Vol 3 Life and Times of S Carter

Check out this great read from Vince Thomas of Slam and NBA.com. Slam is a mag I'd love to write for, because it's a "urban basketball mag" , meaning you can use bball slangs (ie: "dropped 11 dimes", "he had a broken J") and write with a hip hop twang. LOL

Yeah. A few more years of experience and I'm gonna look to move to NYC and write for Slam. Or maybe Slam the print mag will die and I can do it from cyberspace when I'm living in Japan or something.

Anyway back to the topic--I do tend to get sidetracked when I write eh--this piece  by Vince Thomas is a great read about how Twitter has changed the way athletes interact with fans. I know, I know, the Twitter phenom has been covered to death by media (US ones, HK is so damn behind), right?

But Vinny is honest. He's straight. He blunt. He admits that us journalist/writers INFER when we write. He says that twitter is finally allowing misunderstood young black athletes (racial divide thing) to speak their mind and get their story out because the media stuff is often times "drivel on top of drivel".

BINGO. He paints several good examples, such as Tyson Chandler tweeting about his regret about leaving Chicago. Three years after he was traded. We learn--via twitter--that Tyson Chandler is a sappy emo motherfucker--like yours truly--and get warm fuzzy feelings when he revisits an old city, a old job, whatever.

(ironically Tyson is from Compton, you'd think you'd be stone cold growing up in Compton)

Anyway, a few excerpts from the piece:

"That's when this athlete-Twitter relationship crystallized, for me. There was a sort of boundary. For a lot athletes, Twitter is an A and B conversation and journalists can C their way out."

"The whole point of this Twitter thing is to skip the media, skip the marketers, skip everything that separates a jock and his fans and get right to the people. Twitter may seem frivolous and trivial, but it's actually a G-move."

"How many times has a ballplayer said he was misunderstood? A gazillion times, right? And who do they often attribute this to? The media, right? I can feel 'em on many levels. Writers -- hard news journalists included -- infer things. We'll tell you we don't, but we do. Our stories have more than a few subtle conclusions based on evidence and circumstance."

Yeah.

Here's a follow upby Vince Thomas. About how twitter is giving him his NBA fix at a time when NBA news is at a low.