(Originally posted Feb. 26. How about some ripostes to this re-post?)
Time to get a little navel-gazey without crossing into 3M Blog territory,* since it seems like there have been some new readers here.
A while ago someone asked, "What is your blog about?" and that deserves a straight answer. The question should go to the masses out here -- what do you believe this should be about? This periodic state-of-the-blog update (don't worry, I won't threaten to quit) has been brewing for some time.
This space is 10 months old and has passed 70,000 page views, which sounds good for a distinctly Canadian sports blog whose main focus isn't the National Hockey League. It's not an easy road, but the decision was made to focus less on the NHL until the Stanley Cup playoffs. There are plenty of outlets -- cable sports networks and their websites, bloggers such as mc79hockey and Mirtle -- where people can get better-informed hockey commentary.
Going lighter on the NHL and maintaining a readership suggests that taunts of "Blogger Boy" and "Get off the blog and get a girlfriend," notwithstanding, many people do like what they read here. As one new reader put it:
"You speak my language -- plain English with a good dose of wit and a little sarcasm. I also love that you’re a hometowner and follow the local scene as well as chatting up the kids from Kingston who go on to do us proud in various sports."
This is ideally something you'll never get from some drudge in a TV studio who's been imbued with all this authority since he used to skate on the third line for the Toronto Maple Leafs. This is what sports looks like if you come at from the perspective of a knowledgeable fan, one who's as curious about anything and everything, and doesn't just follow the crowd. It should reward people who seek their own path as sportsfans (always one word). It's more about developing your own connections to sports instead of waiting for Sportsnet Connected.
Anyway, here's a quick rundown of topics:
Baseball: Yes, there's a huge childish complex about the Blue Jays and a fascination with statistic memorization, who belongs in the Hall of Fame (cough, Jeff Bagwell, Tim Raines, Mark McGwire). Baseball is the one mainstream major-league sport where this blog can supplant what the papers and the TV talking heads give the public.
Basketball: Love those Raptors like they're kinfolk. Chris Bosh and Official Brother of Out of Left Field Shawn Sager are both 22 years old, so really they're interchangeable aside from a difference in height (one foot, give or take), race and handedness. There's a serious Basketball Jones here that fades in and out depending on the time of year.
Football: Three-down, 12-man, big-field Canadian football is the better-designed game. It is truer to football's origins than what they play down in the States -- check it out, another run up the middle! -- and it's a more free-form game, nowhere near as overcoached. Sometimes it can be sloppy, but more to the point it's unpredictable and a better game for the fans. The CFL has had a down couple of years since the NFL has co-opted a lot of elements of the Canadian game -- spread offences, running quarterbacks (many of whom are African-American), but this is a place where the CFL gets its due alongside the NFL.
With the NFL, there's a serious love-hate relationship with the Minnesota Vikings, but the Vikes were utterly unwatchable for much of the season and no one needs to bored reading about a team no one would watch unless they were a fan.
Golf: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Hockey: Call it a fear of commitment, but the NHL season is just too damn long to hold my interest. When there's something that's a fan issue -- a Ken Dryden sweater retirement; George W. Bush's inability to read some simple platitudes about the Carolina Hurricanes; the bad things that are gonna happen to anyone who buys fraudster's Alan Eagleson's hockey memorabilia -- we're so there. Other than that, it's the Jim Rome policy of "Have a take, and don't suck." Some NHL takes here sucked; apologies for that.
Women's sports: We're sure as hell more enlightened about this than Ottawa Senators president Roy Mlakar, who was on the radio this afternoon and made some crack about "playing in dresses." We're more advanced than the media whose idea of women's sports coverage is to put up photos of Amanda Beard in a slinky dress. (Shame on sportsnet.ca for conflating "hottest female athletes" and "top female athletes," by the way. Sure, it generates traffic, but it's also very trite.)
There's been thought to helping establish a women's hockey blog that would give coverage to the NWHL, WWHL, the CIS women's teams and Canadians playing at U.S. colleges. If you check the federal government website culture.ca (where this blog is listed) it notes that women's hockey are not well spoken for in the blogosphere. The obvious irony is that I'm a guy wanting to address, but if anyone's interested, drop me a line and we'll get to work.
Finally, the CIS Thing: Yes, the blog's been tweaked good-naturedly for "being a little CIS-heavy" but Canadian university athletics has always been in the thick of the sporting consciousness. Starting a CIS football blog (depending on whether cisfootball.org returns in the summer) has been in the hopper at times.
True, university sports in this country is nowhere near as popular as the NCAA and never will be, but here in Ottawa last Saturday, outside of student journalists there were no other print or web writers on site at the Gee-Gees-U of T basketball playoff we liveblogged and covered. James Mirtle did a superior job of covering it over the phone for The Globe & Mail. (Sorry that slipped my mind, James.)
In the mind of friends who implied it was a waste of time to do that, guess it would have been better to be the 1,001st person to opine on the Senators-Sabres game, but so be it.
The aim here is that hopefully everyone (the writers included) learn something and share some laughs. The question is, which topics and sports are the best vehicle for doing so?
(A 3M blog is one where the writer's favourite topics are me, myself and my.)
That's all for now. Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Hey - I covered the U of T game. I just couldn't make the hike up to Ottawa.
That's true, James, you did and you did a great job... so I'll change that to, only print or web writer who was on site... My mistake.
Post a Comment