The Internet. How has it been for you? Here love's first blossom faded quickly. I came back from The Olympics in 1996 and there it was on the second floor. An Internet machine. You could hear the fanfares playing as soon as the elevator doors opened.
We gathered round like dazzled Native Americans being shown their first shiny mirror. When my turn came I spent five minutes surreptitiously looking up my own name and reached a loose end. So I switched to a different search engine and looked myself up again. Just in case somebody was making money out of selling nude photos of me.
I have waited for the Internet to change my life and not just my phone bill. I have waited to see somebody make a good oldfashioned honest profit on the thing. I have waited for sport and the Internet to settle down happily together. It's beginning to look like that won't happen. As an interested party my response is perhaps typical: Tee hee! I say.
The Internet is tricky. Thank goodness. Did you berate yourself for your cowardice as cyberspace became the old west and great stampeding hordes of prospectors, bespectacled and bespotted, marked out the new territory into which we Luddites would eventually be chartered as slaves. I did.
Sport was prime land. Prospectors staked their claim by posting silly undergraduate columns about English soccer on to the net. They gave us tardy results services and chat rooms filled with the generally simple minded. Great meteor showers of unreliable information and dodgy opinion became available.
Experts in the field now say that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Michael Wolff of New York magazine last week pronounced the Internet dead as anything other than a facilitating technology like phones or faxes. "People didn't want to pay for content and there was no way to generate money out of content. It didn't work for advertisers".
This obit is good news for sport. I'd rather get a call from a half drunk friend singing "two-nil-two-nil" down the line than pay to get a little beep on the WAP phone telling me it's one-nil. It's good news if you've ever craned your neck on the bus to read the scorelines on somebody else's Saturday pink or made friends through sports talk or watched games in pubs or just enjoyed the inherent conviviality that goes with being a sports fan. They won't be making cyber nerds out of us after all.
SFX, the owners of David Beckham's "presence" on the Internet, recently decided to postpone launching Beckham's website. Who could blame them? Even Tiger Woods isn't making money out of the web yet.
SportBusiness magazine even reported this month that content is no longer king. Following the death of web biggies like worldsport.com and eurosoccer.com, among others, experts predict bad times for content pushers. Take Quokka Sports, a giant which can no longer see clouds so blackened by vultures is the sky. Quokka ran the NBCOLYMPIC.com site last year, one of the most successful sports sites ever. Months later a ghoul from Merrill Lynch is quoted: we believe Quokka's chances of breaking even before running out of money are low.
You need to have a fast business metabolism and a quick imagination if the alchemy of sport and the net is to make you money.
THE mutts have it sussed. While most Irish sites are still works in progress fighting the same battle as Quokka, Betinternet.com's deal with Bord na gCon to put greyhound racing and with it the Irish tote on to the screens of gamblers all over America seems like a good idea. Gamblers love the net. Spreadbetting punters will go broke with quiet efficiency.
Sportsbooks will be widely available. The wonderful Sportspages.Com site will continue to bring us the best sports columnists in the world. Golfers will benefit. Mbook4golf.com is an American service which integrates tee times at over 300 courses. You can find the right slot, the right course and everybody wins. An Irish version anyone? Sports will promote their games and retail their stats and their memorabilia but beyond that? Faff.
For newspapers? Sport should be a seller but nobody yet has done web sport as well as a printed newspaper: the sweep of the page, the familiar lay-outs, the smudge of ink, the feel of anticipation. So far it has just meant cranky letters from people who don't buy your paper and rows about the industrial relations implications of deals in which papers sell on content to other businesses.
It seems information as a commodity is too democratically available on the Internet for it ever to turn a profit and big, traditional media are already reversing out of cyberspace. The implications for us big sports kids: it's five o'clock, time for sports report!
The information superhighway won't be about information after all. Surprise, surprise, it's about consuming. New ways of consuming. New things to consume. People aren't buying web edition newspapers or score updates or chatrooms or bales of trite information which they already have. It's reassuring. The social instinct lives on. A newspaper is a tactile, sociable, transportable thing and that's why no paper has yet turned hits into profits.
The same for sport. It's the last of the great communal experiences. You need shoulders to rub against. I watched the second half of the 1999 All-Ireland hurling final on the Internet in a cafe in Clarke Street, Chicago. It was a crushingly lonely experience. Unable to find a pub with a crowd to share the experience with, I sat there and silently absorbed the dying moments, watched the flash interviews, smiled back at JBM's grin and then got up and walked out into the sunshine feeling as if I was a million miles from anywhere. I hadn't even the heart to go back in and e-mail someone a nude picture of myself.
