LACROSSE MEDIA - By: Dan Freshman
My favorite day-to-day television shows are the following, in no particular order: all ESPN programming from 4:30 to 7:00 p.m.
I go to sleep watching half-hour re-runs of ESPNEWS, and I keep my homepage to MSN.com simply because I get the Fox Sports headline ticker smack in the middle of the main page. If I still woke up early these days, I’d spend the time reading the sports section of the New York Times and Boston Globe, and I was one of the few souls who was freakin’ psyched when ESPN adapted its infamous “BottomLine” into a software desktop program so your computer screen indeed could have its own BottomLine.
I haven’t graduated onto podcasts yet. But once I find a good one, I will.
I really don’t like baseball anymore, but I can still tell you every major story and saga that has unraveled each day. In fact, I was awake, fingertips droning away at the keyboard and hand glued to the mouse, when New York Mets Coach Willie Randolph was unceremoniously canned at 3:00 a.m. Eastern Time. And for the hell of it, I watched the 2008 Preakness, without a dime on the race, just to see if I could catch history.
And selfishly, I was only watching it just so I could witness more, unfiltered, yet meaningless sports miscellanea.
For awhile, I wanted to pursue a career as a sports anchor—until I realized that all of the broadcast journalism folk are the simpletons with pretty faces, the dumb blondes of the journalism world. Jason Chandler—that includes you, brosef. Then starting this spring, I really knew the dream was over, when I discovered I was terrible on camera except when I ridicule people (thanks Kip, even if you want to take a poop on Kyle, and possibly my face). Then again, maybe my only good writing, as well, is when it comes at the expense of others. Thankfully, Jason and the MLL aren’t paying me much here; I’ve got little to lose.
Nevertheless, I am a slave to the sports media. It’s why I got jealous when my ex-girlfriend was taught a class by Michael Wilbon and another night sat next to Bill Simmons while she mocks my vested interest and even budding career in a small world, sports, inside an even smaller world, lacrosse, that so few care about.
But in the end, for now, she’s probably right.
Bitch.
The Babyfaced Assassin struck again last week, slicing and dicing through LaxUnited’s columns of fluff—most notably mine—and planted a C3 explosive of pant less preposterousness inside his poorly-veiled advertisement for LaxUnited Radio: where’s all of the stories at? Better yet, where and what is “the media?”
It’s not the press releases, whose lead paragraphs all end with “(insert team) General Manager (insert name) announced today.” It’s not the Power Rankings that I can so callously scrutinize. It’s not the dozens of credentialed laggards who suddenly inhabit the press box of a Final Four Weekend but then disappear once the nets have been cut. And it’s definitely not the kibbles and bits of lax clips in the major papers that garner dozens of e-mails and phone calls from junkie to junkie.
From the way we define the media in present day, it’s just a handful of fortunate outlets that have surreptitiously found windfall one way or another. They’re the guys you get to wale on, BFA. And how the guys who didn’t play the sport found themselves covering a game of mere sticks and stones is still beyond me. Did they draw the short straw at the college paper and end up covering the beat for lacrosse and rhythmic gymnastics or something? Or did their alternative, hipster stage include following club girls’ lacrosse?
Grow up not playing basketball, and one still has a shot at covering the NBA. Just notice the roundtable of flabby old white guys on PTI who debate the effectiveness of Sasha Vujacic’s perimeter defense every day. But how often can the same happen to a helpless soul that didn’t play the sport as a youth? Like Chandler, like another editor at possibly the lone large lacrosse media outlet in the country. They’re a special breed, where few and far become. Like Ginger Flow.
The secluded nature of the game lends lacrosse that problem for the media—in both its producers and its recipients. Rest assured, it’s getting better now as the game spreads. But is the same growing sports junkie getting his daily dosage of lacrosse, as well as baseball, basketball, football, hockey, golf, racing, horse racing and every other sport that holds more household cache than lacrosse? From there, the chicken and the egg debate comes in how to expand the lacrosse media: give the fans more media, or wait until more fans come? Maybe Kip can do one of his vintage squats, focus real hard, and pop out that golden egg and solve our problem. Just kidding, Kip. You’re awesome. I even stole about 50 of those Kip Turner appreciation posters they handed out last Thursday so I can marvel in that goalie stance that brought you over 20 saves against the Bayhawks.
