« PREVIOUS: No. 27 -- DeWayne Wise's catch saves Mark Buehrle's perfect game
This story appears in the Dec. 14 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
I hate Twitter. There, I said it.
I hate Twitter because I fear one day it will render my job obsolete. I hate Twitter because everybody talks and nobody listens; there is little dialogue and a whole lot of monologue. (Hey, at least The Magazine has its Reply All page.) I hate Twitter because it breeds vanity, narcissism, egocentrism and every other self-serving neurosis. I hate Twitter because it reaches the masses like Facebook on steroids. I hate Facebook. And steroids.
So naturally, when my bosses at The Mag assigned me a story on how Twitter transformed our relationship with athletes this year, I nearly hurled. Because I knew that professionalism, not to mention the need to pay my mortgage, required me to try the free and fast-growing (estimates range from 15 million to 50 million total users) microblogging service. Like a legion of star athletes have done, I must enter the Twittersphere, join the Twitterati, send tweets to my tweeps.