I was reading the new book about ESPN on my Kindle this past week, and while their business model and product are certainly the envy of many in the industry, I found myself wondering if the network was getting, well, too big for its britches. Does ESPN have too much influence over sports in the United States?
So I found myself asking the question: Can one follow US sports without utilizing ESPN products? What does one lose, if anything, by doing so? The only way to find out, perhaps, is to try to do so. So for the next few months, I will be foregoing use of any product with the ESPN label, yet will still try to follow sports as I normally do. The results of my efforts will be detailed here, for anyone interested.
Such an effort may be perceived as a criticism of the ESPN brand, but I do not intend it as such. I lived for the times when I could watch Australian Rules football on the network when it first started (my family could not afford this newfangled invention called cable TV). I found a place to watch one of the Georgetown-St. John's college basketball clashes in the 1985-86 season. When I got my first job after college, my first investment was in a TV so that I finally had full access to ESPN. The ESPN Sports Net and its successors have been my home page since my first computer. I had to have XM Radio when I bought my most recent car just for ESPN Radio. I just want to see how much I will miss it.
I may be perceived as having an inherent bias, so here are my sporting interests. I am originally from the West Coast, having grown up in the state of Washington. So I follow a number of Seattle sports, the Mariners, the University of Washington basketball and football. I very much miss the Sonics, and the late Mariner broadcaster Dave Niehaus, as part of this heritage. My primary sport used to be baseball, but has morphed over the years to college basketball; my wife graduated from Michigan State, so that works for us. I follow tennis and golf whenever I can, and like college sports in general.
The one way I differ from most US sports fans is that I am not a follower of the National Football League. I followed the game intently when I was growing up, as a fan of the Oakland Raiders, since their games were available on a Seattle radio station before the Seahawks came into existence. However, I grew tired of the media fascination with the game, first in Seattle, as the Seahawks grew their franchise, then in the Washington D.C. area, where I worked after college. Perhaps the effort is similar: I do not want the media defining what I like and how I follow it.
So the ground rules for my effort are:
No ESPN on television. This is easy for me right now, since I live in Singapore, and the cable system in our apartment lost ESPN to a cable competitor about a year ago. However, any ESPN product I might otherwise see, such as the NBA finals, is also off limits.
The ESPN I used to receive here was ESPN International, which of course is nothing like ESPN in the US. I was surprised to learn that I did not miss it nearly as much as I imagined when the network moved off our cable system, which may also have contributed to the genesis of this blog.
No ESPN Radio. As with ESPN television, this isn't so difficult when living overseas, but when I lived in the US, I would have it on whenever I was in my car. I would still occasionally call up ESPN Radio streaming on the Internet after we moved to Singapore, but will avoid it now.
Both these platforms will become far more ubiquitous for me in just over six weeks, when my family returns to the United States, so this blog will have much more to say on these platforms in the coming weeks.
No ESPN.com or any of its affiliates. This is a harder presence to squelch, since their brand exists on Facebook, and Twitter, and is the home page on every browser on every computer I may access in my house. I'm not sure my scrub is complete, but will report on that, too.
Obviously in my current situation, I will miss the ESPN.com brand the most, and will detail what I will miss and what I will look to replace in Internet media circles in my next post.
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