Column:
Slow down the sports news
Published Sept. 11, 2008
In 1908, sports fans were lucky if they could find the final score of their favorite baseball team from the previous day. There was no SportsCenter, no score updates sent to their cell phones and no Internet.
A century later, as MU celebrates the 100th anniversary of the world's first journalism school, times have certainly changed.
It is easier today to be a sports fan than ever before. We get to know our heroes at levels people didn't dream about 50 years ago. Games are shown online, if not with live footage then with up-to-the-second graphic updates. At halftime of the Missouri-Southeast Missouri State game last Saturday, I received a text message with Chase Daniel's first-half statistics. In case you need to study up on Missouri Tiger basketball, Google has you covered. Just type it in and get started with the 498,000 hits that show up.
Easier is not always better.
Although it might be human nature to crave information, the sports fans' DNA is coded to care about three things: their teams, their players and winning. The extra information now available does little more than cause pain and worry.
I mentioned that fans today get to know more about their favorite players' lives than ever before. I put together a list of just some of the things I've learned about our beloved athletes.
Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's magical 1998 season was aided by something not so magical. We deserve to know, but do we truly want to?
Ricky Williams smokes marijuana. In fact, for a while he moved overseas to get a more worldly experience of the pot. He has since come back and picked up football.
Alex Rodriguez had an affair with Madonna. Apparently, he's not too smart either if he thought this would go unnoticed in the media zoo that is New York City.
I've learned I never want to hear anything about a Missouri Tiger basketball team again. I want to go to the games, hope for a victory and leave. Because everything else involves Quin Snyder, fighting (Jason Horton, Stefhon Hannah, Marshall Brown, Darryl Butterfield and Leo Lyons), guns (Kalen Grimes and Demarre Carroll) or Ricky Clemons. Not exactly bedtime story material.
Jeff Kent does not like Barry Bonds. Carlos Zambrano has issues with Michael Barrett. Tony LaRussa and Scott Rolen didn't exactly go out for drinks once the game was over. Not everybody on a given team is going to like one another. But fans would prefer to keep the image of love and harmony in the clubhouse.
My purpose is not to reprimand either the players or media for their roles in my suffering. Athletes are human and the media is doing their job. All I am saying is that in the next 100 years, there is some information I don't want to know.
I don't want to know who is whining about their contract or holding out for more money. I don't want to know who drinks after games or who sleeps around. Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle both hit the town hard after games, but the focus when they played was on the field, not on their personal lives. I don't want to know that NBA referees are cheating or that Jeremy Maclin might have broken his ankle. I couldn't quite savor the second half of the Illinois game because of a text message news update that Maclin was getting X-rays.
I just want my team to win and my favorite players to perform well with maximum effort. A century ago people might not have dreamed of the technology we have today. But as I sit here in 2008, sometimes I wonder what it would be like to follow sports in a time when it was all about the game.
