Kyle Whelliston

Independent Economics

2008-06-17T12:58:24Z

My two favorite XM channels are 20 and 115: the "20 on 20" pop countdown and Radio Disney. I love the way pop music sounds (they've engineered it so I will), but there's also something comforting to the soul about it. The music styles and the production values are different than they were 10 or 20 years ago, but it's still the same 10 messages delivered by the same 10 high school archetypes. As long as America is the land of the free, it'll always be this way.

Another thing I like to do is look up the bands and singers on the internet. That's how I learn how they got their start, how they were "discovered," and how many fans disowned them once their public personas were styled after the peppy cheerleaders, mysterious rebel loner boys or doe-eyed heart-scribbling female diarists that the general public easily recognizes. I believe that artists don't sell out to giant entertainment conglomerates, they sell out to audiences.

]]> Audiences, in general, are truly horrible groups of people. Audience members are usually too in love with their own individual power of choice and own personal uniqueness to get to know who it is they're consuming. The audience wants to know what's in it for them, how it all relates to them, what they're getting out of it. If the artist stops delivering what they want, or "branches out" into "new directions," they'll get what they want from somewhere else. It's not the singer or the song, it's the medium and the message.

If there's any such thing as a "good" audience, it's one you attracts and builds yourself, independent of the smart-bomb techniques of the Entertainment Machine. That's more possible than ever now, with this internet thing, as long as there's a willingness to let go of the vague and illusory idea of "fame" and the notion that it's possible to have everybody know who you are. Take, for instance, this guy, who you've never heard of. He's the world's most popular blogger.

If you can find 5,000 people to give you ten dollars a year in return for whatever it is you do, that's independent success, however modest. How they get it to you is dependent on the creative field you work in. Ten dollars is a cut of a record album and a concert ticket, it's a slice of a hardcover book, or a PayPal link on a web page. In about a month, it'll be two gallons of gas. It's not a lot of money.

"Only" 5,000 still seems like a mark of failure in a world of platinum dreams. But if one finds those 5,000 that are willing to give up an hour's worth of work in exchange for diversion of some sort, that's a decent living. Fifty thousand dollars is a nice gross annual income, well above the poverty line -- and with careful deductions, the government will only take about a tenth of it at the end of the year. You can be a functioning, non-cubicle dwelling part of a functioning family with that kind of money... or you could live comfortably by yourself.

On the other hand, five thousand people is a lot of people. More than you can fit in your house! It's well north of the average two-digit blog fan base, or the hit count on a MySpace band page, or the sales of a Lulu.com self-published book. But think of it this way: that's .000017 percent of the American population, or the number of residents in the tiny municipality of Cave Creek, Arizona.

But how to reach them? This is the excruciatingly difficult part, and the primary reason why there are entertainment companies at all. The ones that survive, that have grown large enough to consume and absorb other entertainment companies, have done so because they're the best at understanding what audiences want. What they don't want is you, the unique individual.

After an unofficial, indirect, multi-year survey on the topic, I'm of the opinion that one of the biggest problems that creative people face is the belief that they're selling themselves, which gets in the way of identifying and mining the relatively miniscule audience segment that will bring independent success. You have to know who you appeal to, what they want, and how to give it to them so they're satisfied enough to come back.

Me, my audience segment is cynical, disaffected, college-educated white males 25-40 who still cling to a scrap of hopeful idealism. There are more than 5,000 of those, certainly... but I'm still figuring out how best to relieve them of that ten-spot.

Olympic blog

The Illusion of Accessibility

2008-06-16T16:44:21Z

This entry takes no comments. No trackbacks, shoutbacks, pings or dings. It exists on its own, just like all the others I've written, residing entirely within its own context. Whether it's read by anybody or not, it is as real as a tree falling in the woods, and it's certainly more searchable, indexable and Googleable than one of those. What this is not, however, is interactive.

I can't find an authoritative history of website comments anywhere, but I recall seeing feedback solicitations on blog entries as far back as 1999. I couldn't figure out what I was supposed to write. "Hey, good job?" "I really agree with what you're saying?" "Me too?" If I disagreed with whatever theory was being posited, I could always post something myself somewhere and reference it via a newfangled "hyperlink." Written opinions have been traded in similar cross-referenced fashion for centuries.

But as the new century began, it was clear that people wanted the ability to elicit responses that were not only instant, but inline and attached. In my life as a developer, I was being asked to build not only blogs, but comment submission forms as well. In a relational database, this is roughly what the relationship between the two looks like.

]]>

This clearly drawn host-parasite pairing has guided my view of the practice for many years now. A posted comment -- usually anonymous, generally either overwhelmingly positive or negative -- sits alongside, sucking precious disk space and visitor attention away from the original work. Deleting vulgar and offensive comments, to say nothing of link-spam, takes time and is generally agitating for all actual humans involved.

Alas, but this is the way blogs are today, and how the blogosphere has decided they're going to be. Something that had begun as an innocent poke into the unknown ("Is anybody out there?") blossomed into a crusade for self-serving personal validation. Lots of comments, either measured by positive tone or sheer volume, are what bloggers generally want. Comments mean you're getting through to people, jerking their knees.

