Don't Hate The Player, Hate The Game

"The reasonable criticism [of sports blogs] is of the tone of gratuitous potshots and mean-spirited abuse."

So sayeth Bob Costas, and so it shall be done. Wait, was that mean-spirited?

If you haven't watched it yet, the recent episode of 'Costas Now' that focused on the blogosphere is worth a few minutes. Specifically -- and this is the part that everyone is talking about -- you need to watch the exchange between Will Leitch of Deadspin and Buzz Bissinger, author of 'Friday Night Lights.'

Bissinger, who attended Penn and Harvard and therefore immediately earns my distrust (I went to Cornell, and yes, that was a gratuitous potshot), leaps off the top rope immediately and never stops swinging. Draw your own conclusions from the video, but I liked what Jerry Greene wrote in the Orlando Sentinel this weekend:

"Buzz committed virtual hari-kari -- and took with him everyone that has problems with the excessive and worthless nature of the worst of blogging. Wrote Leitch almost immediately afterward on Deadspin: "We just watched a man immolate on national television. To have piled on the carnage would have been discourteous."

Buzz later admitted he "subsumed the valid points" he was trying to make."

Immolate: to kill as a sacrifice; to kill (oneself) by fire; to destroy.

Subsume: to consider or include (an idea, term, proposition, etc.) as part of a more comprehensive one; to bring (a case, instance, etc.) under a rule; to take up into a more inclusive classification.

The first one I get; Bissinger went down in flames. I drew the same conclusion.

The second one took me a moment, but I believe that Bissinger is admitting that his naive hyperfocus on one small aspect of the Deadspin blog -- the admittedly snarky comments from readers -- crippled his ability to objectively criticize the concept of blogging.

Leading off his counter-argument with "I think you're full of s**t" didn't help much.

What did this exchange accomplish? Let's take me as one example.

First, I read Deadspin for the first time, and thought it was pretty damn funny.

Second, I continued my long and proud tradition of never watching a single episode of 'Friday Night Lights' on TV -- only now I have the added benefit of believing the show's creator to be cranky, arrogant, hopelessly out of touch, and generally despicable. Which, I predict, will not compel me to change my mind about the TV show or rush out to buy one of Bissinger's many other works.

Nice work, Buzz! And it only took you 10 minutes!

What he did, of course, was completely and totally legitimize Will Leitch, Deadspin, and by extension, every other blog out there that attempts to accurately capture the attitude of the fan. He accomplished this by hating them.

Not 'hating on them,' playa, but simply 'hating them.' Because, Grasshopper, the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.

If one truly considers something completely devoid of any lovable characteristics, one simply doesn't give a crap and ignores said thing. If, however, one recognizes this nebulous 'thing' as a threat -- if one views the 'thing' as potentially dangerous, and therefore worthy of concern and respect, even as a target -- then one chooses to expend energy on this 'thing.' And that energy, class, is hate.

You have to care about something to hate it. Bissinger cares about blogs, because they are (in his mind) a threat to traditional media, an affront to true journalists like himself who attended Phillips Andover and wrote a book about high school football in Texas that got so many people so pissed off that he was unable to set foot in Odessa for several years. That, you see, is REAL writing. Simply pissing off the guy who went to Andover doesn't count, I guess. Anyway, he hates the blogs. Which means he feels threatened by them.

Should he be?

Yeah, probably. You'll read this one hundred times in the aftermath of the Leitch visit to Costas Now -- if you haven't already in the aftermath of Costas himself making that galactically stupid 'high-tech place for idiots' comment several weeks earlier -- but the upshot is this:

The whole blog thing? It's not going away. That horse, as I have written before, is well out of the barn. Those who 'get it' will be those who ride the wave, as most major newspapers around the country already understand. Those who don't get it will be those who feel threatened by it, those who, to be frank, are pissed off that their own hard work, education, and experience counts for nothing in the court of public opinion.

Because isn't that what this really comes down to? People like Bissinger are appalled at the mere suggestion that some schmoe who didn't go to Andover, Penn, and Harvard could actually produce something in print that could rival the great classically-trained sportswriters of our time. No, wait -- what he's really tweaked about is that more people might choose to read it.

It's the ultimate exercise in free press, this blog thing. You read what you find entertaining, not what you're told is "great writing." That scares the living you-know-what out of people like Bissinger and Costas, who admittedly worked very, very hard to get where they are today. But they're finding that reputation and resume' only counts for so much.

So in the absence of career-threatening tirades on television, what should they be doing?

Like we used to say in the gym -- if you don't like my trash-talking, beat me.

Work harder, Buzz. If the blogospheric (loving that word right now) audience is so important to you, as it appears to be, then show us something. Be more entertaining than Deadspin. Be funnier than Every Day Should Be Saturday. Be sharper than Bill Simmons. Go ahead, do it. Do it, and we'll read your stuff.

You CAN do that, can't you?