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September 12, 2006

The Wisdom Of Twenty-Something Slacker Fratboys

Why the Sports Guy is my favorite online community

By the second quarter of last night's Raiders-Chargers beatdown on Monday Night Football, my buddies and I had pretty much given up on the game (sort of like the Raiders!) in favor of a vigil on Art Shell closeups. That is, we were spellbound by the shots of Art Shell on the sidelines, solemnly staring across the field and, most importantly, not saying a word. The camera kept cutting the Shell, and Shell wouldn't move his lips. Not a mumble into the headset. Not a whisper to an assistant. Nothing. Just staring.

We couldn't believe it! Mostly because we had read The Sports Guy's NFL picks column that weekend in which he (or at least one of his readers, but more on that in a bit) had predicted exactly this -- that Art Shell would stand silent on the sidelines throughout the game:

Q: Couldn't agree with you more about Art Shell's lack of clock management. During big moments of any game when he coached in the '90s, whenever they showed the coaches, did you ever notice that Art never had anything to say to anyone (assistants, players, even referees)? He always had this huge headset on but never said a word. My buddies and I always surmised that the coaches in the booth were telling him what to do and how to react through his headset. For example, after a bad call, they were no doubt yelling into his headset, "Art, look mad!" Can't wait to see if he still does this.
--Mike S., Northville, Mich.

SG: So glad you mentioned this. You're right, that was an Art Shell staple -- staring out toward the field with no expression on his face, completely still, to the point that you would worry for a second that your TV's picture froze. I'm telling you, Art Shell's comeback was a gift from the Comedy Gods AND the Gambling Gods. Just you wait. I'm excited for football fans 22 and under to experience him for the first time -- it's almost like finding out that "The Jericho Mile" has been released on DVD or something.

Wow. I mean, wow. This was completely dead on. Perfect. Art Shell acted exactly as predicted in the Sports Guy column. On the couch Monday night, we were blown away. We couldn't stop talking about it. And every time they cut to a silent Art Shell, the joke got even better. We couldn't have been happier; mostly because we thought it was cool that the prediction from the Sports Guy's column had come true. Why did we think this was so cool? Because, whether we knew it or not, we were proud members of the Sports Guy community.

If you're a guy in your twenties/ early thirties who follows sports and checks your e-mail, you've probably come across The Sports Guy. If anything, the Sports Guy might have jumped the shark a couple years back (roughly around the time the Red Sox won the World Series), leading to the inevitable Sports Guy backlash ("I'm so over his Boston crap, Sox and Pats, blah blah blah, and I hate the nonsense with the 90210 and The O.C.; it makes him seem like a chick"). Even with the backlash, we can't deny that the Sports Guy has become a brand in his own right, and definitely one of the biggest columnist draws on the ESPN.com site. It's a little bit hometown sports columnist, a little bit blogger, a little bit talk radio, and a little bit lads mag. You gets sports yak and Vegas stories from a guy who sits on his ass and watches too much TV. Just in time for the internet generation!

(In the interest of full disclosure, I shall admit that I've had a couple e-mails make it into the Mailbag column about five years ago. It used to be one of the few things that might show up in a web search on my name -- that and this really awkward quote from an ESPN message board before a NCAA tourney game in college. But I can pledge that I haven't sent any entries for the Sports Guy Mailbag since 2001. Not even when he showed up about four years late on "The Wire" bandwagon and managed to recommend a discount soccer book instead of Soccer Against The Enemy. That's just how mature and cool I am!)

At this point, regular readers know the drill from the Sports Guy, and can filter their reading appropriately. Me, I tend to read the NFL stuff and the NBA stuff, but go light on the baseball and Boston stuff, while avoiding the pop culture recommendations pretty aggressively. To be honest, we know most of the jokes at this point; I'm actually more interested in the details of his sports observations (I know, it's pitiful, but I also listen to a lot of WIP, so it really shouldn't be that surprising).

But there's one Sports Guy column I never miss, because it's so consistently outstanding. It's the one that will actually make me laugh out loud, and it's the one that probably has the least to do with what the Sports Guy's writing (but has everything to do with the Sports Guy): the Sports Guy Mailbag. The format is simple. Readers submit funny e-mails on topics that seem germane to the Sports Guy audience, and the Sports Guy prints them along with his own riffs on the topic. The riffs are usually pretty good, but it's the e-mails that consistently shine. It's as if someone has aggregated all of the funny sports-and-pop-culture-related e-mails exchanged by groups of college buddies around America each week and reprinted them in a single place; like a big clearinghouse for smart-ass mails and goofy theories from the funniest dudes you know. (Find them here under "Mailbags".)

The reason that the Mailbag is so consistently good is that the Sports Guy has actually created something that's bigger than his own journalism or short-lived comedy-writing career: a robust and engaged online community. Essentially, the Sports Guy has managed to build a group of readers who are so familiar with and enthusiastic about the Sports Guy brand that they can, in aggregate, write a better Sports Guy column than the Sports Guy himself. They know what topics are appropriate, they know what other Sports Guy readers find funny, and they know that they don't have to write their own blog because the Sports Guy will do it for them.

Gathering content from your fan community isn't really a new idea; the late-night TV talk shows have solicited jokes from outside their staffs for years (remember when Cliff Claven got his joke on "The Tonight Show"?), and the Star Trek spinoffs have long since accepted script submissions from fans. The Sports Guy Mailbag is just the latest incarnation thereof. But the phenomena of the Sports Guy's community is definitely an internet effect -- closer to what's cropping up within flickr, del.icio.us, and Wikipedia than to hack comics faxing jokes to Johnny Carson. Call it collective wisdom, a wiki, or just a bunch of guys who like swapping Vegas stories. The difference with the Sports Guy is that his online community -- unlike the Web 2.0 dweebs -- doesn't actually know that it's an online community. They're just doing it because they think it's cool and fun. And they're producing amazing results -- all the Sports Guys in the world working together to create something bigger than the Sports Guy. And maybe that's the most remarkable and coolest part of all.

You really wonder where it all goes for the Sports Guy from here. He wrote his book (about the Red Sox and the tortured existences of the fans thereof comma yawn), did some time writing for a TV show, and then returned to ESPN.com. He hasn't really shown up on other ESPN media outlets, though that seems the next logical step. But you have to wonder if, at this point, he has the critical mass to just step away from ESPN and do it all himself. He's got his brand, he's got his community -- why bother with the compromises of working for the Walt Disney Corporation? Why not just build his own ad-supported sports content empire?

Probably because that's not what Bill Simmons is all about. Doing it all on his own means that he can't convince ESPN to send him to the NBA All-Star Game or the Super Bowl. He probably has a pretty mellow life -- picks up a handy salary, doesn't worry about anything but writing and watching TV, spends a lot of time with friends and family. You just wonder if the good folks at ESPN, or at least Bill Simmons, realize what they have in their community. Because it's probably a lot bigger and more interesting than a biweekly Mailbag column.

Posted by thatkid at September 12, 2006 11:56 PM under Biznass

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Posted by: thatkid at September 15, 2006 1:21 PM

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