Norman Einstein's Newness: The Golfer & More

In addition to the Yankee Stadium tour, check out the latest from Norman Einstein's Magazine; quite possibly the best yet.

In addtion to my focus on The Golfer and Nike, there is some other excellence in this month's edition:

• Einstein's Latest Findings looks back at April, but she won't look back at us. So we pray in May for June to stay... (You like that? Then, like this!)
• Graydon Gordian from 48 Minutes of Hell talks about the beauty of hard fouls in basketball
• Patrick Truby from There's No "I" in Blog provides words for fellow relocated baseball fans
• The Conductor of the Orchestra that is Cian O'Day talks about the NFL Draft going primetime
• Finally, Cian also joins Corban Goble and Marshall Rake (both from Epilogue Magazine) for some stickball with Q-Tip... yes, Q-Tip

We're pretty hyped for June, but goodness it was fun working on May's edition. Please join the Facebook group and check out the Rec Room to keep up with the goodness and talk about our pieces.

The Tragedy of News as Entertainment

Hours after discussing the idiocy of how the news media is covering The Golfer’s Statement, I ran into these two tragic stories:

A Vanderbilt recruit, Raajan Bennett, was killed last night in a murder-suicide committed by an ex-boyfriend of his mother. All three were found dead in the family home in Powder Springs, an Atlanta suburb.

Earlier today at Ole Miss (University of Mississippi), walk-on safety Bennie Abram collapsed at the school’s training facility and died hours later. The football team was partaking conditioning drills when trainers noticed that he had endured some difficulties minutes into those drills.

In a day where sports fans may have preferred to hear about some PED/steroid-use admission or a contract squabble, we are still enduring wall-to-wall ϋberanalysis of a seemingly fruitless public statement.

In a day where we should be discussing these tragedies in a greater scale in sports media, we had to actually sift through to find the few details that already exist on these stories.

A day like this is the epitome of news as entertainment.

News as entertainment isn’t a new phenomenon, contrary to popular belief. It’s just grown exponentially over the past two decades. We can blame the trials of the Menendez brothers or O.J. Simpson. We can shout at the top of our lungs about Monica Lewinski (who these ladies that The Golfer had dalliances should learn from). We can grow angry about the sensationalism from Elian Gonzalez to Paris & Britney to Kobe Bryant to Chris Benoit to Balloon Boy.

Yet, there are too many sports outlets, too many voices, too many reasons for important stories like this to be overlooked.

We don’t know anything about Abram’s situation. Considering how many in-training deaths of football players we’ve heard about since the Korey Stringer tragedy in 2001, you’d think that there would be a greater discussion.

We know slightly more details about Bennett. Maybe because he was a victim and not the culprit, we won’t learn anything more about his family’s life and events that led up to this senseless loss of life.

The sad thing about this is that as soon as the news and sports networks decide to shift gears, these two tragedies will be forgotten on the national scale.

Maybe the American priorities are screwed up, though any nation that criticizes our media needs to take a serious look at itself before pointing and laughing at us. Maybe times like this can make localized outlets all the more important: home area newspapers such as The Tennessean and the Clarion-Ledger still have the wherewithal and influence to keep these tragedies at the forefront of media coverage for days and weeks. Maybe for some of us, coverage of The Golfer will turn the tide in our media consumption.

All I can hope is that at some point in the next few days, CNN, MSNBC and FOX News will go back to their political agendas as they’re supposed to. More so, I hope that ESPN will dispatch a few of its most heralded reporters to give these stories a bit more national prominence beyond bottom line crawls on our TV screens.

What Was the Point?

This post exists because no one has provided the answers. Otherwise, I couldn’t care less about the ‘event’.

Because The Golfer’s statement seems to be more important than a man intentionally flying his plane into an Austin, Texas office building, let the following words provide some much-needed perspective that none of the broadcasting networks or cable news channels that showed it will give you.

Almost five years ago to the day, a slightly similar event took place, but without the posturing boycott from a writer’s association or as many channels breaking from programming to show the statement. You can’t find the video anywhere online today, but the transcript should jog the memory of how an athlete’s transgressions (alleged or proven) can become two days of media fodder despite all the other matters that can use the attention.

To summarize, Barry Bonds said let’s move on, don’t ask me about anyone else and many in the media have lied about their personal affairs.

