The other night, some friends of mine and I went out to Hooters for dinner. Ironically, it was actually the girls in the party who suggested it. However, it turned out to be one of the worst dining experiences in recent memory, because the particular location we went too apparently had the equivalent of TNA Wrestling management working the kitchen, because it was the slowest service I’d received in months, and when the food came out, it was not really hot and was subpar.
However, it did give me a lot of time to watch TV, and I caught the very tail end of the Braves game, where Braves pitcher Sean Newcomb came within one strike from throwing the first Braves no-hitter in 24 years. Despite the heart-breaking near-miss, it was undoubtedly the greatest start of a very young and budding career for the once-highly touted prospect. Newcomb should absolutely have been feeling really good after the win that prevented the Dodgers from sweeping them at home.
Nah, instead the afternoon turned sour really fast when some Twitter troll(s) dug into his Twitter history and found some tweets he made when he was high school that were yeah, racially insensitive and pretty homophobic. So shortly after having the best start of his career, Newcomb was sitting at the media table for the post-game talking about how regretful and apologetic he was for saying stupid shit for when he was a teenager, instead of talking about his fantastic start, in the present.
From what I understand, the person who started this shit storm was supposedly a Nationals fan, so some vindictive Braves fan(s) decided to eye-for-an-eye the situation, so they took it upon themselves to go digging through the old tweets of one of the young Nationals players, and found one in rising star Trea Turner.
All this comes just weeks after Milwaukee Brewers’ pitcher Josh Hader came under fire for precisely the same thing, at approximately the same time he was on the mound pitching in the all-star game, and a few months after recent NBA draftee Donte DiVincenzo had some of his old tweets unearthed shortly after he was drafted.
Sure, the shit all of these guys said when they were teenagers were stupid, and it’s even dumber that they put it in writing and slapped it onto the internet, where everything is permanent no matter what people believe things can be deleted and eradicated. But that’s the world now, no matter just how dumb it might seem to those slightly older and a little more paranoid of the idea of consequences.
However, I challenge any person on the planet to try and sell the claim that they themselves have never said anything insensitive when they were a similar age, because anyone who claims otherwise is most undoubtedly lying and/or delusional.
But the bigger target of criticism is unmistakably the people out there who take it upon themselves to go wading through the Twitter accounts of athletes and other celebrities, looking for shit to publicly shame them for. And the fact that this trend has clearly turned into a game of waiting until these figures are at the peaks of their exposures to unleash the embarrassment is just this shitty insufferable act that really agitates me more than I think it really should.
Like really, there are people out there who literally expend the time and effort to wade through endless numbers of tweets from celebrities, looking for those nuggets of taboo words and phrases, and then if they find any, they screen grab, bookmark, or copy embeds and then wait for the most opportune times to embarrass their marks, preferably when they’re at peaks of their careers.
I have to imagine that now, more than ever, anyone who’s a celebrity of any sort, is probably taking time out to go through their own tweet histories and looking to get rid of absolutely anything that could be construed as politically incorrect or offensive to anyone. Smart ones probably already have, and athletes are apparently frequently easy targets because most are a bunch of dumb jocks anyway. But in doing so, it’s kind of defeating the purpose for what Twitter kind of was originally meant for, for people to spontaneously tweet out thoughts and things that were relevant to the minute, but because the world is a shitty place and social media is cancer, all those things too must be critically curated and be mindful for when the context is lost.
The only difference between a bro-ey high school jock and a professional athlete is maybe 4-7 years and the fact that one gets paid a salary to play the same game. I’m not condoning the things that any of these bros have said in their lives, nor does it make it in any way acceptable, but it can’t really be shocking or surprising considering the archetype of society in which they come from.
But without question, social media is a putrid wasteland of shit where not nearly enough good comes out it, compared to the oceans of negativity that endlessly flow, cascade into reality like waves, and the occasional tidal wave or tsunami wrecks things for the worse way too often.
This is why I’m sparsely on it, and I fully feel that the world would be a much better place without any of it.
