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. But in The Long Tail Chris Anderson convinces us that the Web is helping us discover markets that were always there, but too decentralized to discover. I like the way Anderson thinks. Maybe there’s a demand for braniac sports talk.

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.)

So this video on Matsuzaka is interesting, although nothing unexpected based on what was going on last fall when he was signed. I love how Japan as a nation is so caught up in this guy as a symbol of national pride — that if he succeeds, he reflects well on them on the world stage. My comparison would be when American soccer players play in England or Germany, but of course those guys are virtually unknown back here. Maybe i should say Brasilian soccer players in Spain or Italy, except that there are so many that they’re all playing each other.

I don’t know what they could hope to learn from Shaughnessy, though — maybe that you can sell a lot of books by beating to death some damn superstition that looks silly in retrospect, or maybe that you can get a gig as a multisports columnist without ever bothering to learn anything about other sports.

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. So if it makes the people of Nashville feel good about shoveling out piles of government dough because the word “Tennessee” would float across TV screens in Germany and Japan — if only the “audience” hadn’t turned off the set before heading to sleep or to work! — then the people of Nashville are gullible. Roger Godell won’t complain.