Its symptoms are quick, tricky to pick but all hope is not lost. After my crack squad of praat kak scientists and I dug into this terrible malaise (research actually began in earnest before the public-servants strike [who are they serving neow?] began … hence the delay in publishing) affecting society, these are some of the causes:

• Not having 100% command of the language being used. Case study: Peter de Villiers. Rumour has it that his first language is Afrikaans. When not asked questions about conspiracies and murder suspects by annoying rooinekke journalists, I’m sure the man can hang with the best of them. This is referred to in journalism circles as being lost in translation, which poses ethical challenges for any form of media production. At this rate, good old snor would’ve outdone Sir Francis Drake if he actually set out to discover new lands. Research on him alone has saved thousands of lives.
• Social media has eroded the barriers of communication between the public and the person. Case study: Kevin ‘%@&$ing’ Pietersen and Phil Hughes. Phil Hughes was the first cricketer, via Twatte, to tell those who cared to listen that he had been dropped from the Test squad before the official word was released by Australian management. KP has now followed suit, moaning like a wounded zebra about being dropped from the ODI side. His now infamous twat: “Done for rest of summer!! Man of the World Cup T20 and dropped from the T20 side too. It’s a fuck up.”
  
• Just being plain foolish. Case study: Joel Santana. Remember that guy? Apart from being unable to coach a soccer team, the guy could barely speak English (see above), but to make matters worse, he would constantly tell us Bafana were making progress when the losses kept stacking up. I’m very glad that Pitso is now running things.

As I was looking around for KP’s twat, I saw a headline saying: “Should sports stars be banned from Twatter [sic]?”

It’s an interesting question. Happenings like this are only going to become ever more common as social media makes further inroads into communication circles. An outright ban? Not feasible, and apart from denying the right of free speech (a big boo-boo) it deprives sports stars of revenue. If you have a lot of followers checking out what’s crappening in your life, that follower base, in the eyes of advertisers, equals a market. Ka-ching ka-ching.

Though we may rail at the frankly idiotic comments spewing from characters such as PDV, it’s sure as hell more interesting hearing him than most SA sports stars who say “it’s going to be a challenge”, “we respect team X”, “the boys/girls are disappointed” etc etc which all are stored in the parthenon of “bread” (eg Ashwin Willemse, who I have nothing against and is probably a nice guy, just doesn’t add much to the pre-match build-up on SuperSport). Players are now forced to do media training since, perhaps in the view of their bosses, those bloody agents can’t be trusted. No wonder the government is keen to copy the apartheid government’s playbook of keeping the media quite (for the record, it won’t happen).

The reason we hear sports stars speaking, which often is a waste of time in itself is because it is a means to an end to make sure the PR bubble of professional sports doesn’t pop. It certainly wasn’t to pass on some Oscar Wilde. We passed the tipping point a long time ago.

What’s worse, sports stars have slowly gravitated — either through their own initiative or through the mechanisms of the market system — towards celebrities, today’s neo-royalty of sorts. There is a whole list of lives that we, as citizens, should be taking an interest in or more to the point are told to take an interest in. Do you give a shit what Paris Hilton (forgive me for uttering her philistine name on these hallowed sporting pages) is up to? Nope, so why should I care about what Pierre Spies is up to (as we speak he is probably making another Outsurance or custard advert)?

So what are we to do? Mute them all? Perhaps … perhaps … perhaps …

• The Alternative 2011 Awards

This entry was posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2010 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Other Sports, Cricket, Rugby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.