Though moderated, it was a majestic press conference and none ever since have captured the antagonism and emotion that his provided. While it was also unintentionally funny, it did serve a purpose: Bonds, whose surly demeanor and the PED allegations overshadowed his on-field greatness, needed to defend himself against people who continued to make statements against his name. For that moment, Bonds set out to address people who spent years vilifying or defending him. After all, whether you like him or not, the truth is that he allowed his image to be crafted by the media based on his own fallacies.

He had enough.

Photo credit to The New York Times via Reuters

Today’s statement was a bit different.

Now, a point was made on Twitter by Chi-Chi Anunkor (one of the hosts of "Sports at the Half "on WHCR here in NYC) that too many people are beating the drum of “throwing stones at a glass house”. She’s certainly right in that it’s not the point of this latest media event, but can anyone with a straight and objective point of view tell me what it was?

Probably not.

When The Golfer’s team announced that a statement would be made, the entire sports world just ran with its proverbial cameras, recorders, laptops and cell phones without asking what purpose does this serve. Yes, he falls under the adage of “anything he does is newsworthy”, but that’s phenomenally subjective and whether ‘legitimate’ media peers agree or not, it’s a poor justification to report on something. With so many outlets deciding to have a NFL-like pre- & post-game analysis on the statement, it’s not a shock that no one would dare question the need for blanket coverage.

Yet, again, the fundamental question has to be asked: what was the point?

What purpose did making the statement serve for him beyond the need to control the message?

What was the public supposed to ascertain from this? Ours is a fickle – or at least an opinion-diverse – one. Some don’t give a hoot as long as he hits the course soon. Many love to throw shade on any rich or wealthy public figure, especially those who make a living playing a sport. Many still believe that he let them down because he “wasn’t like the others” as his carefully-controlled image presented. With these varying perspectives, were millions of us supposed to get angrier or to feel empathy?

Can ANYONE explain this?

The cynical ones might say that this was done to get us talking about him again, yet that can’t be it. To borrow the phrase from Chris Jericho, he is best in the world at what he does. That sheer excellence is enough for people to take notice of him, even if it’s as benign as sneezing into a Kleenex. He is the most important figure to a sporting organization since Wayne Gretzky was traded to the Los Angeles Kings (despite the greatness of Michael Jordan, the NBA wasn’t hurt for stars as much as we’re told to believe). To think that he needed to speak this morning in order to make sure we watch him hit the links soon is absurd.

This morning’s statement, no matter how prepared it was or genuine it apparently doesn’t change anything he does on the course when he returns. It’s a great joke for another day or two as it has been since Wednesday when it was announced. However, not one person has been able to answer the fundamental question:

What was the point?

Say What?!?!: Points well taken here by Yahoo!'s Dan Wetzel.

Video Credit to jarroddrover123

Inaccessible

There may never be another like Michael Jordan, no matter how hard we try to find one.

Or in the cases of some, make one.

For years, those of us who love and appreciate the game of basketball have been participants in the crisis of the search for “the Next One”. Most of us have passively accepted this as background music while trying to enjoy the game play of current stars. Yet, there will always be those that either love to debate which player has the standing to take his mantle – between LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and Dwayne Wade – or want to single out the NBA for even pushing the agenda.

Yet, if you take a look around, you’d find that the A isn’t the only entity looking. In fact, if there is one league that feels that they have that next Jordan, it’s the Professional Golfers' Association with one (Eldrick) Tiger Woods.

Starting tomorrow, Augusta National is going to be the epicenter of über-levels of hype as Woods takes part in his fifteenth Masters appearance.

Chronicling Tiger’s achievements over that span on Scribe would be kowtowing to carpal tunnel syndrome. You could sum up his career in the amount of majors he has won, his lifetime earnings, the potential to become the first professional athlete to earn a billion dollars as an active athlete and being the first “ethnic” star of significance in the sport’s history. Yet, the most impressive aspect about his career is actually how he made golf, for the lack of a better term, relevant to the mainstream sports world.

Prior to Woods’ arrival, only the diehards and keenly aware sports fans could name the most successful golfers on tour. Outside of those people, some may have still believed that Arnold Palmer was not only a really good non-alcoholic beverage, but still an active player on the PGA tour.

His consistent dominance in a sport known for quirks, flukes and frustration at the bunker made the sports world take notice. You can say his absence has the same effect as television ratings – no matter how criticized the metric is – plummeted and “when is Tiger coming back?” queries skyrocketed.

