Athletes tweeting? No thank you

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To say being a sports fan has changed in the last 10 years would be an enormous understatement, and not necessarily for the better.

I’ve found that for the most part, the more we learn about these guys, it is decidedly not for the better.

Recently, I tried futilely to track down a professional athlete with marginal ties to the area, and at one point was asked, “Did you try his twitter account?” My reply went something like this: blank, quizzical stare, followed by, “Um, no.”

The reason being is that I would not be caught dead checking twitter or facebook or any other mind-numbing site for information a simple phone call should suffice for.

It’s incredible now how pro athletes have taken to twitter in mass and how they feel the need to wax unpoetically about seemingly everything.

I try to avoid it all like the plague, but on Tuesday, in a story we ran, a tweet by Twins centerfielder Denard Span read, “I think d Span is feeling alright today,” he cobbled together. “By far my best day in a while!”

Talking in third person is never a good thing, but doing so on twitter?

A lot of athletes now will shun reporters entirely and direct scribes to their twitter accounts for their thoughts, updates, whatever. It’s a cop-out first off, but having to endure Chad Ochocinco’s twitter site isn’t informative or newsy, actually a lot closer to cruel and unusual.

You want to curb crime? Make a con have to sit down and suffer through tweets by Roger Clemens or Rashard Mendenhall or Steve Nash — that’ll set them straight.

But it’s mostly unavoidable now.

It doesn’t matter what you watch, listen to or read, it is everywhere.

It’s kind of like how it used to be with books, when it seemed like every athlete, or coach had a book. This trend certainly hasn’t died. The latest example being Auburn football coach Gene Chizik coming out with a 288-page word dump about his team’s run to what will undoubtedly go down as the slimiest national championship of all time.

Prior to last season, Chizik’s career record was 13-24 — good enough for a book deal, I guess. So he took to pen and paper to tell the world how great of a person and player Cam Newton is. Of course he glossed over the whole being booted out of school at Florida thing, and his dad’s “Cam-for-hire,” tour.

Back in the day all we really knew about a player was what was on the back of his baseball card, and sometimes that small amount of information was hard to read because of the grease stain left behind from the haggard piece of chewing gum that was included with the cards.

These days, athletes keep their twitter “followers” — more like zombies — updated on what they’re doing virtually hour by hour. I miss the baseball-card days when ignorance was indeed bliss, and less was certainly more.

Sun sports editor Dave Selvig can be reached at (701) 952-8460 or by e-mail at dselvig@jamestownsun.com

Tags: sports, selvig, comments, tweeting