When the news that the UK voted to leave the European Union broke on Thursday, my Twitter feed was predictably flooded with tweets about it. But those tweets were contrasted with a different type of 140-character blurb.
The annual NBA Draft happened to be going on when the brexit news broke, and because I follow so many sports writers on social media, every seventh or eighth tweet contained something about the draft.
And through those draft-related tweets, juxtaposed against sentences struggling to outline the potential economic devastation that could result from the world-altering brexit decision, sports writers looked their stupidest.
Because instead of stepping back for a moment and contemplating the possibility that something — anything — might be more important than former Florida basketball player Dorian Finney-Smith going undrafted, some chose to continue throwing out obscure statistics that were accentuated in the most negative way possible by the light of consequential world events.
Many will say they just have a job to do when they ignore such events.
I get that — I do. On the day of the Orlando shooting, I had to cover a baseball game that night. And I tweeted about the baseball game that night.
But what I didn’t do — as some sports folks did — was pretend that nothing had happened. I re-tweeted about the massacre throughout the day and before the game started, I acknowledged how inconsequential it was in the larger scheme of the world.
That’s because there’s this old cliche that I’ve come to detest in my time as a sports writer — the idea that sports writers should stick to sports.
It’s complete crap.
Sports writers, like anyone else on social media, are people. People have opinions. But some in the sports world don’t believe in sharing their opinions (unless they’re sports related) because it’s not their job — it’s not the reason people follow them.
But it seems, then, that sports writers can do no right.
On one hand, they’ll receive backlash from people who only want to hear about sports — people who use sports as a way to escape impending crises and depressing news.
On the other hand, they’ll hear it from people — like me — who believe that there are times when sports should be treated like a winter coat: stuffed into a closet and brought out only when the time is right.
And instead of taking the side of humanity — the side of compassion, understanding and evidence of thought beyond football — some people choose to be robotic and appear uninformed.
Again, “I just have a job to do,” they’ll say.
No.
No one “just” has a job to do.
Whether a software engineer, a commercial airline pilot or a sports writer, people in general have commitments outside of work — friends, family, events — that add meaning to their lives.
And in times of tragedy, devastation or change, the appropriate response from sports media-ites shouldn’t be isolation in a bubble of sports, but embrace of the world around them.
Because yes, they have a job to do.
But not just a job to do.
Ethan Bauer is the Assistant Sports Editor. You can contact him at ebauer@alligator.org and follow him on Twitter @ebaueri.
The Twitter logo appears at the post where it trades, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Friday, June 17, 2016. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
