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November 08, 2002
It's With Mixed Emotions. .
It's With Mixed Emotions. . . That I read Scott Berg's piece in today's Washington Post concerning the rise of fantasy sports and how they've affected the way we watch games today. Berg's story is a fine survey on the origins of the hobby, and how the whole shooting match has grown out of control -- witness fantasy leagues where you compete to see which fugitives can evade capture by the FBI the longest, or more recently, another fantasy league where contestants attempt to divine which way the Supreme Court will rule on some cases. I have mixed emotions for simply one reason: from 1993-1994, I wrote a column on fantasy sports for the Washington Times. I pitched the idea to then Times sports editor Mark Green, and he agreed to let me produce a piece on spec (for free) for the newspaper -- a piece that if memory serves wasn't all that different from the one Berg produced for the Post today. After a quick phone call with Green, my 2,500 word piece was slashed to 500, but I had earned myself a slot on the paper's NFL preview page every Friday. Oh, and I was recompensed with the princely sum of $50 per week. Which, come to think of it, is more than I've ever made for this blog. My column continued throughout the football season, took January-March off, and was then revived for the following baseball season at Green's behest. Of course, that effort was cut short by the baseball strike -- something which cost me a few hundred bucks, a not inconsiderable sum at the time. In any case, Green left the Times to become an editorial writer for a paper in Kentucky, and the new sports editor wasn't interested in renewing the column. My column now homeless, I contacted Post sports editor George Solomon to pitch the idea to him, but he demurred. After a few pieces for Pro Football Weekly my brief side career as a freelance sportswriter was essentially over -- though I still have a framed copy of my first Times column as well as a longer piece on ice hockey I wrote for the Post Weekend section. Which, leaves me where I am today -- ranting about sports and wondering just how many people are actually reading this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bitter. The money I earned from my freelance gigs came at an opportune time and helped get me back on the ice to play hockey again after a 14-year hiatus. And I never got over the kick of riding the Metro to work and seeing someone, anyone, reading something I wrote in the newspaper. Best of all, the Post piece I wrote ran on the same day as my Times column -- a rare double that I'm sure some other freelancer probably acheived too. But Off-Wing Opinion exists for a reason -- mostly rooted in the fact that many of the folks covering sports today are stuck recreating the same old formulas when it comes to coverage. For me, what I see most often is a combination of factors coming together to create a stale homogenization across the nation's sports coverage. At times, it's an insistence to see sports stories through a political prism that's far less relevant than it used to be -- and at times, hardly relevant at all. At other times, a deep and abiding misunderstanding of business issues is to blame. And far more often, I'm afraid that overlapping conflicts of interests when it comes to broadcast rights often cause broadcasters to simply ignore important stories in their midst. How else to explain how over the last two seasons as a bloated Barry Bonds assaulted the baseball record book, nary a word was mentioned that steroids may be the source of his late-career dominance of the game. Granted, there are some exceptions. ESPN's Page 2 offers some welcome relief, and I was happy Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning QB was able to find a home there after getting bumped off by the people at Slate. Certainly, the growing legion of Sports Bloggers is beginning to do yeoman's work as well, besides giving me the feeling that I'm not alone in my assesment of much of the sports writing game. POSTSCRIPT: Look for some more changes in this space, starting around December 1. I've gotten myself onto Stacey Tabb's production schedule, and we ought to be debuting a new look for Off-Wing Opinion in the near future -- one that will coincide with a move off of Blogspot. After taking a hard look at my server logs, I've come to the conclusion that Off-Wing has been hard to reach for long stretches more than a few times this week -- in some cases knocking my daily traffic off by about 20 percent off my average. And since I use Blogger Pro, I'm actually paying for this service and think I have the right to complain. In any case, a new look and a new URL are in the offing. So stay tuned, and thanks for reading.
Eric
01:48 PM
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