As old media and big media slowly caught up with the new, they added feedback features of their own. ESPN.com, the biggest sports site in the world, has its own "conversation" feature that allows registered users to quickly open up a text box at the end of a column, type their instant reaction, then let it fly. I've never read a single one of the comments that are attached to my columns over there, much less jumped into that fray with the "article author" posting function I hear they have.

When I started The Mid-Majority back in 2004, the commenting feature was left on. A month went by (nothing says "irrelevant" quite like "Comments (0)") but when the idea caught fire and the throngs gathered, people started throwing around their opinions. After a few days of "you're great," "you suck," and "check out my site" personal adverts, I shut the form down. Forever.

But it's important to keep the door open, to allow people to get in touch, especially if you get your facts wrong and you need to post a correction. I learned this the hard way in the third season of TMM (2006-07), when I took down my e-mail link and left no way for strangers to contact me. I was able to get a ton of work done in my safe little teflon-walled cocoon, but I had to learn about my screwups from message boards. And I didn't make any new friends via the site that year.

So now I have a feedback form that spits out all the day's responses once a day into my e-mail, and I've reached a point where just about 80 percent of it is thoughtful responses and serious inquiries. I think what I've learned from this is to maintain accessibility, but to make it difficult. Unless you're one of the millions of bloggers who gets high off the cheap fuel of strangers' attention, protect your real e-mail address. While you're at it, turn off your Facebook wall and all other insta-feedback mechanisms that invite the kind of asinine drivel bored people tend to crap out. Make folks work for that contact form.

There is a distinct inverse ratio between the speed at which visitors can provide feedback and the quality thereof. Besides, the less time one has to weed through polarized and useless feedback, all the more to spend responding to the good stuff.

WHELLISTON - Announced new website.

2008-06-10T18:07:31Z

Back when newspapers were king, in the pre-internet, pre-ESPNews era, one of my favorite parts of daily sports news consumption was the transaction section. Sports sections contained, and still do, a concise guide to signings, hirings, firings and trades, all organized neatly by sport and league. I credit my excellent eyesight to hours and years of sharpening my reading skills on that sans-serif agate type, there on the sports section's back page.

This, to me, represented the absolute root, the nerve center of the sporting world. Just as the stock and bond grids were to the financial section, those block paragraphs (team name in all caps, followed by an em-dash and a succinct description of the action taken) represented the heart of what was really going on. Most of the stories on the preceding pages were just longer versions of what was found there, colored with interviews and other flowery details.

]]> No, this was a 100 percent bullshit-free zone: no points, goals, wins or losses either. Just the wheelings and dealings that served as the foundations of future victories and defeats.

Transactions didn't enter the 21st century gracefully. Even today on the web, they're usually found in the same solid grey blocks as in the old days, with no cross-referencing or hyper-anything. It was only within the past three years that the Pro Sports Transactions site sprung up, first with NBA data, then with the other three major American leagues. I've spent more time on that site than I care to admit.

But something was still missing. Much of the romance of the transaction section is contained in the thick college grid, the descriptions of the movements in lesser and minor leagues, all those obscure and possibly fictional team names. And what happens when a hanger-on or has-been falls off the major league map? A comprehensive transaction grid holds the true key.

So I've started a brand-new website called Transactionist. The basis of the site is three years' worth of pro, college, minor-league and independent-league transactions, a database totaling over 36,000 entries so far. It's all indexed and searchable, updated hourly, and has hundreds of drilled-down rabbit holes to fall into.

Not only can you get a rundown of all the moves made by, say, the Minnesota Twins, you can also similarly follow those of the Atlantic League's Long Island Ducks. Or marvel at the complexity of NASCAR's tribunal system. Or flash back to two years ago. Besides, a cross-referenced transactions database is the only way possible to record the sprawling history of the new American Basketball Association, for what it's worth.

I've also built in some community features, for kicks. With a basic username-password account, anybody can give the thumbs-up or thumbs-down to any transaction, or even make a snide comment about it. It remains to be seen if those features will catch fire, but in an age where a lot of fans get more worked up about hirings and firings than the actual games, I figure it's only a matter of time.

But my favorite part of the new site, and the real research-related reason why I built it, is the custom RSS transaction feeds for entire sports, leagues or teams. I've been hosting an RSS feed (in the block format) for about a year now with over 1,000 subscribers. But now, if you like the American-style football, you can subscribe to the entire sport, just the Arena Football League, or just the Tampa Bay Storm. There's an orange icon on each page, and it will play nice with your newsreader of choice. Each transaction is its own feed item now.

So I hope you find a use for Transactionist, if for no other good reason than to follow the Calgary Vipers' (Northern League) shameless attention-grabbing techniques. They were the ones who traded a dude for some bats, and earlier picked up this guy, presumably for no reason other than his name.

Simply, Jim

2008-06-08T02:47:50Z

James Kenneth McManus died today. He was 86. He was my hero.

Along with millions of Americans of my general age, Jim McKay introduced me to the beauty, the grandeur, the full width and depth of the Olympics. More than any other, Mr. MckKay ignited in me a life-long love for the Games and all they represent, in spite of the forces and elements that would corrupt and cheapen them. When drugs, bid-fixing and gigantism threaten to render the Olympic Movement irrelevant, I remember all those things Mr. McKay would say in those post-Games monologues. He'd use those few post-Closing Ceremony minutes to remind us about how those past 16 days had represented the best parts of the human spirit, how the modern Games can serve as a fleeting glimpse into a truly peaceful world, one where sport promotes cross-cultural understanding.

