This column is not about that big game that happened over the weekend. It will never speculate on who the greatest athletes of all time are. This column will not answer the question "Will the Green Bay Packers repeat as Super Bowl Champions?"
This column will also not answer the question of whether you should start Joe Flacco or Kyle Orton on your fantasy team this week. There will be no power rankings, at least not traditional ones. There might be power rankings of other things, such as a ranking of the entertainment value of mainstream beer commercials during the Super Bowl. But probably not.
This column will not tell you whether Tiger Woods will someday be "back" to major-winning form. But this column will consider, for example, whether Tiger's apology to the public for his major infidelities was really sincere. And it will talk about whether someone who has had people in his ear telling him how to act and which decisions to make since his teens can really be sincere at all.
I might ask you to watch a powerful Nike ad, in which Tiger stands in black-and-white on a pristine course, birds chirping in the background, while his late father Earl tells him what we all want to tell our troubled superstar: "I want to know what you were thinking, what your feelings are, and did you learn anything." And then this column might make a snide remark about how Tiger's actual words to the public are so unsatisfying in regard to these questions and how and why his decision to refuse questions at his apology press conference is so frustrating for us. This column would also discuss whether the public has any right to pry into Tiger's personal life in the first place.
If you're reading these words online, you got a special bonus in that last paragraph — two hyperlinks! If you're reading this column in print, that's cool, too — say hi to the Dewick pizza lady for me; her name's Winnie. But you should go online and click on this column there. That way when I make a point by referencing a moment in a game or an athlete's reaction to an interviewer's question or want to discuss something like whether Grantland.com is the coolest thing ever or just a group of great writers who will never be cool as long as they are employees of that monolith we all know and some of us love, ESPN, there's a link for you to check out.
I'm not entirely convinced that print journalism is dying. I still love reading newspapers and punny headlines. But the upside of the move online is that a writer can connect with his readers interactively. Got a gripe or a correction? Tweet me at @benkochman.
My goal is to establish a brain-to-brain connection with each of you in the most efficient way I can. Together, let's peel back the layers of sports and examine the athletes that play the games, the people who cover them and the fans who spend countless hours consuming them.
That's The Wackness. It's lying awake at night wondering what Tiger was thinking when he took that night-club manager to bed, or if the players on your favorite team would leave in a hot second for the right contract somewhere else and if we would blame them. Most of all it's the lump in the throat we get when someone asks us, "Why do you care? It's only sports."
The Wackness is a swift kick to that person's ribs.
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Ben Kochman is a junior who is majoring in English. He can be reached at Benjamin.Kochman@tufts.edu.