Yet even as the media currently is, they surely could pop out more scintillating stories, bawdy rants from pundits or scandalous exposés on the darker side of the lacrosse world. And yes, they exist. Look at half the blogs on this site alone. What would happen if Tony Romo filmed himself eating a lunch consisting of a quarter of a fudge cake, like Chazz Woodson? What would the media do if an all-star player insulted a former teammate in a video clip posted online, like what Sean Morris did to Brad Heritage? Luckily, Morris is no Shaq and Heritage doesn’t have ups like Kobe. How many more hits would a YouTube video get if it were Roger Clemens, not Mikey Powell, who nailed a cheerleader with an errant ball? As both Jason and Kyle argued, the stories are there, including the legitimate and the raunchy that cloud the mainstream sports headlines.
But instead, we don’t have those pundits. And when the few outlets have survived on the funding of the only cash pool available in the lacrosse community, the lacrosse companies and their advertising budgets, it will be a long time before any magazine or Web site publishes a front page story criticizing a player’s dietary habits, insults at an ex-teammate or decapitating of a cheerleader.
At one major outlet I wrote for, I was even barred from writing negative commentary on players.
And the overall declination of American journalism, too, lends little promise. At LaxUnited alone, we have NCAA coaches, play-by-play broadcasters and an 18-year-old kid doubling as journalists, a sinking ship, for a sport that insists so adamantly that it belongs in the mainstream spotlight. And for the first time, we’re allowed to be as negative and uncensored as we want.
For example: San Francisco Dragons, you suck. At least the Pride splurged on draft picks and the Machine may become the first team to suffer double-digit one-goal losses in a season. Meanwhile, you lose and make professional lacrosse with a two-point line, shot clock and removal of a long pole defender look painfully boring. And now you don’t have Jarett Park’s ridiculous flow either.
Nevertheless, this cornucopia of free speech comes at the ire of the league, while in other sports, the criticism comes so rampant that players can’t even track the number of journalists that thrash them. We’re stuck. This sport is allegedly the future, but we can’t handle what lives in the past: the traditional media.
Instead, we have possibly the greatest subculture any sport has: lax junkies.
The average laxer is no longer the bro with the sculpted quad’s, sick tri’s and might be possibly but has killer bi’s; it’s a nerd who plays World of Warcraft and restrings his stick once a week with neon pink mesh and hopes one day that he’ll model his wand after Paul Rabil. Luckily, Paul Rabil listens to these fools. I even suspect Paul is one of these oily junkies himself, disguised as a Thor-like lax brah. So he posted his stick online, within hours, per a fan’s request.
We also have cult videos on YouTube. We have Facebook groups with tens of thousands devoted to looking like a lacrosse player. We have conventions. We have every game streamed online. And we have too many bloggers.
The major papers are scurrying to adapt to the wired world of new media. Yet do other media outlets of professional sporting leagues send two clueless jerks to games along the East Coast to video blog their empty insults and aimless follies? Or do the same and hand out a camera to some of its all-stars? Other leagues were smarter than that and realized the clear hazards at hand. I, on the other hand, get to enjoy the ride.
It all represents why so many lifelong lacrosse devotees have stayed loving the game: the community. Lacrosse is a small sport, and as non-players bind into its flow, it still hopes it will stay that way. As a result, maybe it was never meant for the big headlines and tireless commentary that other sports garner. We get to explain to Paul Rabil what a sidewall pattern means. And tell players their teammates look like they’re pooping. And they get to respond back to us.
I’m not going to hear about lacrosse on ESPN primetime, in the newspapers or on my BottomLine ticker for awhile, maybe ever in my lifetime. But I do get to repeat video clips of an apparent lax superstar pegging a cheerleader while laughing as random players spiritedly heckle me from the sidelines.
I’m a journalist. Kyle is a writer. Either way, we’re not here to play lacrosse. Players, focus on that. We’ll focus on making fun of you while playing lacrosse. Fans, focus on watching and reading us doing it.
THE RETURN OF POWER RANKINGS
- Denver. Look out for the big July 4 attendance record to shatter.
- Long Island. Get on the Lizards bandwagon. Now.
- Boston. The Cannons will reach full throttle when Adam Hazen grows out his promised Fu Manchu moustache.
- Rochester. Barely winning against a treading Barrage team is a much-needed, but nearly lost, confidence win.
- Los Angeles. The Riptide played tough against Long Island and have a softer schedule ahead. A few AARP meetings will also help.
- Washington. Teams have figured out how to contain Kyle Dixon; all is doomed.
- Philadelphia/Homeless. Can LaxUnited do an MTV-style “Cribs” of the Barrage tour bus?
- New Jersey. The Pride barely beat an anemic Dragons team in one of the lowest-scoring MLL games to date. Not too much Pride in that.
- Chicago. The Machine continue to look good losing—if that’s possible.
- San Francisco. The Dragons picked up a bit more firepower offensively, but is it too late?
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