]]> Jim McKay never felt the need to oversell anything. He'd tell you what was going on, in simple and direct language, in a honest and forthright manner. If the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team had just won, he didn't need to raise his voice or convince you how important it all was -- he'd provide color commentary to make you feel like you were there instead of just watching via satellite. If the news was bad, as it was at Munich in 1972, he didn't sugarcoat the truth. When he said, "They're all gone," that was all anybody needed to say.

He brought the same unadorned tellitlikeitis style to 12 Olympics worth of forgotten moments, too, as well as countless horse derbies, golf tournaments and auto races. And, as well, to decades of odd events on Wide World of Sports, personally spanning the globe to bring us barrel riding and freestyle rodeo and freestyle skiing and bowling and (if I remember right) motoball. No matter how strange the event was, Jim McKay's mild-mannered curiosity made it immensely less so. No matter how much the event stretched the modern American definition of "sport," as long as it contained those three magic ingredients (the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, and the human drama of athletic competition), that was enough for him.

A lot of tributes will be written in the next days and weeks, many by people who actually knew Mr. McKay, as well as by those of us who were merely inspired or influenced by him. Some of those tributes, undoubtedly, will raise the question as to whether there's a place anymore for the McKay style: that blazer, that haircut, that oversized microphone or the unending honesty ("This program was on videotape.") Or rather, if there's a place for what all these things represented -- if value-added style points can be less important than acting as an effective and efficient conduit between audience and event. Never did his work feel like anything other than humble service to both.

But in an age of 100 sports channels, catch-phrases, perfect hair, audience pandering and wink-wink snark, we need new Jim McKays more than ever. Anybody who takes that bold step and follows his example, who carries themselves with the same kind of unvarnished dignity he did, can be rewarded with differentiation from the vast majority of sportscasters and sportswriters who shamelessly vie for audience attention and ultimately get in the way of the events they cover. No matter how boring or old-fashioned the values may seem, there will always be a place for truth, candor and simplicity, for love and for service. Mr. McKay proved that for over 40 years.

OK

2008-05-22T18:29:42Z

I'm not sure why, but I've been thinking a lot about OK Soda this morning. It's been about a decade and a half since it was available to buy in limited test markets, since it disappeared as quickly as it showed up. But I liked the stuff a lot... it was like a "suicide," that yummy weirdness you get from mixing all the fountain drinks together at a convenience store.

But the reason OK Soda is legendary is because of the way it was sold. In 1994, the Coca-Cola Company used slogans and art and marketing concepts that were specifically designed to appeal to "Generation X" types (like me) who had grown up bombarded with sales messages, enough to become cynical about consumerism. It was all very awkward, a zillion-dollar company attempting to speak the language of the disaffected commoner. The populace rebelled. But in this society, "rebellion" means don't buy it and complain.

]]> The company would learn from its mistake quickly enough, and exact horrible revenge. In 1995, Coca-Cola used one of its established brands, Sprite lemon-lime soda, to launch the tagline "Image is Nothing, Taste is Everything... Obey Your Thirst." They signed then-hot NBA star Grant Hill to an endorsement contract, and promptly made him into an anti-endorser. Don't drink it because celebrities do, came the campaign's message. Drink it because you like it. The consumer, after all, is by far the best judge of a product's worthiness.

Less than a year after the OK Soda campaign ended up DOA, this particular concept took off. It's been used to sell Sprite for the last 13 years.

There's a lot more CGI in television advertisements now, but not much else has changed since then. Gigantic corporations with non-essential products to sell are still out of new ways of convincing people that their products are somehow essential. Celebrity endorsements, competitive comparisons and sex are as questionably effective as they were in 1995. Even the idea that product consumption will advance a consumer beyond simple consumer status doesn't work anymore. We've all heard it before, heard it a million times.

The most effective, compelling message in the world to the disenfranchised or otherwise powerless is this: You are better, smarter and wiser than those who hold power. In more volatile and less comfortable times and places, this is a message that gives slaves, peasants and commoners the confidence they need to displace those who would keep them down in lower stations. In modern America, it's a message that can be used by the rich to keep the poor entertained, consuming, and too content and soft to examine the manipulation, much less riot in the streets.

And this is why I hate Sprite, the American version of The Office, Green Day, Ron Paul, and anyone or anything else that gets rich off convincing audiences of the audience's superiority to its superiors. The relative rich telling the relative poor that they're smarter than bosses and celebrities and politicians and leaders -- and turning a profit while they're doing so -- is just about the most cynical, despicable metaphorical handjob I can think of.

But anyway, I hope you'll all join me in drinking a toast to spectacular corporate failure. Trust me, this stuff is delicious.

