It’s an old and tired tale by now - the employee who gets fired/harassed/suspended etc. for blogging.

But this case, involving an NCAA basketball coach being reprimanded for comments he made on his blog about the way his league is run, is of interest to me because it brings up the issue of blogs and sports, which is an intriguing topic.

Of course the most famous sports blogger, possibly the most famous blogger period, and certainly the richest, is Mark Cuban, (http://www.blogmaverick.com/) the billionaire owner of the NBA’s powerhouse Dallas Mavericks. Cuban made his billions (5 of them, if I recall correctly) by selling his audio/video streaming operation (the world’s first) called Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999. Cuban has always ‘gotten’ the web and he has been a tireless advocate for free speech, blogging and other progressive web initiatives ever since. He also posts regularly and answers many comments himself, something few billionaires and no other sports team owners do. (His post on the corporatization of YouTube was a killer: http://www.blogmaverick.com/2006/12/27/ripping-on-gootube-again2/) So, good for Mark Cuban. His team might even win the title this year, if they can get past the amazing Captain Canada and his Suns. (My money’s on the Suns.)

Another NBA blogpost that really knocked me out was this one, by former Raptor and current Milwaukee Buck, Charlie Villanueva: http://www.cv31.com/myjournal.html. This post was written last year by a 21 year-old NBA rookie who had just scored an amazing 48 points in a game, the most by a rookie since Michael Jordan, I believe. This post on his blog is not some typical ghost-written prefab pap nor is it sports journalism. It’s one young NBA player’s honest outpouring of feelings about an incredible experience he had just had. I loved it. I also found it indicative of the generation gap around blogging because I tried to imagine veteran sports stars sitting down and putting their feelings out there this way and it was inconceivable. (Barry Bonds: “So then I got another shot of ‘the clear’ and stepped to the plate…”)

It also made me think back to Ball Four (1970), the hilarious book by Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton that was the first ‘exposé’ of the life of a professional athlete, with its booze and hookers and juvenile hijinx. Bouton was excoriated by many (tho his book was a bestseller) for breaking a taboo that kept players’ realities shielded from their adoring fans. Of course the journalists were complicit in this, too. These days, things have changed, and the Internet has a lot to do with that. Just take a look at this behind-the-scenes video on YouTube from NBA draft day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QibGO_QKzQE. The average Joe wasn’t privy to this kind of thing in the days of Harold Ballard. (Just imagine what that behind-the-scenes footage would have revealed…Yikes!)

Then there’s the Raptorblog, (http://www.raptorblog.com/) which has been a furious hotbed of Raptor fandom for many years. (If you notice a certain theme, here…yes, I am a huge Raptors fan). Apart from the high level of critical discussion on this board, which sees itself as able to deliver much more informed and knowledgeable writing than do the basketball writers for Toronto’s daily newspapers, it’s interesting to note that the moderator of this blog just took a job at MSN.ca as a senior sports editor. Another example of how blogging is a good career move.

When I think about it, as much as I like the new dynamics that have made sports more transparent, on some level I do long for the good old days too, when sports heroes were heroes to their fans even if they were pricks in real life. I remember when I was a young boy, my dad wrote a fine book called Babe Ruth and the American Dream (Random House, out of print). I went out with him on some of his research trips and got to meet several hall-of-famers who had played with Ruth, including the likes of Frankie Frisch, (The Fordham Flash) and kindly old Harry Hooper (who had been on the 1927 Yankees, widely considered the greatest baseball team ever). It was awe-inspiring. And although my father’s book made no bones about Ruth’s coarseness in person (imagine MeatLoaf with a bat) it also highlighted the incredible respect and love that he engendered among Americans of every race and class. It’s hard to imagine anything like that today - in the era of OJ Simpson and Kobe Bryant, of Terrell Owens and Mark McGwire, of season-long player’s strikes and endless testing of the free agent market. Maybe Gretzky was the closest thing to Ruth we’ve known in a long time. Now if we can just get The Great One to blog…