I’ll admit I tried to make the headline as sappy and over the top as possible to illustrate my point: a two year old girl going to a press conference has turned into the conflict du jour in sports, and that annoys a lot of people. A lot.
Riley Curry is adorable, and when she took over Steph Curry’s press conference after the Game 1 victory in the Western Conference finals, no one had any idea that cute little girl would create such an issue.
Only she didn’t. We did.
Well technically Brian Windhorst did, sold out by fellow NBA journalist Ramona Shelburne on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ramonashelburne/status/600896599527567360
That led to many of us getting our “calm down, she’s cute” missives blasting throughout the early morning on Wednesday because what’s better to talk about in sports than the kid of the guy who just dominated a conference final game instead of, you know, the actual guy.
See, now I’m doing it too. Actually, I admit I was doing it the whole time—trying to balance the line between “why are we talking about this” and “is this still news because I thought of something else funny to say?”
First it was one guy the rest of us took to task, which is certainly enough to turn this one comment into a blog post on sites like AA, or a four minute sports talk radio topic before going to break. (That was me, this morning, for sure. For what it’s worth I think bringing your kid to press conferences when you win is hilarious, but when you lose it feels a bit like using your kid as a shield to avoid tough questions, Derrick Rose!)
One guy made this a story. Then it was two.
https://twitter.com/HPbasketball/status/601047464561483777
That second was this guy, who most of us had never heard of before today and won’t ever think about again after today, but by golly did he get a lot of attention for echoing the sentiments of Windhorst, so much that he needed to delete his original tweet and replace it with this hilarious lack of irony:
People complaining about Twitter on Twitter is, above all, the best use of Twitter. There’s really no second place.
Still, two against the world is hardly a controversy, with most of us just firing off jokes about Colin Cowherd’s thoughts on Curry’s parenting or fake press conference rules like only letting cute tykes in because America hates ugly kids (okay both of those jokes were mine) before, well, THIS happened:
https://twitter.com/erikmal/status/601055328663277568
We should have seen it coming, because that’s what always comes. ESPN’s carnival barking crew of Skip Bayless or Cowherd or Jason Whitlock or Stephen A. Smith take our benign spats and find a way to press the red button every single time. I’m probably giving the Worldwide Leader far too much credit, because even more respected yet lower profile journalists like Dennis Dodd of CBS can turn nothing into something, especially if we replace a two-year old baby at the NBA playoffs with a Green Bay quarterback at the NCAA Tournament. It’s become an art form, truly. And so has the backlash.
And once we have that backlash, what’s backlash without backlash to the backlash? The “why is this a story, can’t we move on” people are essentially creating the same amount of noise as those of us barking in the first place. Then, inevitably—and I’m almost always part of this, I admit—there’s backlash to that backlash of the backlash.
“This is what the internet is for,” people like me tend to argue. Rinse. Post. Repeat. (Post again with ICYMI, then repeat again with a link back to the first post.)
The real issue isn’t that people have ‘hot takes’ about a two year old at a press conference, or that those of us with warm takes about those hot takes feel the need to share our every thought (and joke), it’s that there are too damn many of us with these takes for any small bit of can-we-even-call-it-news to properly cycle out.
There are too many voices in the world, and blogs and podcasts and radio shows and, hell, newspapers and Twitter and Periscope and Meerkat, if that’s still a thing and wasn’t eaten by Periscope, and Instagram and whatever device you use to communicate, empowers each and every flipping one of us with an opportunity—nay, a right—to share our takes with the world.
One guy who covers basketball has a problem with a baby at a presser while he’s on deadline? Launch the armada, because we’ve all got a boat, a paddle and nowhere else to be.
We’re all yelling at the top of our lungs, desperate for someone to listen. Every one of us, no matter how big or small our audience may be.
Those of us clamoring for people to “move on” are really saying, “too late, jerk.” If you haven’t shared your opinion on topic du jour yet, enough people have, so you’ll have to wait until next time we all get angry. In other words, wait an hour and get in line for the next crisis. But be quick, we’ll hate you all over again if you’re late.
Out of every 100 sports controversies, 99 of them are as ridiculous as an adorable girl hiding under a tablecloth. We’re monsters, really, programmed to turn everything awesome into regurgitated garbage, and social media has leveled the playing field in a way that blogs never could. Everyone’s opinion can matter now, and too often too many of ours do. (I’ll certainly put myself in this category.)
The thing is, I want my opinion to matter. I get paid to give my opinion on things, and that’s a very difficult switch to un-flip, so the more my opinion matters, the better I am at my job that given day.
And on some level, I don’t even think it matters whether I’m paid for my thoughts or not. I think (ironic start to a sentence, yes) we all want to matter. We all want our joke to get the most retweets or favorites or up-Diggs (does that still exist?) or whatever makes us get one more follower, friend or acolyte.
There are too many of us in the world, and all of us are screaming at the top of our lungs almost all the time.
I’m not going to stop screaming until nobody wants to listen anymore, and I probably won’t even stop then. I just hope what I scream sounds smarter than what Skip Bayless is screaming. This time, and every time.
There is no actual controversy about adorable Riley Curry. There were a handful of people who thought an NBA star showing the assembled media a human moment as a father and three-dimensional human person in this world was disrespectful because they had a deadline to file their story about him as a two-dimensional basketball player.
This was really never about the kid. Or the player. The controversy is about us. There are too many of us who know there is no controversy, but our need to say that over and over again is what created the inevitable controversy.
I’m not going to stop. Are you?
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