1 part orange soda
3 parts flat cola
a splash of Dr. Pepper

Bump List

2008-05-14T15:33:24Z

It's been 20 years, two entire decades. I spent the summer of 1988 holed up in my room, living on bags of "Cajun Spice" Ruffles chips and ashtrays full of Pall Mall cigarettes, wearing out Steely Dan cassettes in my Walkman. I was connected to the outside world with a Commodore 64 and a 1200 baud modem that was, at the time, considered lightning fast. The online service I used back then was called Q-Link, run by a company called Quantum Computer Services with a destiny that couldn't be contained in 64 kilobytes of random access memory. In 1989, the firm changed its name to America Online.

You could connect with people on Q-Link, in a place called "People Connection." You'd type stuff into a text box, others would too, and occasionally you might find someone who was typing things you found interesting. You could then access their profile with a few keystrokes, and read a list of the things they liked -- movies, bands, books and whatnot. If you liked the same things they did, maybe you'd send them an "instant message," or perhaps an "e-mail." If they reciprocated, they'd be your friend. When you'd hit the send button on your e-mail, the word "MAIL" would flicker on the lower right-hand corner of their screen.

]]> We're now one whole generation removed from the days of Q-Link and bulletin board systems, but the basic architecture of social networking laid down back then has remained virtually intact, even though we've moved from phone lines to wireless fidelity. We got virtual communication right the first time, because nothing in the above paragraph sounds like it happened in a bygone age. It's safe to assume that 20 years from now, we're still going to be sending synchronous and asynchronous personal communications over networks of some kind.

The opportunity for long-distance voiceless chat provides an opportunity for abstraction -- with our big brains and big imaginations, that also seems like something people of all generations like to do. On Q-Link, you could take on the personality of a wizard or a medieval peasant or a rapper (we had those back then) and engage in role-playing games. Or, if you didn't want to go that overboard, you and your friends could play a more everyday form of make-believe. Maybe you'd call your chat room "Corner Bar," and "buy your friends a beer." Here's my all-time favorite example of ASCII art from that era, one that I use whenever I can:

Kyle ----======== cU you

Twenty years later, with all the technological advances we've made, that same sentiment might be expressed like this:

There are people who weren't even born back when the first virtual beers were poured. That makes me think that maybe -- just maybe -- pokes, superpokes, troutslaps and FunWalls tap into needs that have lay dormant within us since the genesis of our species... just waiting to be released and exploited. If Michelangelo, Tesla or Edison had the technological means to build a proto-MySpace or steam-powered Facebook, they probably would have encountered scant market resistance. At the very least, there'd likely be enough early adopters to keep the thing profitable.

***

So yeah, anyway, I'm back on the FaceBook again. It's not like that's any big news worthy of any sort of announcement. I'm user number (or inmate) 727111904 over there, and I'm able to use my real name only because of the magic that is data binding. I had deactivated my account back in December, I said at the time that it was because of intrusive data-mining practices. The truth was that the constant flow of meaningless everyday information (as well as the internal and external pressures to contribute to it) was making my brain hurt.

A few weeks ago, I put together a "bump list." A wise old basketball coach once imparted to me the importance of staying in touch with as many people as possible every so often, "bumping" them with a message every once in a while to say hello, compliment them on their successes, and inquire about the family. Hidden in every bump, he whispered with a grin, was this tiny invisible message: "Don't forget about me, I'm still alive."

My list, before I gave up, was over 100 people long, and the idea of sending out that many e-mails was completely overwhelming. And that's when I realized, for the first time, the power of modern social networking, and the real differences between 20 years ago and now. Facebook is just one big, endless, 24/7 "bump list."

Social networking isn't exactly a necessary evil, as much as it's a necessary sadness. In past years, I've enjoyed being able to vanish mysteriously at the end of college basketball season in March, only to return in November when the games started up again. I can't afford that old indulgence anymore, disappearing from people's radar screens for months on end. Not like I could 20 years ago, alone in my room with few outside responsibilities or quasi-political obligations. Those days are gone forever, over a long time ago.

Mortgage

2008-05-13T18:31:37Z

Since we talked last, it came to light that several years ago a young man took out a simple mortgage. The collateral consisted of his skills as an basketball player, and the advance (paid out over several years) came in the form of tens of thousands of dollars in cash and goods. The agreement, in principle, was that the creditor would someday collect an agent's cut of a virtually assured professional contract, a slice of a multi-million-dollar pie.

It's an innocuous enough transaction, free of its context and actual signifiers -- it's the same kind of advance on future earnings that happens every day in your local bank's loan department. But the story of young O.J. Mayo is a tremendous scandal in the making, and it'll keep most of the people in my profession busy for the foreseeable future. Set and printed rules were broken, "allegedly" or not... people will be punished, fired, blacklisted for this. It's still in the debate stage, though, and which of them allegedly deserve to take the hit is still entirely up to you.

]]> We're been dealing with athletics-related loans all decade. Nearly every major sport in the world has been rocked -- rocked! -- with stories of athletes who have traded scary and uncertain futures for today's world-beating performances, as well as the medals, statistics and riches that can follow. The risks of performance-enhancing drugs are well-known enough to define this as yet another kind of now-for-later deal. So it's one thing to quibble about perceived "authenticity" and "cheating," but look at it this way -- you won't be the one with the high blood pressure, heart disease and/or cancer when the bill comes due. (Or the shriveled balls.)

