Keidel: Jets Fans, Please Stay Off Twitter; You're Embarrassing Yourselves
By Jason Keidel
» More Columns
It seems I've started quite a scrum among the more ardent Jets fans. And I've broken at least four fingers from jamming the "Block" button.
When it comes to Gang Green devotees, let's make a salient distinction.
There seem to be two types of Jets fans. The long-suffering fan who toils in tired desperation, the Joe & Evan, "Oh, the pain!" gang. They plod down the decades in quiet resignation.
They recall and recoil before the montage of baleful memories, from the "Mud Bowl" to the Gastineau Game to Curtis Martin's blasphemous fumble to Vinny snapping his Achilles. They are in love-loathe conflict, all the symptoms of amour fou in full view. But their issues are entirely with the team.
You are on social media, but not 20 hours a day. And when you are online you are capable of civil discourse. You disagree with those of us who bang on Gang Green, but you make your points in logical, linear ways. "I know we stink, but..." is generally the opening salvo from the honest and earnest Jets fan. The worst I am accused of is piling on.
Then we have Fan Guy. The guy who slithers onto Twitter, never uses his own name, and goes on his carpet F-bomb missions on those of us who critique his Jets with a modicum of honesty. Any candid appraisal spawns biblical wrath from Fan Guy.
If he doesn't like Mike Francesa's take on Gang Green, he chides Mike over his age, accent, or appearance. He doesn't have the stones to call Mike and say these things, of course, so he takes his crusade to Twitter.
Fan Guy goes by "Mikey Knuckles" or whatever clever handle suits him that day. He's got some syllable, some amalgam of hyphens and consonants, like "NYJ" or "-JTS-" or similar etched into his Twitter moniker. It's like a siren call through cyberspace, letting you know he will be vocal, vulgar, and violent.
What has eluded this writer, and can find no answer in an algorithm, is the native, inverted hubris of the Jets fan. When I criticize the Nets, Mets, Yanks, or Giants, I find the occasional troll stroll across my screen. But nothing so vocal or vulgar as Fan Guy. The worse his Jets get, the angrier he gets and lashes out at the periphery.
The only comparable venom or vitriol I find in the five boroughs is the Knicks fan. Whenever we truthfully assert that Carmelo Anthony has never come close to winning a championship, we are scolded. When we make the reasonable assumption, based on his decade-plus playoff futility, that he won't ever win a championship, we are scalded. But basketball doesn't resonate like football or baseball, so the Knicks and Anthony apologist doesn't have the congregation that Fan Guy has.
Fan Guy rarely reads the articles he smashes or listens to the arguments he abhors. Indeed, his incredibly limited lexicon suggests he's done very little reading in his life. Words with more than two syllables are unspoken or misspelled.
We're talking the people who question our intellect, ancestry, sanity, and sexuality. Fan Guys have two things in common. The obscenely profane nature of their attacks and their allergy to the truth. The venom never reaches their team, but their fangs find the coratid artery of the critic.
Fan Guy cares about how many online friends or followers he has and counts how many you have. He has met none of these people in real life, yet his self-esteem is tethered to his Twitter following. It's like junior high except he's now 40 and rather than enjoy this divine October day, he's buried in chat rooms, designing F-bombs from his bedroom, mom's basement, or the comfort of his cubicle.
The first Jets fan has a life. He's at the game or playing pick-up ball or dating or working or working out. He checks his phone or tablet on occasion, but only when he's got a moment. The Jets' poor play weighs on him, but doesn't define him. Social media is part of his life; he doesn't live for social media.
Fan Guy is flashing profanity and emoticons. He imbues that glowing cube with mystical powers, his laptop or tablet a portal through which he shows us his genius. The Jets and their wretched performance are never the problem. The person who points it out is.
And there seems to be a special, savage tone to Twitter. Perhaps because Fan Guy can find you and harass you but he need not need your approval to enter your life, like the way you must accept his friend request on Facebook.
Indeed, Facebook, as much as any online apparatus can, is a kind of cozy village. You find your friends from high school, post pictures, and lay out the history and human archaeology of your life. Twitter is about vomiting the most nerve-bending paragraph as possible, never to exceed 140 characters, in rapid fire. And it made me wonder if sports fans really use social media and, if they do, which appendage they use to reach the world.
According to a 2012 study by the sports media group Perform, which surveyed over 1,000 American sports fans, 26 percent of us use social media to follow leagues, teams, and players.
However, only 33 percent of them used Twitter to stay informed about their teams, whereas 90 percent of them favored Facebook and 64 percent also used YouTube.
Another study in 2013, conducted by Catalyst, part of media consulting titan IMG, said 73 percent use Facebook to follow and discuss sports. 54 percent use YouTube. Just 37 percent use Twitter.
More people are using social media than ever, but the ratios have remained around the same, with a 2-to-1 edge for Facebook over Twitter. The only exception is during actual games, when fans look to Twitter for quick, pithy (and profane) reaction. So suffice it to say Facebook is for the more reasonable, more mature slice of our society.
Twitter for the low-end of the key demo and caters to the most vitriolic impulses of our culture. Sure, we sign some vague contract with Twitter which tethers us to some modicum of decency. But just spend five minutes in the online crucible and you'll see the kind of mind-numbing language that would make George Carlin and Redd Foxx blush. The defining difference, of course, is the cyberspace vocabulary isn't designed to be funny.
It's our fault that Geno Smith went to movies instead of meetings. It's our fault Michael Vick admitted he wasn't ready to play in San Diego. It's our fault they wasted a top-ten pick on Dee Milliner. It's our fault Richard Todd decided to play catch with A.J. Duhe. It's our fault they drafted Blair Thomas and Vernon Gholston and Milliner. It's our fault Bill Parcells' epic wanderlust took him from the team before he finished the job. It's our fault they haven't won a Super Bowl since 1969.
I wrote a sprawling piece calling the Mets equally wretched, saying that Sandy Alderson did nothing to warrant an extension, other than shave the team's payroll. Not one Mets fan took a megaphone to Twitter and called me a caveman with a laptop. When I rip my Yankees, declare the dynasty dead, not one Yankees fan hopes my plane crashes on the way to Vegas. When I bang on Big Blue, not one Giants worshiper says my parents were clearly first cousins.
And, of course, Fan Guy's default diagnosis is that we're whining. We just can't take the same, white-hot critiques that we apply to the Jets. Actually, we're just trying to point out that Fan Guy is an adjunct of the Jets. Neither Fan Guy nor Gang Green ever admits there's a problem -- with their language, lives, or overall way of doing business.
Besides, I can just block Fan Guy. Sadly, for him, he can't just block Gang Green.
Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel
You May Also Be Interested In These Stories
