No time for Twitter
WHERE IS THE great William Safire when you need him?
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Safire, who died Sunday at 79, had a storied linguistic career that included a stint as Spiro Agnew's speechwriter.
It was Safire who penned the famous line Agnew uttered while referring to the media in 1970: "Nattering nabobs of negativism."
We bring this up because we need a new bit of alliteration to describe the inane proliferation of Twittering athletes.
Just yesterday, the Texas Tech football team, the Miami Heat and the New York Jets were each involved in separate Twitter incidents.
Texas Tech coach Mike Leach has banned his players from tweeting - shorthand for sending a message on Twitter - after a linebacker noted that Leach was late for a team meeting on Sunday.
In Miami yesterday morning, Heat player Dwyane Wade told his 96,348 Twitter followers that he was heading to work.
The problem is the NBA doesn't want its players tweeting while they're on the clock.
"The NBA has put in strict rules about it," Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra told the Associated Press at the team's media day yesterday. "Social media, we will not accept that in our building during office hours. That's the way we'll look at it when we're coming to practice, to shootarounds and to games. We're coming to work and we're coming to get a job done. That's not time for social media."
Finally, there's New York Jets wide receiver David Clowney, who learned the hard way that you have to watch what you tweet.
Clowney was benched by head coach Rex Ryan for Sunday's game against Tennessee after tweeting about his lack of playing time the week before.
Yesterday, Ryan talked about Clowney's benching.
"I was upset with him, yep," Ryan told the AP. "For a couple of reasons. One of them is you'll hear things if a guy's unhappy or whatever. I'm not a big Twitter guy, but you hear different things. To me, this is about our team and understanding this is about our team. No individual is bigger than the team."
Take that you bunch of twaddling, tweeting, Twittering twits.
- Tom Mahon
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