Mortgaging an uncertain later for a cushy now is part of a much wider pattern here in our nation, you don't have to live in or near a foreclosed house to see that. A lot of modern American problems can be boiled down into the act of trading instant or short-term gratification for an I.O.U., followed by the inherent problems of that particular transaction type. The credit card world is imploding into millions of defaults, and displaced homeowners are living out of mini-storage units. In the macro view, our country pays its bills with loans from scary places like China, Singapore and Europe. We've gladly traded the sweet comfort of automotive isolation for massive environmental damage, and it's too late to turn back now.

This isn't another sermon, though. I'm just trying to figure out a unified approach to the now-for-later deal, which has been heretofore impossible. As a society, we haven't come to any sort of consensus on what types of mortgages are okay, which are not so okay, and which are downright criminal. (It would seem, generally, that the risky checks we ourselves write are acceptable, while those of others are not.) Should the mortgage that O.J. Mayo took out on his talent, or the ones that Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens took out on their future health and well-being, be viewed any differently than the bad loans of various types we've entered into? At root, they're all deals with some sort of devil.

When we look back at this decade, if we all survive it together, I'm positively certain that we'll refer to it as the I.O.U. Era. We'll remember this as a time when we wrote a lot of checks, and got in a lot of trouble when our asses couldn't cash them. Hopefully, we'll recognize the pattern before then, and figure out that trading tomorrow for today is pretty dumb, no matter what form the transaction takes.

My Book Deal, and The Abandonment of Game Plans

2008-05-01T14:10:15Z

Nobody involved was really aware of it at the time, but there was a rumbling shudder that coursed across the press-blog continuum this past Tuesday night. A pay-television sports show dedicated a segment to sports coverage on the web. The panel discussion featured America's most popular sports blogger, a Pulitzer-winning author, and some dude who plays football.

From the fallout posted here on the interweb, it would seem that all hell broke loose on HBO's Costas Now. Poor Will Leitch practically lived out that R.E.M. song about talk shows, ambushed by a crazy has-been writer, while an athlete sat in the corner wondering if he was in the right universe.

Me, I didn't get to see the segment until it was posted online yesterday (the show is carried on a channel I haven't received since Flight of the Conchords last aired). It certainly wasn't as explosive as everyone made it out to be, which was a bit of a disappointment. In fact, I'm just surprised how bad everyone looked coming out of it. From Bob Costas (the Voice of the Olympics) saying "fuck-face," to the athlete's description of his own web egosurfing, to the aged one's mouth-froth. Oh, the mouth-froth.

]]> The only thing that advanced the discussion was the piece of paper that the host read from: a Deadspin post that contains the most expertly written deconstruction of the celebrity sportswriter culture I've ever seen, that details why working-class fans who have been priced out of the stadium feel alienated by that culture. Unfortunately, it was only brought up because it contained the word "tits."

(Buzz Bissinger was right about one thing: it was "Big Daddy Balls" who wrote that.)

Or maybe two things, that interesting closing statement about the "nebulous fan's voice." I haven't known the exact point where Deadspin is coming from for three years, and it was too bad that Mr. Leitch did nothing to clarify that position when offered that platform.

Before we go too much further, because most people aren't in any position to string the dots together: I have a fairly successful sports "blog" of my own that's operated five months out of the year (during college basketball season) since 2004. It's done well enough that it's landed me thousands of readers, a gig with the Worldwide Leader in Sports, and a column in an industry-respected magazine too. Not bad for somebody who left journalism school to become a graphic designer back in 1992, and later took a decade off to "monetize" websites for people. It's a story that could only happen in America, I suppose.

On Tuesday evening, all too coincidentally, I signed a contract to write my first book. It will be a non-fiction, hardcover book about college basketball, and it will be released on or near October 1, 2009 by Sports Publishing LLC (the folks who put out Hall of Famer Dickie V's autobio). Here's a 400-word overview.

There are 342 universities and colleges that compete for the NCAA Division I men's basketball championship every year, but nearly two-thirds of those schools languish in the shadows of the well-moneyed and constantly televised power conferences. For the past five years, I've travelled from coast to coast covering "mid-major" conferences like the Big South, Big Sky and Big West, leagues that are only as "big time" as their exceedingly hopeful titles.

I plan to chronicle my 2008-09 season on the road, as I travel to and between over 100 Division I games. Along the way, we'll stop by hallowed halls like Butler's Hinkle Fieldhouse and Penn's Palestra. We'll meet head coaches on the rise, as well as on career declines and rebounds. We'll visit with student section superfans and explore their odd rituals, and reveal heated local rivalries often overlooked by the national media. Invariably, a previously unknown school will leap into the limelight as a surprise nationally-ranked instant powerhouse. We'll discover players who go from unknowns to legends in a single episode of March Madness. And as winter turns to spring, small towns across America will become transformed, as tiny local colleges achieve berths in America's ultimate college sports showcase, the NCAA Tournament.

