National Sports Journalism Center

The National Sports Journalism Center is pleased to announce the addition of Michael Bradley as a contributor to our “Getting Schooled in Sports Journalism” blog. Bradley is a writer, broadcaster and teacher headquartered in suburban Philadelphia. His written work has appeared in Sporting News, ESPN the Magazine, Athlon Sports, Hoop and Slam, among others. He is a host on 97.5 the Fanatic in Philadelphia and contributes analysis for Yahoo! Sports Radio and Sirius Mad Dog Radio. He appears on CSNPhilly.com, writes a weekly column on Philadelphia Magazine’s “Philly Post” and has authored 26 books. He teaches sports journalism at Saint Joseph’s, Villanova and Neumann Universities.

I have a college friend who has what one might consider something of a casual relationship with the English language. He is intelligent and successful, but for him grammar and syntax are nuisances in the pursuit of what he considers successful interaction. When we were at the University of Michigan together, I would chide him for his mangled sentences, and his stock response was, “Did you understand what I meant?” When I told him I did, he would reply, “Then it doesn’t matter how I said it. The goal is successful communication.”

It would infuriate me that he could break down the art of speaking to its most base elements. Being clever or insightful didn’t matter. Speech to him was a tool intended to create an outcome. Period. My frustration continued until I read George Orwell’s famous quotation from his 1946 Horizon essay, “Politics And The English Language,” and had the ammunition necessary to counter my friend’s argument.

Orwell wrote: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness or our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Aha! There it was. You may be able to communicate through garbled speech, but how lively will your ideas be if you don’t put them forth eloquently? Although my friend did not hand over his sword, he had no real reply to Mr. Orwell. Score one for the English language and its defenders.

I was reminded of my friend last week when British actor Ralph Fiennes announced that modern language was being “eroded” and that Twitter was responsible for “a world of truncated sentences.” He was decrying the breakdown of the language’s complexities and wondering whether Shakespeare was still relevant in today’s world. Just because Twitter confines us to 140 characters doesn’t mean The Bard doesn’t have a place. It’s just that he wouldn’t have been able to tweet Hamlet’s Soliloquy to his legion of followers – without attaching a tiny URL.

While Fiennes was railing against our slide into a climate of single-clause sentences and monosyllabic utterances, scientists at Texas, Cornell and Carnegie Mellon were extolling Twitter’s virtues in the world of research. Thanks to Twitter’s immediacy, we were able to get real-time information from Middle East countries in the throes of revolution. We could gauge the relative mood of people in Libya as Muamma el-Qaddafi was captured and executed.

Linguists are also tracking language trends throughout the country by monitoring Twitter feeds. For instance, do you know that New Yorkers type “suttin” or “sumthin,” instead of “something?” Meanwhile, Californians write “koo” or “coo” when something is cool. Twitter’s small exchanges can help researchers in many fields, even if the advances are incremental and may seem frivolous to some, like linguist Noam Chomsky, who says Twitter often reeks of “superficiality.” After all, who cares what somebody had for breakfast? It is hard to argue, though, with the amount of information contained in the billions of tweets that crowd our phones, computers and tablets. Sorting through that can yield some nuggets, just as sifting through the trillions of written words can produce Shakespeare’s true beauty.

Consider: “See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O that I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek!”

While Fiennes was taking on Twitter, the very tool he condemned was playing a role in sports journalism that not even the sharpest, most accomplished reporter could have replicated. From the moment the NBA owners declared a lockout in their labor impasse with the league’s Players Association, commissioner David Stern declared a gag order on all involved on his side. No one was to talk about negotiations, give opinions on progress or lack thereof or speak into a microphone about anything having to do with basketball. So, even if you wanted to shake loose some pearls from normally loquacious Dallas owner Mark Cuban, you had no chance. Not even he was going to risk the huge fine Stern would surely levy.

But all it took to engage Miami Heat owner Micky Arison was an angry tweet, and all of a sudden Twitter had taken fans – and the media – in a direction conventional reporting could not. The tweeter expressed much of the same outrage NBA fans have felt throughout the 100-plus days of the lockout and directed his ire at Arison.

“How’s it feel to be apart(sic) of ruining the best game in the world? NBA owners/players don’t give a damn about fans, and guess what? Fans provide all the money you’re fighting over, you greedy (expletive) pigs.”

Had Fiennes seen that, he would have gone running for his Shakespeare deodorant and sprayed the offending missive. But that type of raw emotion can’t be expressed by previous means of communication, especially not directly to an NBA owner. Say what you want about the delivery, but the message was delivered clearly and passionately, in a way that no other means of conveyance could have allowed.

Arison was quick to respond. “Honestly, u r barking at the wrong owner.” Again, not too eloquent, but certainly direct.

This led another tweeter to weigh in: “Know it’s not ur fault at this point, it’s become child’s play. Grown men making stupid decisions over money.” Arison responded, “Exactly.” The original Twitter poster reentered the fray, tweeting “Then can you bark at the other owners? This is RIDICULOUS.” And Arison responded, “Now u r making some sense.”

The exchange continued for a few more posts and was quite interesting. Fans spoke directly to an NBA owner. From a journalistic standpoint, his responses were more important. Arison revealed that he was not among the more hard-line owners who favored limiting NBA players’ cut of basketball-related income to below 50%. (The players received 57% in the last contract.) Further, his comments intimated a rift between the ownership group that no one knew existed before. To that point, Stern and his top aide, Adam Silver, had delivered every utterance to the media on the owners’ behalf. And despite many attempts by media to get an owner to comment, not even the garrulous Cuban would comply. With a few tweets, Arison had created a new angle on the lockout story.

As one might have predicted easily, Stern was not amused. Arison removed the posts shortly thereafter, and the next day, the commissioner slapped him with a $500,000 fine. While some columnists debated whether Stern was violating Arison’s free-speech rights, others went looking for further evidence of a rift. It was a perfect example of how Twitter has become not only an invaluable tool for delivering news but also a conduit for people to make it. The exchange between Arison and the fans may not have satisfied Fiennes’ need for pristine English usage, but it had certainly provided us with an interesting story that we would have not found without it.

My old roomie would have been proud.