Most Missouri fans weren’t just east of Orlando on Saturday when Dorial Green-Beckham gave them his first 80 reasons to shout.
Almost every person who was happy when the nation’s No. 1 recruit chose Missouri over the likes of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas in February, the people who chanted his initials at basketball games before he signed and turned Ellis Library into a pep rally the moment he did, those people weren’t there to see the new King of Columbia’s crowning moment.
They weren’t there to clap and cheer and chant, so what did they do?
Tiger fans erupted on Twitter — predictably, emphatically and superficially, as only Twitter can erupt — following the play, which put Missouri up 7-3 over Central Florida in a game it’d eventually win 21-16.
Cyberspace exploded with hash-tagged howls of “DGB,” and the phrase soon became what is known as “trending.” Trending, as in being— for at least a moment or two — one of the most popular topics in a world that has become inarguably more socially relevant than the one out your window. When you’re trending, you’ve made it.
As of 6:30 p.m. Sunday, 20,018 people have signed up to follow Green-Beckham in this world. I’m one of them, having done so last winter in light of the hype and the fact I write about sports for a newspaper. Green-Beckham was, is and will be for a long time an important sports figure, both in this town and in others. I thought by clicking that blue button I’d learn a little about him. I thought it would help. I didn’t think I’d regret it. I was wrong.
Last month, the popular sports blog “Deadspin” released a ranking of the 67 worst Twitter accounts in sports. The site, which maintains its edge after all this time, did a lot of things right here. Stephen A. Smith and his personality, entertaining on television but blatantly obnoxious typed, is high on the list. Pathetic sarcasm accounts like @NotBillWalton and @FauxJohnMadden are there. Peter Gammons, who literally tweets in what can only be described as drunken gibberish, is there too. Like I said, they did a lot of things right. But they missed one.
Anyone who explains Twitter as “a Facebook with just statuses” doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Tweets can be replied to, but even when they are, they still exist only as individual entities. They are not like statuses, which are commented on and then grow with those comments. Not at all. They cannot be “liked” (they can be “favorited,” but nobody really cares about these at all), only acknowledged or ignored. And that’s what adds to the relevance of each individual tweet: the fact it stands completely alone, waiting for approval or rejection.
On Sept. 25, “Where you been” popped up on thousands of Twitter feeds. Most Tiger fans had been wondering the same thing about Green-Beckham, who at that point had recorded just six catches for 48 yards in four games. He didn’t tag anyone specific, and it wasn’t in reply to anything. He just sent the words “where you been” out into space like a balloon.
This is a classic Green-Beckham tweet: an unpunctuated fragment that can never stand alone anywhere long enough to be entertaining. His thoughts are shot out almost exclusively without subject or context, ambiguously to an audience of strangers. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this — he can tweet whatever he wants. My problem is not only that so many people have signed up to witness such an empty show, but how nobody seems to be throwing tomatoes onstage and leaving.
About a month ago, Green-Beckham tweeted, “U really just made me mad.” It received two retweets and five favorites. More than 19,000 people who signed up for that ignored it. Then he asked the world, “Why did u do that.” Four people favorited that. More than 19,000 didn’t.
It just rattles the brain to think of how insanely access-obsessed our age has become. It will eventually be a downfall, this intrusive epidemic, this genocide of privacy. A downfall of individuals, of media and of the athlete-fan dynamic.
And for what? So that we know DGB thinks, “She said its truu like a horseshoe”? You can be a fan of football and not need to linger on an 18-year-old receiver’s every thought.
We can enjoy the game and the talent without being inside the helmet.