The real texture to this story of mid-major basketball, however, is provided by its inherent struggle. There will also be trips to run-down, dimly-lit 1,000-seat gymnasiums with empty seats, failed recruiting trips. There will be November "guarantee games," in which power-conference teams exchange five-figure checks for certain beatings, and long 700-mile team bus rides through the night. Players who excel in smaller leagues often have their weaknesses cruelly exposed against higher competition. All of these programs are defined by their relative lack of finances, and struggle to achieve or maintain excellence at the highest level. It's a world where big success becomes bittersweet --larger programs routinely lure away winning coaches with multi-million dollar contracts, reducing the role of mid-major schools to simple stepping stones.

The chronicle will be narrated in an even-handed, philosophical style that's been honed and perfected over three years as a national college basketball reporter. Travelogue-style elements will be woven into the story as I criss-cross the country for five months, driving tens of thousands of miles in pursuit of small college basketball's pulse. In book form, the 2008-09 mid-major college basketball season promises to be a patchwork of hope, faith, expectation, disappointment, pride and heartbreak -- it may end for each team with inevitable elimination, but it's always an interesting journey.

If you haven't guessed, I'm incredibly fortunate to have this opportunity and this advantage. Most first-time authors have to write the book first (or at least a first chapter), then have an agent shop it around in a humiliating cycle of outbound manila envelopes and incoming rejection letters. I haven't written a single word of this book, but I know when it's coming out, where it's going to be published and excerpted, and how long the book tour's going to be. I have a lot of people to thank, but they're going to have to wait 18 months to read it in print.

I really hope you'll buy it when it comes out.

After that ridiculous TV discussion show on Tuesday night, I'm more proud than ever of the internet. The internet made me. None of what's happened to me is possible without a "blog" -- that horrible little word splinter that's come to represent irresponsible reporting, tit jokes, parents' basements and anarchy. And there will always be artists who pine for expired times that made more sense to them, and art that won't outlive its own generation. There will always be preening celebrities who don't understand what happens in the seats that face them. There will, I guess, continue to be nebulous newcomers who can't figure out which swath of "brow" to stake out, who think they can occupy the high, middle and low simultaneously. From what I've seen, and even tried, it can't be done.

But I know what that word, "blog," really means. It's a synonym for endless possibility and a limitless blue sky, the freedom to plant a flag and proclaim to whomever cares to listen, "This is where I'm from."

And I think you know it, too.

Regular offseason workshop-style transmissions will resume from here shortly, along with announcements of other new projects. Stay tuned.

A Brief History of "Don't You Know Who I Am?"

2007-11-03T11:22:42Z

I thought it would never happen, but this past summer I was recognized and stopped on the street by a complete stranger for the first time in my life. Granted, it was the street of a college campus, and I make my living off college basketball, but it was still weird. "Hey, aren't you Kyle Whelliston?" It was uncomfortable for sure, I wasn't quite prepared to answer questions about basketball in July. I was just trying to get to a Store 24 and get a candy bar because I had skipped lunch and was hungry as a motherfucker. As the 3 Musketeers melted in my mouth, I thought a lot about how I wouldn't mind if my life was never interrupted by strangers again. Especially if the question was, "Didn't you used to be Kyle Whelliston?"]]> this incident several days ago involving Dreamworks studio co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. At a hotel bar in New York, he blocked the flow of service traffic so he could hold a cellphone conversation without dining chatter in the backgound. When he was asked to move out of the way, a witness told The Post that he replied with, "'Who the fuck are you? Do you know who I am?' "Don't you who I am." The complete reverse and inverse of "leave me alone," the last outpost on the far edge of narcissism, a level of self-importance and self-absorption that no blogger could ever hope to match... no matter how trapped in their own heads they become. The card is nothing new: sports stars, actors and politicians have used it to get out of speeding tickets and hotel charges and bar tabs, as well as into first class on commuter jets. This is not a comprehensive survey, but here are just a few of the examples of DYKWIA in our lifetime.

I don't know who Sienna Miller is, but she pulled one off in Pittsburgh last year. She didn't realize that you can't say "Do you know who I am," and follow it up by saying your name afterwards (only Charles Foster Kane can get away with that). Or call the city "Shittsburgh." That's something only Philadelphians can use.

John Mayer is so not cool. If he had to drop a DYKWIA in a Circuit City when asked for an ID to back up a credit card, he could have gone over to the music section, picked up a copy of Heavier Things and put it on the counter. "That's my picture ID, bitch," he could have said. That would have been smooth.

This story has been around for as long as the internet-as-we-know-it has existed, and it's easy to tell who the new folks are around here: they're the ones who are sending it out via mass e-mail. The premise is this: Jane Fonda and Ted Turner were in a Montana restaurant and Jane tried to blow a 45-minute queue with a devastating DYKWIA-bomb. I'm sure that the general framework is true, but the part at the end where the Vietnam vet kicks her out for having hung out with the wrong crowd once sounds like something someone might add to the story later to make it sound better. "And then... and then I threw an American flag in her face and said, 'Kiss it! Kiss it!'", etc.

John Kerry: We as a nation might have been in a whole lot less of a shitastrophe than it is now if Kerry had been elected, but it's come to light over the past three years that a big reason why is because the man can't get out of his own way. Or the way of his own ego. We'll never know how many people voted for Nader or stayed home because of circulated stories about Kerry using his influence to get other people's pizza, cut in line for snowboard rentals, or pass through barricades at a Rolling Stones show... but if the current global situation devolves into World War III, "Don't you who I am" will have played a crucial role in the extinction of the human race.

