Web turns sports fan into talk show host

A May 2006 graduate of USC, the 24-year-old Mattis did a little research and discovered that streaming his show online was relatively inexpensive. He broadcast his first show last October and, for the first few months, only family and friends would listen or call in.

Sometimes i think my general approach is too nuanced, too intellectual, to make for really good radio though. If nationally #1-rated WEEI’s drive time shows are the Rush Limbaugh of sports talk, i’d want to be the NPR. You know: every issue has one angle, and then another, but if you dig deep some of the people from the second point of view can see merits to the first one, but there’s still some unresolved issues, but wait! there’s a third point-of-view disagreeing with the first two…. That’s how i think. I reserve black and white judgments for only the few essential issues. Sports radio exists by making black and white judgments about everything. Either you’re a Bledsoe guy or a Brady guy. Either Manny is a bum who’s not worth the drama he brings, or he’s a hugely valuable piece of the Sox puzzle. Great for ratings, bad for nuance.

The Matsuzaka story is actually the perfect example of what i would classify as “metasports” in my mind. I’ve been fascinated by this story since a few days before Daisuke’s fateful cross-country plane trip with the Red Sox brass, not because i really give a flying damn about who pitches for the Sox — i mean, not really, i’m happy to see the team do well or what have you but i’d trade 10 World Series for one Vanderbilt win over MTSU in football. The fascination for me is other people’s fascination, particularly in this case the Japanese media’s. (I’m reminded of a joke i heard from Tony Campolo: a sociologist is someone who, when a pretty girl walks in the room, is looking at everyone else to see their reaction.)

As part of its All Predators All the Time round-the-clock vigil, WGFX just had some guy on who claimed that the Titans, “represented our city in front of a billion people in 1999.” (paraphrased)

No.

The NFL likes to quote “audience” figures for the Super Bowl, understating that the definition of audience in this case is everyone who lives in a country or has access to a TV system where they could watch the Super Bowl if they so chose. And if you accept that definition, the SB’s “audience” is indeed about a billion people, or half the number who’ve watched the last couple of World Cup finals. That’s not two billion in NFL terms. That’s two billion who watched.