Sports have changed forever. No, it was not the NFL lockout,
the Boston Redsox breaking their 84-year World Series drought, Brett Favre
retiring, or even that the Detroit Lions making the playoffs for the first time
since 1995 that changed sports. It was a modest invention in 2006 that has
changed the direction of sports for good. That invention is known best as
Twitter.
Before the invention of Twitter, athletes had no feasible way
of reaching directly out to and interacting with their ever-growing fan bases.
Then one day it became all too easy send 144 characters worth of personal
sentiments to a favorite athlete. Fans and the media alike swarmed to this new
medium, looking for greater access to their favorite players.
One of the greatest changes to sports is the way sports
reporting is handled. Before the days of Twitter, journalists had to go through
the team to get to a player. Scripted, monotonous and often boring press
conferences were the only real way of gaining insight into how a player felt or
thought during the game. The answers became predictable and if you listened to
enough press conferences, you came to understand that there was a strict code
on what should and should not be said in the media.
Twitter has revolutionized this process though. Athletes can
speak freely, whether it is articulate or not. The problem becomes when athletes
speak their minds without thinking of the consequences first. Almost daily, Sportscenter
utilizes the biggest, most unscripted press conference to get juicy tidbits to
fill airtime. Instead of using statements issued by the team, they go straight
for athlete Twitter accounts to get the latest juicy developments or find an
interesting take on a breaking topic, just ask Matt Hasselbeck.
What goes unsaid though is that no matter how great the
ability to interact with athletes and see what they are thinking may be it also
is very dangerous territory. Sometimes players go a little too far and they get
into deep trouble. It is a trend that, while fun for fans, needs to be
controlled before too many athletes reveal things that should not be public.