Impermanence

2007-11-02T09:43:34Z

After living in New York and Philadelphia for many years, I know my vandalism. Entire quadrants of those metropolises have been given over to the imperial aerosol kids, who take possession of signs, vehicles, buildings and bridges by way of spray-painted symbology. With their tags and codes, they tell each other who owns what, and any street or place in view of the marking is dominated by proxy. Outsiders and downtowners can't begin to pretend to understand the language, but the basic message is very clear: this doesn't belong to you.]]> Moving to the Providence area has taken some adjustments. Here is something I found on a Rhode Island Public Transit Association city bus a few days ago. It's a Post-it note with a graffiti tag on it. There were others on seats as well, clearly all left by the same marksman. I'm not really sure what the intent was here, but there's very little threat or danger inherent. It takes me back to by dormitory days -- "street-tough" in that context means removing the Post-it, drinking the milk, and casually telling your roommate that you never saw it when confronted. Perhaps this is the way rival gangs in Providence manage their territory too. The cross-town ride gave me a lot of time to focus on the Post-it tags, as I watched polo-shirted businessmen, elderly ladies with flower-print purses, and man-children in oversized Avirex coats came on and off the bus. They stepped on the Post-its with muddy shoes, picked them up, balled them, sometimes leaving the notes crumpled in the seatcushion canyons with discarded newspapers and Dunkin' Donuts cups. How like life, I thought. We boldly strike forth, fashion an individual shape that distinguishes us from the rest of the race. We make our marks in this world, but they're hardly indelible. Our work is underappreciated, trod upon, misunderstood, and after we've reached our final destination, it's nearly impossible to make sense of what we left behind. We're not dust in the wind, we're Post-it graffiti tags on a small-city bus. What chance do we really have?

Saxophones are Gay

2007-10-25T15:59:22Z

The other night, I was sitting in the Providence Place food court, watching as the girl behind the counter at the Dale & Thomas popcorn stand slipped a small wad of bills from the till into her pocket. I found myself distracted from the scene by the piped-in muzak, which normally hides in the background of the shopping experience but had become surprisingly intrusive. St. Elmo's Fire. And who can forget the scene in Better Off Dead where John Cusack brought the cute French foreign exchange student into the deserted Pig Burger for a private dinner, then topped it off with an awesome sax solo over the Rupert Hine song in the background. It was totally a keyboard set to the "saxophone" setting, but it didn't matter. The number one rule for bagging chicks in the 1980's was this: brass equals ass. The sax was still cool and dangerous into the 1990's... anybody who owns a Morphine CD knows that. But nobody knows exactly when the saxophone stopped being cool... my guess was that it was around 1995, the year that John Tesh's "Sax On The Beach" came out. Or maybe it was the Dave Matthews Band's fault. It's beyond debate that the saxophone is now, in fact, totally gay. And by gay, I mean God Awful Yucky. But let's take a moment and celebrate that shiny, gold horn of our memories and dreams. Blow on, saxophone, blow on. Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street
Quarterflash - Harden My Heart
Boy Meets Girl - Waiting For A Star To Fall
Glenn Frey - The Heat Is On
Huey Lewis & The News - Slammin'
Icehouse - Electric Blue
Men At Work - Who Can It Be Now?
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The Red Sox

2007-10-24T15:01:31Z

The 2004 Boston Red Sox were a magical team, insofar as they transformed the psyche of an entire region. They even reached out to touch the lives of non-Sox fans like myself. A true story: October 16, 2004, the date of Game 3 of that year's American League Championship Series, was when my wife and I became engaged to be married on the platform of an Orange Line MBTA station. The game drifted in and out of our evening out in Boston, score updates coming from restaurant televisions and bus drivers and strangers on the street. The highly improbable final score, 19-8, corresponds to the dates in May upon which we were both born. Of course, it was the last game the 2004 Red Sox would lose, and we felt like we had tapped into the mythology, curse or no curse. ]]> violent criminal. In the bullpen, there's Eric Gagne, the faded and broken pitcher who sticks around and keeps getting shots at glory presumably because of great performances in his distant past, for other teams. If Gagne is like the doddering old executive who hangs around the company for years past his prime because firing him isn't the right business thing to do, outfielder J.D. Drew is the lazy cubicle-dweller who takes naps during meetings and surfs for internet porn all day, then says something really interesting in the final presentation to a client. Sure, he hit a grand slam in ALCS Game 7 after sleepwalking through the 2007 season, but just how little does one have to do at the right time to be validated as a conquering hero? The 2007 Boston Red Sox are as empty as they are inevitable. But I hope that there are a few 11-year olds out there in New England who recognize this team and way of life for what it is, reject it, and choose another, better path. And if they need some suggestions, we're getting Francisco Liriano back next year.

