Upon sitting down in my cramped court-side seat to protect my "talent" from stray basketballs, a quick glance to the right yields two pretty unremarkable characters. Both work for the Albany Times Union, and I have scanned many an article written by each of them. Yet, until I began working with Time Warner Cable, I had no idea who they were. And it wasn't like I had suddenly unmasked the caped heroes, revealing the simple human beings behind them, but rather that I had read their name tags and recognized them from somewhere... I couldn't quite remember... Oh yea, they wrote in the Times Union. It certainly wasn't a storybook revelation about me meeting my lifelong heroes, although that would make for a much better story.
When I finally picked up on who they were, I began reading their articles in each morning's paper more thoroughly. It became pretty clear who did what. Guy #1 wrote the game reports, Guy #2 did the color. I was immediately disappointed in the systematic nature of it all. I had always dreamed that writers wrote purely on inspiration. But there we were, 3 peas in one court-side pod, 2 professionals and 1 amateur, me watching them, them watching their computer screens. I was rollin' with the Albany "big" dogs.
It became pretty apparent, pretty quickly, that "rollin' with the big dogs" wouldn't be the stressful, self-consciousness inducing endeavor I had imagined. One glance towards their computer screens told it all. Yes, 2 fully-grown journalists, sitting a jock straps length apart, were sitting at their laptops, talking... Via Twitter. It took me a little while, but I finally realized that they were each commenting on the other's Tweets. They could have looked up, and practically whispered what they were saying to each other. One guy could have coughed a little bit and forced the other guy out of work for a week with the flu. They could probably have guessed with 99% accuracy what the other had eaten for dinner, including appetizers and dessert, just by how close there breaths were to each other. Yet, they tacitly decided that Twitter was a better option. Any self-doubt that I had harvested about the responsibility of my seat position flew backwards out of me and smacked the guy screaming drunken obscenities at the refs right in the face.
Guy #1 is a brutally ordinary looking guy. He writes color-by-number articles, except in words. He just reports the facts. I often see him preparing the final product on his laptop with 5 minutes left to go in the game. The outcome doesn't really matter, because all he needs is to know who scored an important bucket, and when. He has a template in which he fills in the blanks, occasionally adding a key transition word such as "However" or "But". I want to believe that he wishes to move up to articles with less restriction, but he sort of looks like he's all set with his templates. If he were a painter, he would be fine with producing only predictably beautiful landscapes. He's good at painting rolling hills and menacing mountains, so why move on to anything else?
Guy #2 is the flamboyant color man, the one that gets deep into the action and asks the tough questions. Comparing his Times Union photo with his actual self is comical. In the newspaper, he looks like a strapping 6'4" hunk in his mid-30's with cleanly cropped hair and a trimmed goatee. In actuality, he's about 5"9" in his mid to late 40's with unkempt hair and a penchant for dandruff. He wears black jeans, a t-shirt, and a suit jacket way too often. He's the more sociable one, and can regularly be caught pal'ing around with old buds in the crowd. His garrulousness is expressed in his writing style. I envision him typing emphatically the last word of his witty column, and grinning at his own pithy last sentence.
I have never met these two men, nor shaken their hands, nodded my head at them or slapped them on the back while clamoring "How are you old sport?" They are journalists, and they are good at what they do. I imagine them like Frodo and Sam Baggins. One is the colorful and popular Frodo, who can be weak-hearted at times, while the other is the simple, steady Sam who keeps Frodo staggering forward in their quest to destroy the One Ring in Mordor. Together they make a great team. We can only hope that they will soon feel comfortable enough to speak their first non-Twitter sentences to each other. It may take time, but I think they'll get there.
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