Tackling A Cyclone

[GreenBat]

This is a great opinion piece. The writers of Take A Knee.com should read this. As should Aztecskin and any other aspiring internet writers.

How the internet killed and gave birth to sports writing

[Eagle1855]

though I find most of your posts abrasive and irritating, I appreciate you sharing this.

[GreenBat]

though I find most of your posts abrasive and irritating, I appreciate you sharing this.

As this personal attack was meant to draw a response, I'll give it to you, by saying Thank You and God Bless you.

[Eagle1855]

As this personal attack was meant to draw a response, I'll give it to you, by saying Thank You and God Bless you.

was mostly a joke, however you do have many a personal attacks on this forum. so we can laugh about it or cry about it, however i'm just going to keep knowing it was all meant in the spirit of 'good fun'. if it upset you, i extend a spanish olive branch (because they have delicious olives).

Edited August 26, 2009 by Eagle1855

[Quoner]

Good read, but I doubt anyone could get consistent page views our make a career out of that style of writing anymore. Just another feather in the cap for the growing idiocracy and is one of the many reasons I find it harder and harder to post about sports. I don't care about the game recap and really the only angle I really enjoy is adding my slant to attending or experiencing the events and/or cheerleading teams I care about. Maybe I'm growing up, but discussing sports for sports sake really wears you out after awhile. The news link + snarky comment + prediction gets just as old to write as it is to read.

Look at Deadspin, most of their good writers have left (save the over-the-top cussing-former WaPo employee) and they are really pushing the limits further than they did under Leitch to get those pageviews up for Gawker. Sadly, I think with the scandals they've been able to sit on and generate, it's working. If that's the future of blogging, then meh. I can just read it on the side.

Part of why we changed to TakeAKnee is because we wanted to move away from what TY was doing. We grew out of it. We have a few posts we were proud of, but, and this probably sounds douchey, I'd rather write 4-5 items a month that I am happy to acknowledge I was responsible for than churn out 10-12 posts a week. I know that rankles our universe of 6 readers, but neither us intend to use this site as anything more than a site with a first priority of entertaining ourselves. I think the problem is you have 50-60 bloggers looking for their big break -- and some of them deserve it. Me, I'm just a guy who hates his day job who likes to write freely on the side after being forced to write most of the day onboard a slave ship while being whipped by a shirtless Asian cabana boy.

[aztecskin]

I know this might be a little zombie raising but I wanted to throw my two cents in. I agree that the article was interesting. A nice look back a bygone era. Unfortunately, these kinds of articles are not going to be found. In fact, its because its so easy to watch a game, its no longer needed. The first reaction many will have if someone wrote that today is: "that isn't what happened"

ESPN is both a blessing and a curse in that respect. I mean, whereas we had to rely on sportswriters to recap games for us, we can now watch the highlights and judge for ourselves. For example: I didn't catch the end of the LSU/Washington game. I read espn's recap. In it, they hyped up the receiver's juke on the safety. Made me want to see it. I found the highlights and ... was disappointed. It was nice but I didn't think it was all that amazing.

So in that respect, after weighing the two I chose to see the highlights and lose a great recap read. I would argue that there are still some great writers out there and the cream rises to the top, as they say. If someone is good, you will eventually hear about them. I remember when B Simmons was just another in Page 2's stable. I would hype him to my lil brother, talking about how funny he was.

Some others I like off the top: Joe Posnaski* I stole the asterisk note from him. I'll admit it.

Greg Easterbrook I can never read all of it. I skip the crappier game reviews.

Tim O'Neil A comic book reviewer/ music reviewer /blogger. or something

Buck Harvey SA Express News columnist

If any of you peruse some of the old posts, I started doing it as an outlet and it evolved into a sort of hobby. You can see the evolution in its direction. I tried reviewing movies, comics, games, restaurants. Eventually I settled whatever in the hell it is today.

My aim is to make it almost like a daily column for no other reason than because I think that would be a cool thing to do.

[UNT90]

Too bad the younger generations won't get the anticipation of waiting on the morning sports section, reading all the articles about the previous night's game (especially baseball), looking at the game box score to see how your favorite players fared, and reading the inning by inning scoring summary. Good times. Sometimes I'll do this on a Sunday morning on the rare occasion there is nothing on the agenda.

It's nice to have all this technology at our fingertips, able to get everything you need at the touch of a computer key, unfortunately it takes a lot of the romance out of sports.