So, the major players in the media and advertising business believe that they found “the Next One” in Tiger. Just as discussed in this space about Jordan, Woods has the clean-cut look, the accolades, the publicly-displayed drive to succeed and the apolitical stance to not tick anyone off.

Yet, what those folks seem to overlook is that what made the ascension of Jordan possible was the sport he played.

You don’t need much to play a game of hoop. Anyone can get a ball (or something like it) and a hoop (or something like it) to shoot around, have a make believe dunk contest or practice their ankle-breaking crossover. Outdoors or at a gym, the game is one of the few that can be played in the same manner, regardless of location.

Just as some of soccer/football’s most revered players come from a myriad of backgrounds, basketball features much of the same mix (and surprising to some, many come from more middle-class backgrounds than we thought according to last year’s profile on the NBA by ESPN the Magazine). Part of the allure of Jordan for some is that by obsessively fine-tuning the craft, no matter where you were, you could attain similar success or very close to it.

That’s not exactly the case with golf.

There are most likely golfers who did not come from the pristine and exclusive world of private clubs, crisp polo shirts and affluence. Yet, unless you tear down some housing or want to fight with environmentalists, golf courses aren’t built every day. On top of that, just as the expense of equipment has been explored by Major League Baseball to reinvigorate interest in their game among African-Americans, it is a deterrent that golf has recognized, but not necessarily figured out to a T just yet.

This is not to say that suddenly, civil engineers devise their plans because of an athlete’s popularity. Yet, as anything in society, it’s easy for someone to be interested in a product – in this case, a sport – or service when the costs of participation are easier to negotiate.

Tiger is certainly one of the most revered athletes of all time. He shares equal footing with Jordan in terms of being a singular dominant force in a sport full of just really good players. However, to consider Tiger on par with Mike in terms of global stature is to say that golf’s popularity on par with basketball’s global reach.

It’s nowhere close, no matter how hard some try to ignore that fact.

Props to Getty Images for the photo

Hub

Though not attending any games this weekend, Scribe is back where it all began... well, at least the sports media career. Some duties at the alma mater have taken away the focus from what has already been a wild and intriguing start to NFL free agency, the official arrival of Starbury in The Hub, the "What?!?!" in terms of Manny Ramirez and all else happening in the world of sports.

With that said, that does not mean that there will be total silence on Scribe this weekend. So while anticipating some new posts, this would be a good time to catch up on previous work, vote on the ongoing poll and check a few links for your viewing pleasure.

• Attention has rapidly faded in regards to the Michael Phelps bong fiasco, yet that's not the case for Kellogg, the cereal maker that canned the Olympic champion swimmer as an endorser. According to this Advertising Age report, their reputation, as opposed to Phelps, has taken a hit.
  
  
• Even with his loss at the WGC - Accenture Match Play Championships, Tiger Woods is still a pretty big deal this weekend. This BusinessWeek piece talks about the return of his impact beyond the PGA itself (expect more on this topic this weekend).
  
  
• From the Los Angeles Times, the City of Industry says to the NFL, "let's do this". Now, with all due respect to the Left Coast, California is kinda broke right now. You decide if this is a wise move as it shouldn't surprise anyone that public funds will be requested... and there's that matter of a team actually moving there. More to consider from Field of Schemes.
  
  
• Finally, from the Chicago Sun-Times... DAMN!

Comedy

Before getting serious tonight, a bit to laugh about:

One of the best comebacks of all time in the final three seconds. Hey, I know a guy who would definitely say that!:



Stewart Cink, Trevor Immelman, Justin Leonard and Anthony Kim must be really good sports (along with Nike endorsers) because personally, if I was approached to do this ad, I'd throw some clubs around and spear everyone at the creative agency that came up with this idea. Then, of course laugh because it really was well done in such a short amount of time:



Courtesy of SLAM Magazine and Ball Don't Lie, I'll let you know when this five-part series becomes a syndicated show:



A return to the sober and serious later this evening or early tomorrow morning.

Counting

Here's a challenge for all you golf fans (and those as myself who are paying attention for once):

Count how many times you hear the words "Primetime", "ratings" and "East Coast" during tomorrow's final round of the US Open. Have a separate count when Tiger Woods is on your screen. If you're still watching tonight, get yourself a head start.

By the time you're done, you will be as annoyed as I am about this way-too-obvious schill for the best Nielsen numbers over the weekend.