Sporting Madness

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to." - J.R.R. Tolkien "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S. Thompson My writing life's been an unusual journey, which is probably true for many writers. My parents have been heavily involved in the journalism industry for decades, but I wanted nothing to do with it growing up. I always loved sports, but I wasn't particularly interested in writing about them either. When I went off to school at Queen's University, my plan was to become a chemist; I was more concerned with compounds and formulas than vocabulary and turns of phrase. That all changed thanks to the Queen's Journal , the campus paper I knew I wanted to be a part of soon after reading it for the first time. At first, I wanted the news and politics beats everyone else was interested in, bu...

Today (Sunday) marked what would have been the 73rd birthday of one of my heroes, Hunter. S. Thompson . Thompson was one of the pioneers of gonzo journalism, and he's always been an inspiration of mine. I wrote a piece earlier this year on the fifth anniversary of his death, and I thought it was worth linking to again. The man produced some tremendous writing, and in a lot of ways, he pioneered many of the styles and techniques some of us bloggers use today. To celebrate his career, here's a link to one of his classic columns , and a song I have no doubt he'd approve of:

"It's 106 miles to Chicago. We've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark, and we're wearing sunglasses." "Hit it." - The Blues Brothers I'm in Chicago for the third Blogs With Balls convention, which starts in just a couple of hours with a kick-off party. If it's anything like the last one I covered in Vegas last fall , it should be a great time. The real action is tomorrow, and there's a great lineup of panelists . You can catch all the action via Justin.tv ; I'll also be tweeting during the proceedings and writing some recap posts here. It should be a great weekend; make sure to check back here for my coverage of it!

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Las Vegas for the Blogs With Balls convention and had a great time. There was so much that came out of it that was worth writing about, as evidenced by all the great pieces that have showed up in the blogosphere on the conference since then. You can find most of the recap pieces linked at the official conference site here , and you can also look at parts I , II and III of my series if you're interested. I've been working on a final piece from there since then, but haven't had time to put it up yet, and in some ways, that's probably good, as it gave me time to reflect on it. This is the last official part of the Feat, Loathing and Blogs series, but I'll certainly be touching on some of the panelists' remarks and some of the things that came out of the conference more briefly in future posts as well. This series isn't just about conference recaps, but rather where the sports blogosphere may be going, so I hope it's st...

There will likely be plenty of angry rants about this Jay Mariotti blog post popping up in the sports blogosphere over the next while, and deservedly so. I've complained about Mariotti before thanks to his embodiment of the absolutist shock journalism principles heavily promoted on Around the Horn , where he's a frequent cast member. However, this is a new low even for him. This time around, Mariotti used a tragedy (the Erin Andrews incident, which I discussed with James Brown and First Derivative in The Phoenix Pubcast Monday (episode 2) and also talked about briefly on Twitter over the past few days) to restart his anti-blogging crusade. That's reprehensible in and of itself. What makes it worse is that he didn't offer any valuable points in his column, as mainstream journalists such as Erin Nicks , Chris Zelkovich , Michael Rand and Bruce Arthur did. They offered thoughtful criticisms of the blogosphere, and I agree with some of the points they made; they ...

Quite a while ago, I wrote about the commenting purges over at Deadspin and interviewed editor A.J. Daulerio about them. There have plenty of other developments in the sports world and the blogosphere since then, so I haven't returned to the subject; Andy Hutchins has a good breakdown of the new commenting system over at The Arena (and one that sparked a rather interesting response , plus substantial further debate ) if you're interested in that. However, some further material came to light today, which I felt was worth briefly addressing. Hutchins passed on a link to a Mediaite piece on Gawker Media czar Nick Denton 's reinstatement of pageview bonuses to Gawker Media writers and potential willingness to pay for tips or photos, and that piece in turn linked to a fascinating interview with Denton at the Nieman Journalism Lab (a great site, by the way). There's a few tidbits in this one that are worthy of note. Most interesting is an internal memo Denton passe...

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell ’s latest book, Outliers , and was quite interested in some of the ideas he brought up. Gladwell discusses how it is almost impossible to predict who will succeed at certain jobs, such as quarterbacking at the NFL level, teaching and giving financial advice. The implications of this idea for the world of sports are myriad, but what really jumped out at me was what these theories and conclusions might mean for the world of sportswriting. Gladwell’s general thesis in the book seems to be that the success attained by remarkable individuals is not due to their innate abilities alone, but also to the supporting infrastructure they have and the environment they operate in. At first glance, this would seem to run against the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches dream that still epitomizes much of North American society. However, when you closely examine the situations involved, this isn’t necessarily true. For example, perhaps the most poignant example in Gladwell’s...

If anyone wasn’t already convinced that Twitter has altered the way we cover sports, they would do well to consider the events of the past week. First, we had Kevin Love breaking the news [ Andy Hutchins , The Rookies ] of Minnesota Timberwolves head coach Kevin McHale ’s dismissal on his own Twitter feed, followed in close succession by a supposed Twitter feud [ Andrew Stoeten , TheScore.com Blog ] between Chad Ochocinco and Shawne Merriman , Shaquille O’Neal learning of his trade to the Cleveland Cavaliers on Twitter [ King James Gospel ] and several notable reactions across the sports world to the death of Michael Jackson (including some that were over-the-top [ Jonathan Sacks , Sports Rubbish ). Even before this week, many prominent news organizations have been running stories based on information from the Twitter feeds of athletes, agents and coaches, and that doesn’t appear likely to change any time soon. The big question is what these developments mean for sports coverag...

It's time to announce another exciting new venture. I'm now running a new blog, Canuck Puck . It's going to be mostly focused on the Canucks, but also will touch on deeper issues in the NHL from time to time. The idea's to bring subtle, detailed analysis to the Canucks. It's also part of the great Fanball Network, which is an excellent group of blogs across a wide variety of sports. You can check out my introductory post here . P.S. If you liked my draft posts from earlier this week, I have more analysis of them over at The Phoenix Pub . Suggestions on how to improve the method or thoughts on the data are much appreciated!

The great Tom Benjamin found this site a little while ago, and I was intrigued. Basically, you type in a blog URL and it gives you a readout of the personality of the blog's author. I figured I'd try it with my site and some of the sites I read regularly. Results are below. For myself, Sporting Madness : "The analysis indicates that the author of http://sportingmadness.blogspot.com is of the type: INTP - The Thinkers." "The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications. They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to unders...

Now would be a great time to extend good wishes to soccer writer extraordinaire Ben Knight , who has just launched his own site after the Globe decided to move in a different direction [ Duane Rollins , Out of Left Field ] with their On Soccer blog. Ben is a terrific writer and a great guy, and I'm sure he'll find a lot of success with this. What I value most about his work is his ability to see the shades of grey I referenced earlier . Even on the topics he's most passionate about, such as the bungling of the CSA and some of the mistakes made by Toronto FC, he has avoided the pitfalls of absolutism and put forth balanced, reasoned and rational arguments to improve matters, rather than just the constant vitriol and criticism without solutions found in other quarters. He can balance being a journalist and being a fan, which is a difficult line to walk, but he does it very well in my mind and appeals to a broad range of people as a result. All soccer fans should definitely...