Disclosure: I am participating in the Verizon Fans Voices program and have been provided with a wireless device and six months of service in exchange for my honest opinions about the product.
Eras are a funny thing about sports. Mainly because the current era is never regarded as highly as a previous one. That's evident in Pittsburgh, where football was at its best in the 1970s, not coincidentally when the Steelers were the best team in the league. It's not just football, though; you see this in every sport. Hang around enough people at a hockey game and you'll hear some 50-year-old dudes talk about how much better the game was when you could stand guys up at the blue line and tackle other players (these people exist, and they are wrong). Ethically, it's a little gray, but let's not pretend the steroid era didn't make baseball more exciting, as fans across the country tuned in to see who would win the neck-and-neck race for the home run title and whatnot. And basketball, uh. Wait. In basketball there was uh…
Space Jam? Yeah, definitely Space Jam.
The point is that people tend to focus on the past and let nostalgia cloud their opinions (not of Space Jam though, that is and will always be excellent). What people are missing out it is how freaking amazing it is to be a person in 2013. In regards to sports, we've had sports on TV for a good while now and that's just the expected norm. But look at how the internet has taken sports to the next level. If you wanted to watch Wayne Gretzky in the 1980s, you pretty much had to move to Canada. If you only stuck to TV, you'd have no idea who plays defense for the Tennessee Titans. Wait, maybe that's a bad exmaple, you probably don't anyway.
But it's 2013. We have the internet. Have you been on Twitter for a game? It's like watching with hundreds of other people, but no one is blocking the TV. Heck, look at how many bloggers have taken up tweeting full time because it's more accessible than a website. There's no such thing as an out-of-market game if you either have money or have no ethical qualms with pirate streams of games. We can immerse ourselves fully in the sports we love because of where technology has gone.
When Verizon hooked me up with a Droid Maxx, I was so ready to incorporate it into my life as a sports fan. I had been using my iPhone 4 to tweet during games and keep up with the conversation, while getting text message alerts from ESPN about all the news and scores and whatnot. I didn't even realize how much better things could be until I started using the Droid. The screen is enormous and I can read a lot more things at a time. There's a pretty decent task manager kind of thing that lets me easily switch between Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, what have you (as an aside, holy butts is the Facebook app terrible on the iPhone and totally functional on Android!). I can stream high quality football and hockey games over wifi or even the 4G, which still feels like witchcraft to me.
We're in an age of centering our whole lives around our smartphones, for better or worse. I'll tell you one thing though, it feels a lot better when your phone is better. This isn't the Dead Puck Era in hockey, the Steroid Era in baseball, or the… the seventies, in football. But it's the Technology Era.
And it's awesome.
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