I've watched a lot of sports in my life. I've played nearly as many. But in all of that time, I've never seen anything quite like what happened in Sunday's NCAA basketball tournament game between Louisville University and Duke University.
Louisville sophomore Kevin Ware leaped in an attempt to get a hand in the face of a Duke 3?point attempt, something he's done hundreds of times in his life. But this time, something went horribly wrong. Ware landed on his right leg, and it gave immediately gave out. I'll save you all of the gruesome details, but before his coach could put a towel over it, 35,000 people in the arena and millions watching live on television saw his bone sticking half a foot out of his leg.
The reactions of players that are so often reserved were real and heartbreaking. His teammates on the court fell to the floor, unable to brace themselves. The Louisville bench burst in to tears, while multiple players were sick right there on the sidelines.
The emotions weren't reserved for the Cardinals either. CBS cameras followed a Duke player walking back across the court, wiping tears from his eyes. Nine minutes after Ware landed, the game continued. But those nine minutes were like nothing else I've seen in sports.
People in attendance at Lucas Oil Stadium were not the only ones reacting to the game, and I feel that looking at those reactions can tell us a lot about sports media in the digital age.
The first division fell to the producers at CBS. They could have easily gone to commercial, anything to get the world's attention off of this poor 20?year old. Instead, they chose to stay with the game for the entire break in the action, going to the replay multiple times just to make sure YouTube would have enough videos of the incident to last us a lifetime. They wizened up by the time halftime came around, refusing to show the replay of the injury itself, but the damage had already been done.
Twitter was a mix of good and bad. #prayforware was trending almost immediately, with many positive and heartfelt tweets that reflected well on sports fans as a group. But there was also the bad, including the making of a fake account for Kevin Ware that tricked 17,500 people into following it. While the first tweet was innocuous enough, others have been inappropriate - "chicks dig scars" - or attempts to make a business move using this horrible situation: "SHARE THIS FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN FINAL FOUR TICKETS."
These events create real questions of how we should all handle ourselves in situations such as this. Are televisions stations required to show us the good and the bad? Do they have a responsibility to an injured player to do right by them? Have we given too much power to the public with websites like Twitter? Should sportswriters distance themselves from these new media outlets, lest they fall prey to traps like this?
Unfortunately, I think we are stuck with the world we have now. The information age demands full access at all times and is willing to give up accuracy and quality to get it. Twitter can be a fiendish toy, but it's also done so much to advance the world of sports journalism in a way that no other medium could ever do. Whether we can continue to harness it for good remains to be seem, but the results of the inhumane actions of one anonymous user do not bode well.
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