Malibu Nightz

2007-10-17T14:01:27Z

The portal that separates sleeping dream and wakeful reality is a dark egress, but it's hard to tell the difference between the two when morning comes early with a knock at the window and the glowing honeycomb of a flashlight. Where are you headed? South. To Los Angeles. Where are you coming from? Colorado. What's in L.A.? Friends. I'm visiting friends. Have you had anything to drink? No. Where did you obtain this vehicle? San Francisco. At a rental counter. Where do your friends live in Colorado? Colorado? You mean in Los Angeles, right? Yes. They live in Santa Monica. You're 30 minutes away. You can't sleep on the road. Get out of here. It doesn't matter, as long as the pieces fit together in a vaguely ambiguous manner. Go a few more miles south for show, turn around, the Ventura county line is only five more minutes. Keep going.]]>

Life on a Navy Base

2007-10-15T14:34:39Z

So yeah, life on a navy base is pretty good, thanks. It's not for everyone, obviously, because they don't let everyone in. At the gate, they ask you for your military identification card, your car registration, and the reason you're there in 25 words or less. If any of these aren't good enough, they send you right back onto the road, via a narrow lane protected on either side by jersey walls. There's a war on, and there are secrets here that need to be kept secret. Inside, people in uniform often stop you and ask for ID, more often if you have facial hair. But a lot of the people at the navy base aren't in uniform at all. A lot of families live here, moms and husbands and wives and brothers and sisters. There are old people, kids too. Everyone walks around the sidewalks with faint smiles on their faces, protected and happy. There's a supermarket and a department store on the navy base, housed in low-slung boxes of buildings in the heart of the compound. Prices are very reasonable, presumably frozen since the last time the U.S. won a war. A quart of milk costs $1.25, and bread is a quarter. No tax on anything, even the wide-screen teevees. There's a gas station too. The prices there are so good that they're one of those secrets I talked abut earlier. Morale is important on the navy base. There's a theater that plays second-run movies (war films are popular), there's a gym with top-of-the-line equipment, a teen center, even a bowling alley. Everything, it's all free. There's a teevee channel on the cable system that tells you what's going on around the base on any given day, using a Powerpoint slideshow with clip art and side-wipe transitions and Dave Matthews songs playing in the background. There's also a sports bar on the navy base, that's where most of the men seem to spend the evenings. It's like the sports bars on the outside, mostly, but the tap beer isn't watered down. "Sports" here means football, and the only set showing the baseball playoffs is way in the back over the pool table. The food? The kitchen likes to puts barbecue sauce on everything, including the nacho plate special. It's a little strange for the first few days, but you get used to it after a while. Life on a navy base is like life on the outside, only more so.

Sex

2007-10-12T18:37:45Z

If you take the biological drive, nerve endings and psychology out of it, would humans necessarily want to engage in the measures that we currently know as "sex?" I mean, if it wasn't obvious that a particular man-part fit into another woman-part, if that wasn't the gateway to reproduction, if the operation didn't have the capability of unleash overwhelming emotions, would we have any use for those particular physical measures? The erect penises and the self-lubricating vagina offer obvious clues to how life works. But you know, there are other sharp skin-objects that could fit awkwardly into other orifices. The big toe into the nose, the finger into the ear canal, the elbow into the rectum... if any of these functions had the capability of passing life-stuff from male to female, they might have been candidates for The Act. But evolution played out the way it did: all the magic is between our legs. Too bad that our biological duty turned out to be so boring: in, out, in, out. The best you can hope for is a deep feeling of communion with the other, most everything else turns out to be haunted by inevitable dissatisfaction or regret. Ask any woman, and they're not likely to be impressed by hours of staccato throttling. If you're a man, you're generally judged and graded on the intangibles: attention to detail, the array of interesting activities before intercourse, and the element of surprise. That is, everything but the actual piston-pumping itself. Women are just trying to transcend sex by evolving it beyond its physical limitations, in spite of the best efforts of men to keep it boring. But we men have had their moments. It's true that males helped humanity become the first-ever species to invent pornography, which is an amazing legacy-defining accomplishment unto itself. It's a shame that porn turned out to be a dead-end, though: highly-stylized images of airbrushed perfection, cycles of predictable licking-pumping-moneyshot repetition. The only way to transcend that endless loop is to make it as weird as possible: leather, fisting, ass-fucking, adding more people, what-have-you. The people who make movies and put things on teevee are also trying to transcend sex, but in more calculated ways. They know that when you "sell sex," it's a total misnomer... you're really selling everything but. A seductive glance, a flash of cleavage or ass, athletic bodies acting poised for intercourse.: this is all nothing but foreplay. Even if there were no decency laws or FCC, picture-makers would avoid the real thing. The jism-covered towel, the folds of obstructive fat, the contagious venereal disease, the broken hymen, blood everywhere, the tragically unmet expectations, the soul-piercing stink of sweaty and spent organs... there isn't a product in the world, no beverage or body spray or erection pill, that you could sell with any of these things. American popular culture gets such a bad rap, but it's has done something really amazing: it's improved sex... by taking the sex out of it. Real sex is full of fluids and flab, failure, bizarre and selfish desires for conquest and domination. So I say let kids watch this "sex" on teevee, let 'em. Allow them a few years of being totally deluded about the true reality of sex -- it's like letting them believe in Santa Claus for a few years, they'll likely be disappointed anyway when they learn the smelly truth. And if certain people would get over their feelings of moral superiority, maybe they'd marvel at what our supposedly detestable Hollywood and Madison Avenue cultural overlords have done. They've essentially hacked sex, and that's pretty neat.