Awesome Time

I love sports message boards. Initially I used to poke around the Pirates.com fan forum around the July 31 trade deadline, scoping for links to rumored deals. As I’ve gotten more into college sports, I’ve become a long time lurker of the Pitt basketball and football boards through Rivals.com.

While message boards get a bad rap, I’ve found they’re mostly a pretty good cross section of most amateur writing that you’ll find on the internet. There’s some very worthwhile opinions and analysis, a plethora of unfounded rumors, the occasional insider tidbit and then a lot of ranting that can degenerate into age-inappropriate personal attacks. In a sad way, this is what entertains me the most.

For example, over the holidays I came across a family friend whom I knew to be a regular poster on the football board. He’s a local accountant around my parents age who graduated from Pitt in the early 70s. When I asked him why he hadn’t written anything in a while, his cheeks got very flush, and he instinctively swallowed down his glass of wine in one gulp. “Oh you didn’t see?” he said. “I got into a spat.”

He then proceeded to tell me about how earlier in the season, another poster had called him out for his repeated criticism of running back Larod Stephens-Howling. After a few messages going back and forth with debating the relevance of various stats, the thread degenerated into something like this:

Family Friend: I’m not sure you know enough to figure out what channel the game’s on next week.

Other Guy: Whatever. Why don’t you go screw up some more tax returns?

Family Friend (Apparently shocked and appalled that this guy knew who he was and what he did for a living): I couldn’t concentrate. I was too stunned from when I saw you at a game last year and found out how fat your wife was.

Other Guy: That’s very mature. You just think you know everything about everything, don’t you?

Family Friend: Ain’t it the truth brother!

Then, realizing that the conversation had crossed some sort of line, and petrified that people knew who he actually was, Family Friend deleted the account. “I’m much happier these days that I’m not stressing out over the opinions of some guy who’s made over 5,000 posts to an internet site,” he told me.

I was reminded of that interaction when I clicked onto the Pitt message board today, after hearing that West Virginia had hired Bill Stewart as its new football coach. Stewart led the Mountaineers to a 48-28 thumping of Oklahoma last night, a dramatic win especially on the heels of former coach Rich Rodriguez’s departing for Michigan just weeks ago. Still, Stewart is a 30 year assistant coach without the pedigree or track record of most of the other candidates. The combination of the win and the hire seemed perfect for message board fodder. I wasn’t disappointed by what I found.

Like this thread about the West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin being on the sideline:

“Does the WV governor do anything except meddle in WVU football affairs?***”

“ I Read his Lips - He was trying to tell [WVU RB Noel] Devine that if he sticks around one more year he will qualify for his MBA.”

“Then he’ll have his MBA before his GED.”

What else is he gonna do? Shoot skunks, get lickered up, nuzzle his sister, propose to his dog?

Or this one, about FB Owen Schmitt’s post-game interview:

I gotta admit, when Schmitt started crying in his post-game interview…I started to get goose bumps. No matter how much you hate WVU, and I certainly do, you have to love seeing a kid who plays the game hard, leaves his guts on the field and loves his school and his state.

Re: I gotta admit, when Schmitt started crying in his post-game interview… He looks borderline retarded to me.

Hey, Schmidt was born with a cleft palette. Some online heroes amaze me. You know NOTHING about the kid and you say he looks borderline retarded. You sound like a straight out idiot and hardly borderline. How will you like it someday if you read on the internet some idiot calling your child borderline retarded? How old are you? 9?

Who cares about his disfigured mouth? He got a mohawk to distract from his mouth problem. I respect Schmitt and think he is a heck of a player. They interviewed a MAN on TV today named Owen Schmitt. A guy I would like on my team anytime. Patty, it’s now time to give your bj for three as your board name says.

Cleft “palette”, or rather “palate”???…Wow… Your enlightenment has finally after years allowed me to see how a disfigured mouth relates to Owen Schmitt’s mental retardation. I guess they’re both birth defects, but one is often the result of drug/alcohol use during pregnancy and the other is often the result of inbreeding—both of which would fit the mold of a model citizen of West Virginia. What the hell is your point again??? PS…I have all my teeth and visit the dentist every six months. How about you and yours?

Brilliant, right?

I was at one of my girlfriend Meghann’s friend’s apartments during a visit to Hagerstown recently when another friend of hers, a resident of Baltimore, denounced the arrival of Starbucks in her neighborhood as gentrification.

Disclaimer: I am not a topical person. I buy the newspaper to do the crossword and read selective sports articles, and I read the opinion section of the Sunday paper. As a rule I generally avoid meaningful reading due to my short attention span. That being said…

“Gentrification” is kind of an ugly word to be attached to chain stores we all know and love, given racial and class implications. I tried to discuss it with Meghann on the ride home from Hagerstown a couple of days ago, but she (understandably) leapt to her friend’s defense, and the result was more of a yelling match than a give and take sort of debate, as most arguments are.

I studied economics in college, and I probably got much less out of it than I should have. I took a bunch of macroeconomics classes, including several on economic development, but I’ll be the first to confess that I know next to nothing about it in the academic sense. However, it does seem to me that what Meghann’s friend affectionately referred to as gentrification is what many of the people who are making decisions see as development.

For example: We live on the border of East Liberty, a neighborhood in Pittsburgh’s East End. In the last five years, a number of chain stores (Borders, Whole Foods, and Starbucks, to name a few) have come into the area as a result of “urban renewal” projects. I’ve heard the area referred to as “up and coming.” It was a big market district back in the day, but in the 60’s and 70’s it kind of went to shit with the coinciding erection of low-income high rises and the failed Penn Circle and Motor Square Gardens experiments (see the Wikipedia entry for more details).

Are the arrivals of Whole Foods, Borders, and the like a good thing? Do they represent development? They certainly make the area more attractive to middle class white people, who have taken the area by storm. Money is coming into the area that wasn’t coming in before, along with jobs. This is arguably development, since the aggregate income of the area has increased. But isn’t there a problem if the process forces out the same poor black folk that ended up in the high rises 30 years ago when they were displaced by the erection of the Civic (now Mellon) Arena in the Hill District two miles down Centre Avenue? It is worth noting that part of the “urban renewal” projects is the demolition of that low income housing.

I’m certainly not saying anything new here. MacKenzie Carpenter wrote a pretty good article about the issue in the PG a couple of weeks ago. Some local black community groups are understandably unimpressed with the development, noting that there is little in the development geared to the African-American consumer.

Personally, I like the area. I feel like we live close to everything we need, which is nice. However, I’m pretty sure that an eventual result of the whole urban renewal process will be displacement (given rising housing costs and the destruction of existing low income housing), so I remain skeptical, and I understand where Meghann’s friend was coming from when she commented on the arrival of Starbucks.

Ladies and gentlemen, the site is up.  We are now officially on Awesome Time.