My Football South

Don't think he cares. Probably still busy enjoying a win over Tennessee...  ;D

 

No, they don't tire of it. People are talking SEC football in March. I think the Sport as Cultural Metaphor pieces are lame and redundant myself, but this was well done.

 

world's LARGEST outdoor cocktail party

 

LJB - I'm one of them, and I do get tired of the shit. It's pretty stupid to lump SEC college football fans into a homogenous group that will just lap up any bullshit college football story you throw out there. That's my main point here. People talk/write about Southern fans so condescendingly. Some of them? Maybe. But a lot of them would like to see an effort made not to recycle/regurgitate played out crap. Believe me!

 

Well, I agree with you 100 percent on that one. We have always been poked and prodded with a stick. Southern sports fans have long been treated like they're slightly retarded, but that's a small piece of a much larger condescension.

And I suppose it's no different than how Red Sox or Cubs fans have been/are treated by the national media.

What do you want the dude to write about? There will be plenty of shit after Media Days. But for now, the guy is trying to serve a readership that is salivating for football.

 

Um, he could have been keeping tabs on some SEC recruits from the Memphis area, chronicling their preparations for entry into the league, getting them to talk about what they think life in the SEC would be like. And that's just one off the top of my head. Someone who is supposed to think of such things for a living could have come up with many more, I am sure.

 

yeah, god forbid people enjoy something they read in a newspaper...

 

Tell you what, you go chronicle some "preparations for entry into the league", then package and market it as a cure for insomnia.

"Gee, SEC football. I can't wait to be a part of such rich tradition. I'd just like to thank Coach Blow Hole for giving me this opportunity. I've been working out, learning my routes, and hopefully I can go out there and contribute something to this team."

 

Sure, if you're a crappy reporter who doesn't know how to connect with your sources, that's what you'll get. I would think most would do better.

 

It was just an example. I guess what I'm saying is, I don't see much problem with Ron's column at this point in the year.

Sorry for the harsh overtones earlier, damned back spasms have ruined my day.

 

I don't read every paper in the country, but I'd be willing to bet the ones with staffs the size of Memphis and smaller don't run a lot of award-winning stuff on college football on July 23. A lot of papers have to give their college beat writers vacation in the summer or not at all, and the window gets smaller each year as the time between college baseball and college football lessens.

We run into countless logistical problems trying to get something "fresh" in the paper in July. Among them:

-- Colleges are more strictly limiting access than ever, even during "voluntary" summer workouts.
-- SIDs are on vacation.
-- Coaches are taking their last bit of vacation.
-- Schools are orchestrating one big "summer sit-down" for about 60-80 minutes, where the coach meets the entire press corps. These are supposed to tide you over for the whole summer.
-- Special requests for interviews are shot down: "Hey, you can get him at media days."
-- The SID wants us to go through him for player interviews. The ones we contact directly have clearly been told to avoid us if we call directly. Same with many of their relatives.

So you piece together whatever you can while you're doing three bylines a day and catching phone calls for the local roundup and proofing pages because two staffers are on vacation and two others are off.

I turned a simple meet-and-greet into a decent story, one that received kudos in a PM from someone on the board, but it's nothing I'd enter in a contest. It was the best I could do under the circumstances, and it wasn't as fun a read as Ron's.

And yet, I see that Ron's story is "crap." I shudder to think what mine is.

One gift I received during my month off to be with my dying mother was I got to see our world from the reader's point of view again: in the hospital, at home, in coffee shops, at the funeral home, at informal gatherings with people who wanted to talk sports instead of death for a change. So many of the things we take for granted, these people still find fun and interesting. It is so easy to forget that, and being reminded of it before I read Ron's piece helped me appreciate it more.

I've had so many fans mention his column to me. Not one negative word. Is it for everyone? No. Did it break new ground? No. Did it scoop Rivals.com about some four-star athlete? No. Was it fun to read in a world where everyone is spewing "news" but not everyone can weave an enjoyable Sunday read? For a lot of fans, I'd say it's a big yes.

I'm sure I am a shitty reporter because I haven't broken any ground this summer, but I'd like to see someone who critiques from a safe distance walk in a beat writer's shoes in the ever-closing window of opportunity known as orchestrated media opportunities -- and the shrinking window known as time to work on a story on any given July day -- then tell me what I can do differently without working on stories on my own time every day during vacation alley.

Because I'm a friend of Ron's, I hesitated to link his story, mostly because I feared eventually someone would call it crap. I didn't think it would happen so soon.

Man, we can eat our own as well as any industry out there.

 

I didn't call it crap; I said it was well-written. I just said it wasn't very original, and I said he was capable of solid, more original stuff. And are we not supposed to critique journalism around here?