Hello. I'm rokirovka. This may be the only blog post I ever write. I've been criticizing Joe Posnanski pretty harshly since the Freeh Report came out, in comments under his unrelated most recent blog post "Boo Boos".

A lot of people probably wonder, why get so upset about what one sportswriter does or doesn't write about Joe Paterno in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child abuse scandal at Penn State? After all, one sportswriter isn't really the main issue here, is he?

No, he's not. But there's a reason why what he writes or doesn't write matters to me. I am a sports fan. A big sports fan. I love to watch sports, I love to talk about sports, I love to read about sports. And Joe Posnanski was one of the best reads in the business. So was Bill James, whose books I grew up on.

So it breaks my heart when I see sportswriters whose work I have loved go off the deep end on a sports story that is more important than any sporting event, that should make sports itself seem insignificant by comparison.

It makes me wonder about sports fans in general. I would like to think it should be taken for granted that sports is sports, and life is life. Sports is a game, and life is real. No one should ever allow the game to become bigger than real life. As a big sports fan, when I relate to other big sports fans, I would like to be able to trust that they recognize like I do that our interest is just entertainment, and that sports is not so important in the grand scheme of things that it should cloud our view of real life. I think sports can illustrate life lessons, but only if we recognize that the sports examples are just illustrations, reflections of life and not life itself.


The thought of fans letting sports cloud their judgment of real life issues disturbs me a great deal. So when I see excellent and influential sportswriters like Joe Posnanski and Bill James letting sports cloud their judgment of real life issues, that is extremely disturbing to me. It makes me wonder, if Posnanski and James have succumbed to that, how many thousands or millions of other sports fans have too? And that, sadly, makes me question how appropriate it is to be a big sports fan at all.


I want to keep loving sports. But I want to do it in the company of other sports fans who have their heads on straight, not the ones who have become so mesmerized by the mythology of sports figures that they have lost their ability to see real life clearly.