The phrase above (from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age) ricocheted around my head out of nowhere a couple of weeks ago, when my rant about Jay Cutler and his antagonists got promoted to the front page of Anchor of Gold and I was Twitter’d a message that I had been promoted to front-page access. It flitted through my mind again when my recruiting summary was well-received, and again yesterday when one of the siterunners asked somebody else to post a recap, which I did and which was itself well-received. For which I am profoundly grateful, given that I haven’t done sportswriting to order in seventeen years.
In The Diamond Age, nation-states have largely given way to “phyles,” distributed entities organized around a common culture rather than geographic or (necessarily) racial lines. It’s hard not to see echoes of this in the world of sports, where concepts like “Red Sox Nation” and “Raider Nation” have been aped and emulated to the point where Vanderbilt’s own Steve Tcheingang (himself a native of Cameroon, and one of four different nationalities represented on the squad) tags his Tweets with #DoresNation. Any major city in America will have at least one bar associated with fans of each single NFL franchise – Vikings bar in Nashville, Packer bar in New York City, Steeler bar in Santa Monica, or (erstwhile) Redskins bar in Palo Alto. Similarly, Pete’s Tavern up in China Basin has in years past become the de facto home of Vanderbilt basketball in San Francisco.
So where does the quote come in? I have often said earlier that I would be just as happy to have no comments on my blog, and that I don’t find the lack of comments to be a problem anywhere else (and indeed usually block them, SBNation blogs excepted, when browsing elsewhere). Since the opportunity cost of having one’s own blog is as next to nothing as makes no difference, having comments (as John Gruber has said) is rather like building your own soapbox, with your own time and effort and creativity and credibility, and then being expected to offer that soapbox to anyone who wants to wander through, with predictable results.*
What has happened at AoG is that the siterunners have, in essence, offered me the use of their soapbox, with the unspoken reciprocal understanding that I will make appropriate use of it, and that by doing so, I will contribute in a way that enriches the community as a whole. Which, in turn, will reflect on me as a member of that community. And since this has become the principal blog of Vanderbilt athletics…well, put it all together, and you see where I would get the sense that I have been given an equity stake in the tribal enterprise.
I didn’t go all in for Vanderbilt until fall 2006. It was a prolonged exercise (possibly chronicled here, possibly elsewhere) that arose from the demise of Division I athletics at my undergrad, leaving me with three institutions whose associations were less strong than the traditional four-year-undergraduate institutional affiliation. I managed to hammer out a logical path that ended with justifying my permanent affiliation with Vanderbilt and making a commitment to trying to foster that affiliation. It paid out pretty quick, with a Sweet Sixteen season for basketball, a #1 ranking for baseball, and a winning season for the first time in 26 years (and a bowl win for the first time in 53!) for football, and now the entire athletic program is on the way up. I have enough time and emotion invested with the black and gold that any Vanderbilt success would be far more satisfying than, say, the Giants’ win in the World Series (which, while enjoyable, was not as ultimately gratifying as if I had been following the team closely for the whole eight years since the last pennant). So to be part of the greater tribe now – doing game recaps on the site, live-blogging with the others, swapping tweets with players, etc etc – is a tremendously gratifying capper on five years of realigning my support.
* I got multiple recommendations and stars for a comment on EDSBS: “I used to have a genius level IQ, multiple degrees, and a fast track job at Apple. Then I read the comments at AL.com. Now I wash myself with a rag on a stick.”