Reading the Sunday NYT II

Here’s something I sometimes think about: March 2008 wouldn’t have been what it was had it happened in March 1998. That’s because it couldn’t have been shared the way it was shared.

I’m not talking about general sporting fandom. I’m talking about us. We experienced those 10 days not as taken entertainment but as shared experience, and it happened not only in Raleigh, Detroit and Davidson, but also in e-mails and texts and on DavidsonCats.com.

So here’s Harvey Araton looking ahead to the next decade in sports:

Digitalization is the watch word for sports industry power brokers and planners, seducing and scaring them as they stampede into the great electronic unknown. Some worry that a fast-changing home viewing experience -- 3D television, in particular -- could make pro sports more of a studio event than a public spectacle. Others wonder if sports could be the new decade’s print news media, reconditioning consumers with online alternatives that diminish traditional revenue streams.

The teenager in the basement -- torn between home-team loyalty and fantasy-league reality, monitoring the televised game with laptop humming and cellphone vibrating -- is the face of a multifaceted future.

Digitization means niche-i-fication, exactly what you want, exactly when you want it. How We Watch is changing, TV, movies, sports, everything. Over the last 10-plus years, with Davidson basketball, that’s meant going from watching the ticker on Headline News to watching the score on ESPN.com to listening on Teamline to watching on DavidsonWildcats.com. It’s never been easier to follow Davidson basketball from wherever you happen to be. This is especially useful within this community, I think, a relatively small group of people, many of whom at some point came to Davidson, from somewhere else, stayed for four years, and then for the most part left and went, again to somewhere else.

It’s gotten to the point where I’d almost rather not have the game on TV because then I can’t watch it on the Web. Then that game belongs to, literally has been bought by, someone other than Davidson College. If it’s on ESPN, or ESPN2, or ESPNU -- fine, I’ll go find a TV and I’ll watch the game like that. But if it’s on some more regional and less available outlet, like SportSouth or Fox Sports South or MASN or something, and I’m still down in Florida, it’s that much harder for me to watch the game. I either end up watching it on some sketchy Web platform -- like many folks here, I think, I watched the Cornell game on my laptop screen thanks only to some Cornell student in Ithaca pointing a camera at his TV and then streaming the image onto justintv.com -- or I end up not being able to watch it all. A TV network is a middle man that’s increasingly unnecessary.

More than that: The reason I follow Davidson basketball the way I do is tied up tight with my relationship with the place, by which I mean the actual place, yes, 28036 and 28035, Belk and the Brickhouse, but also the people within the wider community. And I sort of look at a TV network, any TV network, as a third party, a foreign entity, infringing on that relationship. Granted, TV brings other advantages, direct and indirect, i.e. exposure, i.e. recruiting, i.e. some measure of mass media seal of approval, i.e. now you, the wider you, has seen us, or at least the simple TV representation of us, which undeniably somehow makes us feel good, validated, there. I’m thinking here also of Ricky from Michigan. He came to DavidsonCats.com because he saw the team on CBS. He stays at DavidsonCats.com presumably because of the community he’s found.

I guess it comes down to a question of: Is the point to share it with just each other or with so many others?

Warriors on ESPN tonight

If you make it a habit of watching Stephen late in the East on ChannelSurfing.net, and I know y’all are out there, no need this time. Career-high 27.

ESPN’s NBA preview

Jon Barry: Stephen Curry is in the perfect system to thrive.

Rookie of the Year

Vitale says Stephen. “I see star, star, and star.”

Stephen in Chicago

Jay Williams: “Stephen Curry is going to be a huge surprise for anybody this year ...” More: Charlotte. Daily News. Newsday. Post. Washington.

The shrinking space

There was a video this morning on the right side of the Weekend Watch on ESPN.com’s college basketball page. It is now curiously unavailable. I wish it was still there because I was going to say something about it.

I’ll say it anyway.

It was a phone interview with Stephen, no picture, and the guy from ESPN who was interviewing Stephen, I forget who it was, said something along the lines of how Stephen should hurry up and heal so he could play against Butler because that would make the “family” of networks happy.

I wish I could quote here but that was the gist.

It bothered the fuck out of me.

One of the things that most interests me about sports in America here in the early part of the 21st century is the space between game and show. The space between sports and entertainment. It’s getting smaller. It’s getting fuzzier.

Think MMA.

Boxing? No.

Made-for-TV cage fighting? Yes.

Think steroids in baseball.

All you hear about is how wrong it is, and how it’s shaming the game, and how baseball as we knew it is dead, and you see old-man sports columnists shaking their old heads and wagging their fat fingers, and you see A-Rod asking for forgiveness and pretending to cry, and you see his teammates standing there trying to be appropriately solemn about the whole charade.

Know what else you see?

Crowds.

Big crowds, big crowds that couldn’t get enough of the show, bigger crowds than ever before, at least until the economic slowdown. It was the economy that finally made some of the foam-finger-buying, hot-dog-inhaling, fantasy-baseball-playing people stop coming. Not the steroids. All the steroids did was make the show better.

