The Net Net
I was jittery last week.
Would he play or wouldn't he? Would he or wouldn't he?
By "he,"
I mean, of course, University of Kentucky basketball star Derek Anderson, who
blew out a knee a few months ago. The NCAA championship tournament had started,
so I needed to know: Would Kentucky coach Rick Pitino let Anderson return to
the court? All day, I combed sports Web sites for a rumor, a hint, a tea leaf
to read. The more I looked, the gloomier I got. According to the SportsTicker, Anderson's rehabbed knee was stronger than his
undamaged one. The Sporting News reported that Anderson had gone to practice. Then
the Sports Network quoted Pitino as saying Anderson had played better
in practice than anyone else on the team. Finally, bingo! Pitino announced he
wouldn't risk Anderson's pro career for the sake of this year's tournament.
My Anderson frenzy might make sense if I were, say, a
compulsive gambler who'd pawned his fiancee's engagement ring to wager against
Kentucky. But I have just $5 riding on the office tournament pool. The only
explanations I can muster are that 1) I hate Kentucky basketball--Rick Pitino
is so smooth it's creepy and 2) this is the NCAA tournament, the be-all and
end-all for sports fanatics, an event in which no fine point is too fine, no
minutia too minute.
Where does
this madness come from? I could try to justify my tournament obsession as the
natural extension of my romance with college basketball. I could sing hymns to
the majesty of The Game: the monochromatic, never-say-die fans; the band
trumpeting out the tuneful college song; the slap of leather against pine
...
But that would be a lie. I feel the same way
about the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the pennant race, the Masters. Sports
junkies hoard trivia for the same reason political junkies lock their remotes
on C-SPAN and Hollywood obsessives salivate over the Academy Awards pre-game
show: Power. Trivia allows the junkie to master a small (by definition trivial)
corner of the universe. We can explain the tournament, you can't.
We speak a private language--The Big Dance, PTP, zone press, subregionals--and
you don't. The junkie watches a tournament game entirely differently than the
casual fan. For the casual fan, the game is art, an aesthetic delight. For the
junkie, it's science.
All
sports junkies bore their friends with stories of their astounding predictions.
To this day, I congratulate myself for picking low-seeded Louisville, out of 64
teams, to win the 1986 NCAA title. I knew that Denny Crum was a great
tournament coach, that Pervis Ellison could dominate, that Louisville's
competition was weak. What I rarely mention is that I failed to guess the
champion for the next eight tournaments. Junkiedom does not require knowledge
so much as it requires the pretense of knowledge. To really understand
college ball, you would need to spend most of the fall and winter watching Big
Sky conference games on satellite television and reading back issues of
Inside Metro Conference Basketball .
Until this year, being an NCAA-tournament devotee was
harmless. Read the sports section, watch early-round games until 2 a.m.,
videotape the highlights on the local news, and fill out an entry for the pool.
Then the USA Today sports section came along, adding to the load. Soon
ESPN arrived, and cable became a must. But now the sports Web has arrived. The
cocaine has become crack.
I
discovered this innocently on the opening day of the tournament. I logged on to
Yahoo! to search
for scores. I found a mind-boggling array of sports Web sites. Among commercial
sites alone, ESPNET SportsZone, CBS's SportsLine, SI Online, the Sporting News, Nando.net, MSNBC, USA
Today, March
MadNET, Alleyoop.com,
the Sports Network, and Yahoo! itself were covering March Madness. (This is not to
mention the NCAA's
excellent site and the 10 million pages maintained by fans, colleges, and local
newspapers.)
Ihave spent the last two weeks surfing the Net,
and I must report it is magnificent. Sports Web sites are one of the Web's few
financial success stories, and deservedly so. The NCAA tournament is chaos: 64
teams play 32 opening-round games at eight arenas in two days. The frenzy
overwhelms traditional media. Newspapers satisfy themselves with 10-inch
stories and box scores. TV sportscasters rush through a highlight or two. The
sports Web brings order to the anarchy. Unrestricted by space, the sites run
more articles and statistics than any newspaper and deliver more audio and
video clips than any TV show. Their online tournament pools operate better than
any office pool ever could, and their fantasy sports leagues outshine any
nonelectronic sports game. Sports Web sites are category killers.
ESPNET
SportsZone is the
Rolls-Royce of the Web. (Like Rolls-Royce, it costs: $4.95 a month. If you
don't want to pay, you can view some of the site free.) SportsZone does not
cover the tournament so much as carpet-bomb it. On March 21, for example, I
visited SportsZone to learn who won the UCLA-Iowa State round-of-16 game, which
had ended too late to make the morning paper. I immediately found a wire story
about UCLA's overtime win. That led me easily to a box score, photographs, a
game summary, half-a-dozen audio clips of post-game interviews, a 10-second
QuickTime movie of the Bruins running a fast break, a comprehensive scouting
report on both teams, and an online chat room where Bruins fans were whooping
it up. And every tournament game receives this treatment. Nothing
succeeds like excess.
Other sports sites pale next to SportsZone, but they still
demolish print and TV. The Sporting News and CBS's SportsLine (the other site that charges subscribers) mirror
ESPN's format, but serve less: less multimedia, fewer columns, fewer stats.
MSNBC, USA
Today, and Yahoo! behave more like wire services than the full-service sites.
They post loads of newspaper articles--Yahoo! had almost 50 for one
second-round game--but skimp a little on photos and gizmos. Sports
Illustrated , by far the best-written sports print magazine, is more
disappointing online. It prints too little original content and relies heavily
on poorly written wire copy. (I also found it slow-loading and buggy.)
The Sports
Network probably attracts more attention than it deserves. It's slow, ugly,
and text-heavy, but it delivers the one key morsel the big sports sites won't:
the Vegas line. SportsZone, SportsLine, et al practice the anti-gambling
puritanism of TV, which dumped its oddsmakers years ago. But the Sports Network
posts Vegas odds, from the Stardust and Mirage casinos, no less. It also advertises Intertops,
a German online bookmaker. In the spirit of unfettered investigative
journalism, I tried to place a bet on Intertops, but was completely flummoxed
by its complicated log-on.
Still, the gambling-free
sites are entertaining enough. Fantasy basketball, baseball, and football
leagues are thriving on SportsLine, SportsZone, and the Sporting News .
At least half-a-dozen sites, including all the major ones, hosted free online
tournament pools. They were a breeze to enter--a few mouse clicks and a
password. I signed up for all of them. But instead of achieving power and
domination, I suffered a mammoth blow to my junkie ego. Entering Final Four
weekend, I rank no higher than 12,277 th place in any of them.
