 1999 Home Run Derby in Boston, clearly telling at how different the times are. The hit-tracker that drew lines from home plate to the outfield was the highlight of production value during that derby. Ten years from then, the State Farm 2009 MLB Home Run Derby glowed the ball flying through the air much like Fox’s attempt to glow the hockey puck blue so the audience can follow it. And was able to track the amount of feet the ball traveled on contact – emasculating Bradon Inge trickling the ball 20 feet from home-plate.
Dave Halberstam wrote multiple times, compiled in Everything They Had, about his time reporting in the Vietnam War and befriended a man from Boston (Halberstam himself, a Yankee fan since a little boy) and both would watch the ticker scroll with box scores of Red Sox games and be in awe of the consistency of Carl Yastrzemski’s batting line. That was the media in the sporting world in those days. You read it off print and sporting magazines or electronic marquees. This is how men became accustomed to reading their newspapers, from back to front starting with the sports section – a method I practiced even though I’m in my twenties and a dying newspaper industry.
That’s not how you get your stats now: your cellphone – not merely limited to the iPhone – is the gateway that allows you to look up stats, past and present, mobile applications brought us the ability to look up stats to fire back at your drunken friends in seconds (guys – drunk and sober – only have an attention span of a couple of seconds). Twitter gives you updates on trade rumors and firings – a la Kevin Love breaking news on Kevin McHale’s firing from Memphis; more ammo to mercilessly beat down your opponent until they’re in their own pool of blood like Brock Lesnar standing over Frank Mir in UFC 100. Mobile blogging beat reporters give us instantaneous information of real-time events. Photographers directly update their pictures online. Those of us that are lucky enough to subscribe to baseball packages were able to watch Jonathan Sanchez pitch the first no-hitter of 2009 out-of-market from the San Francisco area. MLB has given Blackberry and iPhone users the ability to watch videos of LIVE games. LIVE! (I watched a baseball game during a summer lecture.) New media has dominated the sporting world in the past ten years.
If Sports had teeth, Media punched it all over the octagon.