The Super Bowl is a TV show. The NCAA tournament is a TV show. The Super Bowl I have no problem with. Those actors are getting paid. March Madness? Not so much. That’s the setup and there are too many dollars involved and there’s too much inertia by now for any of the people in positions of power to even think about changing it.

For Davidson, because of last March, obviously, and for the first time ever, that space between sports and entertainment -- it shrunk.

The games are shows.

If you’re the school, you understand that, and you take the good with the bad.

Having a man from a TV network tell a 20-year-old college junior to please get well soon essentially so more people would watch that network’s noon-to-2?

That’s part of the bad.

Maybe I’m just grumpy.

Maybe I tend to overthink these sorts of things.

Or maybe the video is no longer there because I wasn’t the only one who thought it was pretty fucked up.

Vitale at Belk

Cremins: “I’ve got a feeling he’s going there because of Davidson and Stephen Curry, not for the College of Charleston. What Davidson has done for our conference is incredible. On the other side of that coin, they’ve beat the living daylights out of all of us.”

The Butler matchup

Indy:

Sending one of the nation’s top defenses against the nation’s top scorer was an irresistible college basketball matchup. So it was that ESPN paired No. 11 Butler against Davidson and All-America guard Stephen Curry in a BracketBuster game Feb. 21.

Andy:

Butler at Davidson, the highlight game Feb. 21, is a blockbuster game. Both teams will be in the NCAA tournament, regardless of whether they win their conference tourney. This game could easily be an NCAA second-round matchup, considering the way both teams have played at times this season. Butler’s Brad Stevens said Monday the good news was that the two teams probably won’t face each other now in the NCAAs.

Albany:

ESPN apparently decided sending Butler to play Stephen Curry-led Davidson held more television appeal.

Bleacher Report:

Though No. 11 Butler lost just as the schedule was announced, this will still be the highlight of the event, as ESPN nary misses an opportunity to televise Stephen Curry.

It’s Butler

The nation’s marquee BracketBuster game will be Feb. 21 at a sold-out Belk Arena. Indianapolis. Charlotte. Davidson. ESPN.

Some 3-pointer

The third sentence of the first AP story out of Chattanooga last night read like so:

Curry hit a 3-pointer as time expired to give the Wildcats a 41-28 halftime lead.

Yes.

Right.

Suppose that’s true.

Then the video of said 3-pointer showed up today, oh, here, here, here and here. And here. Also here. Probably plenty of other places, too, but these’ll do for now.

I could be wrong, but seems to me the shot’s path to everywhere-ness started with local TV news in Chattanooga, then went to DavidsonCats.com, then to personal blogs, then to wider-audience blogs and YouTube ... and then to the Charlotte Observer’s charlotte.com and SportsCenter and ESPN.com.

I feel like all this says something important about media here in the early 21st century.

But give me till the weekend to mull that over.

No. 30

On the Andy Katz All-Weekly Watch team:

Southern Conference teams can’t touch Curry. He scored 33 points in a win over Wofford and 30 in a win over Furman this past week. He made 13 treys in the two games, but just as impressive was his assist-to-turnover ratio. He had 12 assists and only two turnovers in the two games. Curry also made five steals in the win over Furman.

Stephen: Labor Secretary?

Pat Forde:

No single player is working harder on a nightly basis to help his team succeed than Davidson’s Stephen Curry. He’s averaging 29 of the Wildcats’ 81 points per game and assisting on another 13 points per game. More than 50 percent of Davidson’s point production passes through Curry’s hands on its way to the basket.

No arguments here

Sports Central:

Davidson of course will make the NCAAs one way or another because CBS needs Stephen Curry and ESPN needs to talk about him.

Whoa

Bob Knight: “Take a good look at him because he’s as good a passer as has ever played college basketball.”

2,719 words

Twelve questions, ESPN got almost 3,000 words, and they used not quite 1,300 of them, which was awesome. Here, though, are all of them, uncut, on Storming the Floor.

ESPN.com

On the mag page.

To watch Tuesday

One man’s blog: Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Stephen Curry. Sorry, but why else would you watch this game? No offense to Alex Ruoff or Devin Ebanks, but let’s be honest here. Prediction: Davidson 77, West Virginia 67.

‘Made for TV’

Couldn’t help but notice tonight on the screens at the Brickhouse the hype starting up for Tuesday on ESPN in NYC. Certainly doesn’t hurt that Stephen will hit the city coming off another show in front of LeBron. Made me think of something executive VP of programming for CBS Sports Mike Aresco told me last summer in my reporting for the book: “The Davidson story was the best story of the entire tournament. They had beaten the Big East champs. They beat the Big 10 champions decisively. You kind of think of them as an Amherst or a Williams with a chance to win the national championship. That’s a premier time slot, that regional final going into 60 Minutes, but the Davidson story was unique and Stephen Curry was a genuine star. What he did in the Gonzaga, Georgetown and Wisconsin games, he was the single most visible player in the entire tournament, and maybe for the last several years. And TV thrives on star power. George Mason became a nice story in ’06 but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t a little school. They didn’t have a star. But everything about the Davidson story was made for TV viewership. You dream about Davidson-type scenarios.”