The weirdness of it all

Some days you have to stifle yourself, as Archie Bunker used to say when he was in full Misogynist Jackass mode. This especially happens as you get older, and the world becomes more strange -- and lord knows it's never been stranger then in the Age of the Bastard Plague.

And so to the latest occasion when I caught myself starting a sentence with "Back in MY day ..."

The "sonny" being inferred.

In any event, this time it was prompted by a tweet from my friend and former sportswriting colleague Justin Cohn, observing the weirdness of our times. See, he was covering a Mad Ants game at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum -- except the Mad Ants weren't at the Coliseum, but half a country away in Orlando. So Justin  was covering it by watching the game on a screen and then (presumably) getting quotes on a Zoom call and writing a gamer off that.

All together now: Back in MY day...

Back in my day, when we didn't have to worry about Bastard Plagues, covering a game remotely would not only have been technologically problematical, it would have been a flagrant violation of the Sportswriter Code. Any conversation suggesting such a thing would have gone like this:

Sportswriter: Hey, boss, the weather's lousy outside. How 'bout I just watch the Purdue game on TV and write my story off that instead of driving all the way to West Lafayette?

Sports editor: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA ... no.

But strange times call for strange measures, so now this is how a sportswriter occasionally has to work his gig. 

Oh, they still travel to cover games, a lot, but when they get there nobody's home. Covid protocols mean they're covering the games in empty or nearly empty arenas/stadiums. I can't imagine how bizarre that must be, and how curiously deflating. It must be more like covering a particularly intense practice scrimmage instead of an actual game.

All that's missing is who calls shirts and who calls skins.

And covering a game the way Justin covered the Mad Ants last night?

Well ... back in MY day (sonny), there was a certain sportswriter for a certain publication who was widely suspected of having done the same thing for a particular IU basketball road game. No one on press row could recall seeing him there before, during or in the postgame. But the next day, there was a game story with his byline, complete with quotes and a dateline from the game's site.

In the insular sportswriting fraternity, this was regarded as the worst kind of fraud, and made him an object of scorn. Or at least it did in the city where he worked at the time.

Today, of course, it's just the way you have to do things sometimes -- only it's done up front, and minus the phony dateline. 

Weird. So damn weird.