ClayNation: Don't believe hype, sports blogs a necessary reconnect

Sports bloggers and the mainstream sports media hate each other more than I hate bingo wings. If you ever doubted this, Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger's angry confrontation with deadspin.com's Will Leitch on a recent episode of Costas Now should have erased all these doubts. Bissinger was an angry old man, the 2008 equivalent of parents in the 1960s who worried about the lascivious swishing of Elvis Presley's hips.

Buzz Bissinger's first name is an onomatopoeia, so he's not an oxymoron. (Getty Images)

How bad did it get? About halfway through Bissinger's uninformed rant against blogs, I started to seriously consider giving up my viewing of the television show, Friday Night Lights, inspired by his book. And I'm in television love with Lila Garrity. Yep, it got that bad.

Aside from proving himself to be a gap-toothed, balding bully, Bissinger wasn't perceptive or illuminating in his critiques of bloggers. Somehow in the midst of the death spiral of newspapers, sports writers have decided that bloggers represent all that's evil in the world and are to blame for the slow path towards print media obsolescence. The reality is that in a world of increasing complexity and sensory overload, good sports bloggers provide a larger audience to great and interesting sportswriting than ever existed before. I can't count the number of times I've read something in the mainstream media that I would have never known existed without blogs.

Missing this point entirely, Bissinger trotted out the same old lame clichés about how bloggers represent the death of modern journalism and are a sad testament to our crumbling society. Oh, and he also managed to explicitly state that all bloggers are poor writers and lack an intelligent readership. The reality, of course, is the complete opposite.

The average reader of my local daily newspaper, the Nashville Tennessean, may or may not have opposable thumbs. The best sports bloggers are far more intelligent and better writers than the majority of the mainstream media who deride them. What's more, they work harder too. That's because the internet is a meritocracy and newspapers are ancient and anachronistic vestiges of unionized pulp.

What none of this banal criticism recognizes is that sports blogs exist -- and find an audience -- as a natural reaction to the patently false athletic images sold by the professional sports leagues and the majority of the mainstream media who cover these athletes. We know that athletes aren't saints and that in real life, outside the locker room, they don't walk around spouting the same tired responses to the same tired questions night after night after night.

Yet, athletes have become so coached in their responses to the media that it's the rare individual who is willing to step outside of the cliché and say something interesting or revelatory. I challenge you to read the write-up of any game and see any quote by any player that you haven't seen a thousand times before. We've all been down this path before. Welcome to the sportswriting matrix, where we're all in crypto-sleep waiting for something to change.

Where do you obtain most of your sports information?   4%  Newspapers     3%  Television     26%  Internet Blogs     67%  Internet Sports Sites     Total Votes: 347

What I'm getting at is that every single element of 21st century sports coverage that doesn't take place on the field or court is fundamentally artificial: We're sold an image that never existed about an athlete's personality that bears no resemblance to his actual life. We know, as intelligent people, that athletes are as screwed up as the rest of us, that their lives are complex, varied and interesting, but we only see the cardboard image of a golden athlete that the league wants us to see. Usually we see this image because we're supposed to be buying something that the athlete sells. His team, his grit, his cereal, his moxie, his shoes, his terrific lack of flaws: All of these are clever artifices, deceptive walls between reality and the fan. The leagues have become so adept at packaging their stars as unique, charismatic and endearing heroes that, perversely, the league's players seem less real than they ever have before.

We go to games because they're fun and because we're fans. Because life is complicated and sports aren't. Players and teams win or lose within a circumscribed three hours (or eight hours if you're a college football fan). Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, the business of sports made everything about the fan experience synthetic and the fun of rooting for actual people vanished. In a three-dimensional world, according to the mainstream media, our athletes are either saints or sinners. We all buy the story, even though we all subconsciously recognize how false it is. (Readers of the ClayNation column, of course, will not buy this story because we're too busy growing beards and searching for pink dolphin stories.)

That's because the mainstream media is primarily good at building up these athletic images propagated by the league and then tearing them down. How quickly did the media take us from canonizing Mike Vick to branding him a canine killer? In reality the true Mike Vick dwelled, like most of us, somewhere between these parallel cardboard cutouts that the media created for him.

It's the rare athlete who dwells in the gray area of life, in the nuanced terrain between good and bad where life actually exists. Athletes complain that the media loves to build them up only to later destroy them and point to examples of this when it happens. But it's not so much that the media wishes to destroy them as it is the narrative changes in an instant. Athletes are good or bad in today's sports world. But they're never human.

We want our athletes to behave, but what good is Tony Soprano without violent beatings and guns? (Getty Images)

Art dwells in nuance, why can we root for a character as flawed as Tony Soprano but not root for an athlete unless he's packaged as a paragon of virtue? Because the professional sports leagues have decreed that their stars are larger than life, above the flaws of ordinary life. Some athletes get this, they reject the mantle of sainted otheworldliness thrust upon them by their leagues: Gilbert Arenas, Charles Barkley, John Daly. Each of these athletes is aware that the way he's packaged is fundamentally artificial.

The writers of blogs and the readers of blogs recognize this artificiality and consume non-traditional sports coverage as a way of reconnecting with a reality that is far more complicated than the one sold by the professional sports league. That's one of many reasons why, contrary to the cliché, the best bloggers and their readers are much smarter than the consumers of traditional sports media. Sports bloggers aren't afraid to lift the proverbial curtain and point out the absurdities of modern sporting life.

Indeed blogs are necessary to 21st century sports because they reconnect fans with a more balanced and even-handed reality of athletes' lives. They strip away the artificial and dual construct between saint and sinner. On good blogs, athletes, for the most part, aren't restricted to roles of good or bad, they're just people. Ultimately, like the finest writing of all types, good blogs connect readers through humor, anger and sundry other passions with what it is to be a fan and place your trust, your hopes and fears, in the hands of an athlete you'll never know.

Notwithstanding all of this, the idea that sports bloggers are not intelligent and provide nothing of value persists. It's a lame and pathetic insult offered up by people who aren't even intelligent enough to break out of the hackneyed and inaccurate clichés that are rooted in a fundamental misapprehension of why blogs exist.

I suspect this misapprehension is generational. After all, I've never lived in a world where ESPN didn't exist. The mainstream media's broad-based and consistent criticism of bloggers and their audiences set the ClayNation creativity machine to bubbling. How to right this horrible inequity, this travesty of internet justice?

After being told about the internet, Karla killed everyone in sight with her razor sharp straw hat. (Getty Images)

Eventually, I came upon my answer. If Hollywood has taught us anything, it's this: quiz bowls solve everything. That's why I'm proposing a quiz bowl between five bloggers and five members of the mainstream media who have denigrated the blogging community. Let's find out whether bloggers are actually dumb. Best of all, we'll find a way to raise money and donate the proceeds to Rick Reilly's mosquito net charity.

When broached with the challenge, five bloggers immediately accepted this challenge. Next week we'll meet them. Until then they'll be sitting in their mother's basements, wearing their underwear, madly typing away at their keyboards. All the while bringing a more complete and nuanced portrait of 21st century sporting life than their critics could ever imagine.