The Human Rain Delay
I had a ritual when I was in high school. Wake up, shower, say three words to the parents and walk to my best friend’s house so he could drive me to school. It was mundane, I was tired, and this happened every weekday of the school year. During the spring, I took that walk 10 minutes earlier than any other time of the year. Why? Why on God’s green earth would a teenager turn down an extra 10 minutes of sleep?
Box scores.
My friend and I would scour every box score from every game the day before. We’d lament over 1 for 5’s and get really mad when all you’d see under the Red Sox at Oakland game was “Late.”
I bring this up because kids in high school today would look at this situation much like I looked at driving horse drawn carriages back then.
In today’s world of social media, my high school experience is obviously extremely outdated. When you see that someone went 2 for 4 with 2 RBI, you most likely also saw both of those hits and almost every pitch of those at-bats either live or, worst case, before you turn off the TV for the night.
Gone are the days of wondering if your favorite player’s 1 for 4 should have been a 3 for 4 if not for two outstanding defensive plays. Today, you know that as it happens thanks to ESPN.com, MLB.com, Twitter, Facebook, and on and on.
I bring this up because not too long ago, a friend and I were discussing one of the biggest sports shockers in history on its 20th anniversary: Buster Douglas knocking out Mike Tyson. On Saturday, February 11, 1990, while almost everyone in the U.S. was either asleep or watching the NBA Slam Dunk Championship, Douglas knocked Tyson down with a vicious combination during the 10th round. Tyson struggled back to his hands and knees, and famously tried to get his mouthpiece back in while referee Octavio Meyran counted slowly to 10.
You know the rest of the story.
What almost all sports fans in the 30 to 50 age bracket also know is where they were when they heard the news. Although a select few had actually watched the fight live late the night before, most found out either by turning on the morning news or looking bleary-eyed at a newspaper the next day and thinking to themselves, “Wait – this CAN’T be right.”
It was one of the greatest “Do you believe that?” sports stories of a generation. People at work Monday talked about it all day. The halls and campuses at schools were abuzz about it. My drive to school, my lunch break, and all the breaks the rest of the day was nothing but Tyson – Douglas, and this kept going for days afterward.
Why? Because everyone found out the same way, and at the same time. There was no warning. No text messages from those who were watching, no tweets about it as it happened. No live scorecard look-ins on ESPNews. When an entire country finds out about something at the same time, it has a much greater impact than when we find out in a trickledown effect. If this fight were to have happened last week, that conversation I had when I got to my friend’s house in the morning would have gone more like, “You see about Tyson last night?”
“Yah, Simmons had a great blog on it and you should have seen the tweets that Barkley had during the fight – just classic.”
End of story.
Back then? It was a single headline on a piece of paper, and no one could stop talking about it.
Tyson – Douglas today just wouldn’t have had near the same impact as it did in 1990. Sure, it still would have been considered a great upset; and it would have led SportsCenter, been on the front of CNN.com, etc. But in a few days, the luster would have worn off and it would have become just another in a long line of never-ending subjects for everyone to graze over. There is so much coverage of every single news item today that even the biggest stories get watered down. Sure, you’ll have the items that the large media outlets latch onto and pound us with over and over and over (see: Woods, Tiger); but for most, an upset like a Stanford team that had won 5 games in 2 years shocking mighty USC in football lasts in our consciousness no more than a few days.
That is and will be the curse of social media. We now know, see, and hear about more than we ever dreamed we would and know it almost immediately. You can pick and choose how to follow sports almost like hitting an all-you-can-eat buffet. You want just mashed potatoes? You got it – five pounds of ‘em if you want. You want nothing but women’s curling scores? No problem, we’ve got that, too. I’ve gone from being upset that a game ended too late to show me a box score the next morning to fuming over my MLB.com gamecast freezing in the middle of a May game between the Sox and the O’s. How dare they rob me of watching those six simulated pitches to Dustin Pedroia in the 4th?
The “price” we pay for this amount of information is small and to most it’s been unnoticeable; but to me it’s significant. I will always remember where I was when I found out that Mike Tyson had been knocked out by Buster Douglas.
Thankfully, it was 1990.
