Nunc Coepi: The Start Of It All
An introduction to the latest cultural revolution…or not. Most likely not. The original essay NGL wrote for the final project of his English class he took during his senior year of high school, in all of its glory
I’ll always remember the first time I picked up a football.
It was one of those brightly-colored Nerf ones with the black rubber substituted in for laces. My dad and I, we used to spend beautiful afternoons tossing the faux pigskin in sunny Thousand Oaks, the suburb of L.A. we lived in for two years. Those things were so small that anyone could throw a perfect, Brady-esque spiral.
I never ended up playing tackle football, even if everyone considered me to be the best quarterback to grace the Aiken playground back in West Hartford. A tall and skinny kid like myself was always cut out for basketball, the sport I fell in love with in the second grade.
I brought something back from California, though, that has stuck with me ever since. When my brother and I wanted football jerseys at the local Modell’s, Jake picked the real coveted one: 2006 NFL MVP Ladainian Tomlinson. Me, I could not name a single other player on the Chargers, the most popular team in Southern California at the time. But my brother told me to go with the jersey of the Chargers’ then-rookie quarterback, a goofy-looking southerner by the name of Philip Rivers.
The rest, of course, is history.
Sports fandom is a fickle thing. We attribute our affiliations to location, relatives, or sometimes even colors.
No, seriously — I know a kid who claims to be a Packers fan solely due to the fact that his favorite color is green.
We love to play the holier-than-thou card and determine who’s the bigger bandwagon. However, the reality is that we all love watching unparalleled sports greatness. I’m not a Cavs fan in any way, shape, or form, and yet come May, I find myself constantly enthralled by quite possibly the best basketball player ever, LeBron James. I haven’t watched a ton of the NBA’s regular season the last couple of years, but I’ll always attempt to plop myself down in front of the television when The King is dominating in the playoffs.
Coming into contact with the sporting world as a kid is how most of us stick with our teams for the remainder of our lives. Therefore, this childhood dedication becomes of the utmost importance, oftentimes jumping past work and friendships on the totem pole.
The Fall of 2007 kicked off a life of sports fandom for me, the year we returned from a two-year stint living in California. Ingrained in my nostalgic memory are the champions from those respective seasons: the Giants and the Tyree catch, the Celtics and the Big Three, and the Phillies and the dominant Cole Hamels.
I started watching shows such as SportsCenter and SportsNation around this time, back when ESPN controlled all, employing quite a lot more people than they currently do today. And when the mainstream medium for sports shifted from the television to the computer, you can rest assured that I followed the trend, ensuring to receive my daily content from the likes of outlets such as SB Nation and Bleacher Report.
For a while, I was ignorant to the deficiencies of this new format of sports journalism. Things started to change, however, starting in my senior year of high school.
To start off, when you are young, your priorities obviously do not coincide with those in the workplace. The outrageous outfit Russell Westbrook wore to the game last night remains fresh in your head, while Paul Ryan’s speech about his tax plan stays nothing short of irrelevant.
Maybe it’s just a sign of maturation as a whole, but I think it took a critical look at media for me to appreciate the reality of the sports industry. Guys literally work their asses off to get into peak physical condition; sometimes they hit it big and make millions of dollars, and sometimes they get stuck working at the local car dealership. Along the way, talking heads with fine educations summarize the smallest of intricacies, owners swim in pools of cash a la Donald Duck, and fans get the unique opportunity to roar from both the stands and the sofa.
Obvious, right? Yet to me, it’s crazy to think that those brightly-colored uniforms and flashy highlight reels constitute work. These athletes have contracts like the rest of us, and unions to have their back. Their work just happens to revolve around those activities we adored as little tykes.
As I’m wont to do, I’ll make a Key & Peele reference here that really helped hammer down my current thoughts on sports. In a sketch labelled “TeachingCenter”, the two titular actors pretend to be Sports-Center-style anchors, except instead of talking about athletes, the newsbits revolve around high-profile teachers. There’s sponsorships and ads, million-dollar contracts being discussed, and analysis of the fictional Teachers’ Draft.
The premise is ingenious, really, drawing on the whole debate of how we prioritize those who can teach versus how we worship those who can whack a little white ball with a metal stick. But this alternate universe we deem to be preposterous leaves us with a sad realization. It’s obvious that sports may bring in lots of money, and that in turn warrants such gargantuan contracts and publicity. Still, the complete lack of respect for those with the most noble line of work in the world is utterly bewildering.
For example, today at my sister’s graduation from Boston University, local legend David “Big Papi” Ortiz received an honorary degree. Directly proceeding him was some guy with a whole string of impressive accomplishments, including a Nobel Laureate.
I’ll let you guess who out of the pair got a standing ovation from the Beantown crowd.
Once I started appreciating just how small of a role sports play in the grand scheme of things, my obsessive approach towards the industry softened.
Don’t fret — my current plan is still to go into sports media. I just started to take in the way content is delivered more analytically.
My proposal described how money has killed sports journalism. While entirely prevalent, I will admit that yes, this does not serve well as a thesis because it’s all too obvious.
Nonetheless, with this essay, I’ll take my idea one step further: the real thing killing sports journalism is inefficient yet highly effective social media.
Social media can be a wonderful thing. It can bring together voices from all over the globe, it can help promote content that might have never been seen otherwise, it can produce hilarious Internet memes and trends.
But at the same time, social media promotes a volatile discourse predicated on garnering views and not communicating an idea. For example, in looking at my Facebook and Twitter pages on a random day, I counted five different posts about LaVar Ball and whatever absolutely ridiculous thing he proclaimed to the masses.
That’s fine in itself. If there’s an audience for these statements, might as well post it. The inherent problem is when supposed “articles” start to take shape in a similar fashion. Headlines serve as clickbait in pretending to stage an attempt to further intellectual debate; in the end, the pieces published result in a net gain of nada.
Bleacher Report’s Mike Freeman, for example, posts articles with titles such as “Mike Freeman’s 10-Point Stance: Players See Double Standard with Gronk”. One would imagine that some deeper truth or revelation would be the product of an article with such an introspective title. In the end, though, Freeman’s concluding point is this:
“To me, he can do whatever he wants. He’s a grown-ass man. As long as he doesn’t end up on a police blotter, who cares?
But is this the standard to which other players would be held? It’s a question that has players around the league talking.”
That’s some of the laziest and least insightful bullcrap I’ve ever seen sold as legitimate journalism. And this isn’t a one-off thing, either; this is almost every article published on a daily basis.
People constantly complain about the lack of intelligent writing online, but in a Huxleyan sort of way, sports fans have grown to love their oppression. Controversial Facebook and Twitter posts receive hundreds and hundreds of comments with takes just as hot, and incoherent argumentation always follows. Now that social media openly invites pages to promote posts through paid advertising, it’s impossible to ignore the constant stream of borderline unreadable content.
That’s where Unplugged slots in. The site’s title draws inspiration from my favorite football team, the Chargers, as well as a desire for censorship-free writing that leaves no stone left unturned. If people are going to spend time reading on their phones, editorial-style and informative content driven by people passionate about sports, entertainment, and life in general is what we need, not random crap posted with the sole purpose of getting some views.
I hope to make my dreams for Unplugged a reality, publishing articles as well as podcasts, videos, and wherever else the blog takes me. Studying at Medill will only strengthen my infatuation with writing and communication, and I plan on continuing the blog throughout the next four years.
Given that I’ve already sunk nearly $100 into Unplugged, I kinda have to, even if it flops on its face.
Make sure to keep up with Unplugged by following on Facebook and Twitter @unplgd17!
