As Twitter flits between making its users see stuff they don’t care about and adding new stuff no one cares about, it’s easy to take everything that’s not the core product and ignore it. It’s also preferable. But sometimes, you see something just wrong enough that it makes you care about it. So don’t worry, Twitter, sometimes the system works. Which is bad because the way the system is supposed to work is bad.
The thing I saw yesterday was this:
The word I like to use for this is rovellification, which simply means to take a perfectly good sports story and then loudly and angrily insist that the business side of it is the important thing, usually criticizing those who complain about your priorities as naive fools who don’t understand the way things work.
In this case, DeAndre Hopkins made a shocking catch on a Hail Mary with time almost expired to win an NFL game. If you have seen the highlight, it is difficult not to be astounded not only at the fact that he caught the ball, but that it was even possible for him to do it — there were 3 defenders surrounding him and the ball still somehow found its way into his hands. There was a reasonably strong pass rush, and the throw was incredible, and the catch was otherworldly. It was one of those plays that you remember all year, and if you’re an Arizona Cardinals fan, you remember it as long as you remember football games. It was that impressive.
There is not one single non-Nike employee NFL fan who was thinking, “How much free advertising did Nike get out of this?” It is an almost incomprehensible thing, to have that thought at that time. And yet, not only did someone have that thought, and not only did that someone write that thought, and not only did that piece of writing make its way to an editor who okayed it, but it was then relayed as news, as a thought that it was normal to have.
I hate this. This takes all the good, fun things about sports — the unexpected, the unbearable tension, the incredible athleticism — and boils them all away, leaving a picture of someone else’s money in their wake. Back when analytics were first getting a foothold in baseball, traditional-minded people said statheads needed to watch the game and that it was more than just numbers on a spreadsheet. Silly as those arguments were, well, they apply here more than they ever have anywhere. That nugget of information is for someone who does not care about the sport at all.
And there’s also the fact that that $5.7 million that DeAndre Hopkins generated for Nike? He won’t see any of it. Now, he’s doing fine financially, so don’t worry too much about him, but on the other hand, he’s the guy who made this happen, and the amount of money coming in from it is now apparently a news story as well, and Hopkins gets no extra benefit from it.
So who is that story for? Who will see it and think, “Yes, I care about this,” presumably while flipping through various stock market indeces? It’s for everyone, to normalize that kind of thinking. The point is that consumers will think of the real game as the money involved, the athletes incidental. The point is that you should know that the most important thing is to create value for Nike. The point is to take the sport away from the players and put it in the hands of the businessmen.
It’s possible I’m reading too much into this, I know. But it’s hard not to read into a total non-story absolutely irrelevant to the lives of anyone who sees it becoming reasonably well known, especially when the kind of thinking that created it is so repugnant.
When I think of DeAndre Hopkins making that catch, I think about the catch. I do not think about the money it made for Nike, and I can’t imagine why anyone would.