2010

Final thought on Simmons: I like Simmons because he's not what English professors or scholarly academics would call a "great writer," or "the Robert Frost of our time" or anything like that. Not that I have anything against really poetic, artsy kind of writers. Those people are great in thier own way. What Bill Simmons writes, though, appeals much more to the casual reader, to the sports fan, to today's audiences. That's why he gets such mass appeal; most of America can open up his book (or in this case, web blog) and instantly get his message, and get the little side jokes he plugs in there. He won't win any Pulitzer Prizes nor teach AP English at a high school, but Bill Simmons knows what connects with the audience, and he applies that knowledge practically to perfection. That's what I aspire to do; that's what I will work on doing in this blog. Stay tuned.

Today I address the state of sports in 2010: what's new, what's different, what's changed about sports since 2010. The 2000's, as per the generally accepted name for this decade, is widely regarded as a lost decade for the whole world. Consider what's happened this decade: two recessions, one of them being the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, a horrific terrorist attack in 2001 that led to terrorist-driven wars in the U.S. and other nations, continued use of gasoline-powered cars despite the urgent calls for alternative fuels, no major changes in the way Americans live their lives (in the sense that we still use cell phones, travel to work, go to school, use the computer, etc.). Contrast this to 2000, when we had just gone through a decade full of hope and energy: the advent of the Internet, the technology boom, global financial well-being, the United Nations doing well, it certainly seemed like there was a great deal of momentum going into the new century and that more positive changes would occur. Now at 2010, the future of the world is less rosy and a bit unclear: Will there be a repeat of the Global Financial Crisis leading to double-dip recessions in various financial centers? What's the status of major crises in the world like Jerusalem, Afghanistan, and North Korea? Technology-wise, we now have Facebook, Youtube, smartphones, and awesome music downloading capabilities, which are nice, but not totally vital to human life. They're gadgets, not things that change the basic structure of how Americans use life like the Internet did, or the computer before that. What's on the horizon? It's not entirely clear.

However, in the land of sports, the landscape of 2010 is far more advanced than that of 2000. In 2000, sports wasn't bad: Basketball was discovering new all-stars like Kobe, Shaq and Tim Duncan after the Michael Jordan/ Chicago Bulls era officially ended in 1998; In baseball, the Home Run Chase of 1998 catapulted a new surge of interest in the sport (which later was found to be a fraud). Football was turning into the #1 sport of Americans, capturing a wide audience on Saturday and Sundays and cross-promoting itself through the medium of fantasy football.

In 2010, sports is rapidly evolving. First to mind is the overall viewing experience; the advent of H-D (high-definition) television has made the viewing experience a virtual 3-D movie, almost better quality than actually going to the game itself. One can literally see the sweat glands gleaming off of athletes' foreheads, not to mention the rim-rattling dunks and highlight-reel plays.

ESPN was hot in 2000, it is on fire in 2010. It is now the definitive sports channel in the industry, a virtual monopoly on games and highlights now that NBC, ABC, and CBS have fallen away. ESPN literally covers everything and covers it in viewer-friendly media: Sportscenter is just the beginning. Around the Horn, SportsNation, 30 for 30 series, Pardon the Interruption, Sunday Night Baseball, NBA on Christmas Eve, the X games, College Football, pretty much everything there is.

There's also niche stations that are drawing a lot of buzz. NFL Network has existed for several years and is the only 24-hour network, all-day all-night access for football. Recently, MLB Network just launched with positive results ( I mean, I watch it religiously in the summer, so it must be good). This is, of course, in addition to all the different sports packages available like the DISH network, the NFL package, MLB.com package, etc. where you get ALL the games, a true fan's delight ( I alas, am not).

Plus, the actual athletes in the major sports are defining a new era. We got some dynasties in the making for all sports. In the NBA, the lakers are good and going for another 3-peat; In baseball, the Yankees are good, are defending their championship, and look like they're gonna be good for a long time. The NFL still runs year-to-year on a different winner, but the Steelers, Colts, and Patriots are in it everywhere and comprise somehwat of an oligarchy of consecutive championships in the making, joined soon by possibly the Saints, Chargers, Jets, or Ravens.

The major deal in sports, though, is the advent of a new era of young players. We've got some GREAT young superstars coming out in each league, possibly due to the rise in sports and interest garnered in 1998, when all sports were booming. In the NBA, Durant, Paul, Deron Williams, Derrick Rose, and others are emerging superstars ready to jump onto the big stage, while the cream of the crop of the NBA has gathered in South Beach (LeBron, Wade, and Bosh) to try to work together for a championship. Love'em or hate'em (and o do many people nowadays HATE Lebron), the Miami Heat are gonna make the NBA season interesting, whether in their ultimate fulfillment of a championship or their ultimate failulre to capitalie on their free agent plan.

In the NFL, fantasy football is HUGE. HUGE. There's leagues worth thousands of dollars that people can play in, but mostly it's the friends-and-coworkers pools that make the business. It's so huge that FX made a show premised on people playing fantasy football. Guess who compromise the viewers of that show? Yes, you guessed it, fantasy football fanatics. Plus, the NFL nowadays is a stable of great quarterbacks, either championship-ready ones (Roethlisberger, both Mannings, Brees, Brady), up-and-comers (Schaub and Rivers), battled veterans (Favre and McNabb) or guys who are a bit on the weird side (Vick). The quarterbacks make the league, and viewers eat it up.

Therefore, while the future of the world is unclear and a global apocalypse looms (2012), the fate of sports in general seems like it's in good hands and has great potential to get even better. It's a sports world: we're just living in it.

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan