Le Batard opines on sports journalism

No shit. I was responding to a post that said readers don't care about the column's topic. Reader response has been good, with many of them calling the topic "interesting" and "thought provoking."

I didn't read one comment that said, "We don't care, Dan, please write more about LeBron."

 

Oh, this column will lead nicely into LeBatard's stout defense of every single thing LeBron James does over the next decade.

 

The syncophant business.

 

fill in the blank:

The owner is always the ...... guy in the room

a) greediest
b) most arrogant
c) most crooked
d) most manipulative
e) weirdest
f) most faux-religious
g) cruelest
h) trust-fund
i) most right-wing
j) socially awkward
k) unwelcome
l) tone deaf
etc.

 

The stuff about LeBatard, SAS and Broussard curled up in the fetal position while BronBron held the sports world hostage ... I call BS.

If your (their) sources are telling you that LeBron is signing with Miami, if you feel confident enough to write/say he's signing with Miami, then why worry. Unless you have zero confidence in your sources (or maybe you made 'em up) then, yeah, grow an ulcer while waiting for BronBron to make up his mind.

Otherwise, if you've done your job as a reporter, worked your sources and wrote what they've told you will happen, you're either right or your wrong. Either way, you do the same 100 % effort job on the next Big Story and you go on with your life.

 

"Nothing's riding on this except the, uh, first amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country. Not that any of that matters, but if you guys fuck up again, I'm going to get mad. Goodnight."

 

This is a rank piece of intellectual dishonesty. My personal favorite line is this:

"This is why Cincinnati's Chad Ochocinco forms his own media -- to eliminate the news filter clogged with the sensibilities of reporters who don't look or think anything like him."

Because a guy who changes his name to a couple of Spanish numbers (and is pondering switching to two Japanese numbers) wouldn't be the kind of person who'd normally, you know, seek to form his own media for the sake of publicity.

 

You forgot one:

m) dumbest.

Not in Cuban's case, he earned his money through intelligence (and a hell of a lot of luck timing the sell-out to the height of the bubble, but major smarts to put himself in that position). On the other hand, think of how many heirs are running teams these days. There must be a half-dozen such teams in every major sport. And typically the people they hire are people who won't challenge or threaten them, so those people end up being pretty dumb themselves.

I mean, does Cuban really think the guys covering the Knicks are dumber than the guys running the Knicks?

 

Who cares what he thinks? Do we care what the guys who created Google think about anything other Google? Cuban's been moving chess pieces all over the board now for a decade since he sold Broadcast.com and, I dunno...not as much fruit as he'd like to claim.

 

Absolutely.

The worst example of this was when Big Brown made his Triple Crown run, and Richard Dutrow was an AWESOME quote, calling the Triple Crown a foregone conclusion, being honest, forthright, completely full of himself, yes, but filling up our notebooks like few in sports do.

Big Brown loses the Belmont, and Pat Forde HAMMERS him for running his mouth, telling him to basically shut up next time.

What does at accomplish, other than being an easy rip job column and promising more cliches in the future? And quite frankly, the endless cliches are one of the reasons I lost interest and eventually left sportswriting.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=3431608&sportCat=horse

 

That said, Mark Cuban's quote is hilarious.

Sportswriters in general are of average intelligence, I'd guess.

But there aren't many people stupider than professional athletes.

There isn't a sportswriter alive that's any dumber than some of the fucking idiots I had to talk to on a daily basis for years. It seriously, honestly, truly made me wonder what the fuck I was doing with my life, talking to these dopes.

That cynicism toward human intelligence, coupled with the demise of newspapers, made it an easy decision for me to leave the business a couple years ago.

 

Trading objectivity for access? The ESPN approach . . . and it works . . . but
you have to factor in the price, when you evaluate it . . . and it's not
inconsiderable.