| TMS season ticket sales up 200% A new campaign has revved up Texas Motor Speedway’s season ticket sales. feeds.bizjournals.com |
Marina Hyde: Ryder Cup's tweet irony Golf's desire to censor the banal musings of its players is not just unnecessary – it's to the detriment of its followersDid ever a sport strain so painfully to keep up appearances as professional golf, whose desire to be perceived as wholesome, seemly and united gives the rest of us such a laugh? I believe the technical term for it is "all fur coat and no knickers", and we can see its latest manifestation in the Ryder Cup captains' decision to ban their teams from tweeting.While Corey Pavin's banning appears very much an edict, Colin Montgomerie's seems more of a gentleman's agreement, making Ian Poulter's decision to post some anodyne piece of insurrection after the blackout probably not the Jesus-baiting offence it would be deemed in the US camp, where they take their Christian duty of obedience awfully seriously.But since then, even Poulter has maintained near radio silence. Thus the millions who follow golfers will find themselves subjected to a world where, for reasons of team cohesion/national security/whatevah, they will have to get by without such 140-character pensées. Hardly a privation, you might say. Yet it is somehow even more concerning that a paranoid blackout should be imposed on players who may have won endless trophies, but who, almost to a man, have never said a single interesting thing in all their puff. For them, the utterance of a bon mot remains the most elusive of prizes – and yet golf's establishment appears to deem them as dangerous as Bill Hicks mainlining truth serum.I suppose we must salute the latest blow for the powerful tendency which seeks to erase all remaining traces of candour from sport. And yet, is this control freakery really necessary? No one is suggesting that social networking becomes part of the Ryder Cup format – though perhaps one day we could look at formally expanding the competition into foursomes, fourballs, singles and tweets. But whether or not Twitter is your cup of tea, it can't be denied that millions have decided it enhances their enjoyment of sports in which, surely not coincidentally, the powers-that-be have increasingly limited access to major players.Apologies for returning to the same theme warmed to here last year, when Darren Bent was in the doghouse for tweeting, but the issues endure and will only rear their head with greater frequency as social media becomes a more integral part of the fan experience. Back then, you may remember, Darren was fined the maximum two weeks' wages by his chairman, Tottenham Hotspur's Daniel Levy, for gross insubordination in tweeting (during the close season) that he'd like his transfer to Sunderland to get a move on.Noting the revenue-gathering possibilities of allowing players to shoot their mouths off, one really does have to ask what's the worst that can happen if sports stars have the temerity to communicate with fans. Disrespect, presumably. In explaining his Ryder Cup tweet blackout, Field Marshall Montgomerie cited the case of Kevin Pietersen, who last month fired off a sweary tweet revealing he'd been dropped. Not for the first time, one had to sigh at Kevin's manners – but no grown-up could possibly have been surprised Pietersen was annoyed at being left out. He was duly fined; the world continued to turn; and cricket was discovered to have rather bigger things to worry about than Kevin Pietersen's apercus.The media's gripes about access to sports stars are well-worn to the point of cliche, but they are shared by many fans, and to a small extent Twitter has mitigated against the trend for 20-year-old millionaires to snap "talk to my agent" when asked for a chat. A big part of sport is the human connection – however imagined – that fans feel with players, and the more you legislate against that, the closer you get to thinking that sport might as well be played by robots.It should give golf's bigwigs pause to consider that while the official PGA tour Twitter account has 35,000-odd followers, the Wildean Stewart Cink – Stewart Cink! – has more than 1.2million. Or take Poulter, a livelier correspondent, who just before the ban came into force managed to sneak under the wire a picture of his Ryder Cup hotel room, a veritable Aladdin's cave of sponsors' gifts and goody bags.The blazers may be too atrophied to realise it, but this is precisely the sort of detail that is of interest to fans whose appetite for a backstage look at the Ryder Cup remains bafflingly unsated by the traditional Stepford Air picture of the players and their wives posed up in matchy-matchy suits on the aeroplane steps. Having said that, hats off to Tiger Woods for working so indefatigably to layer new layers of hilarity on that timeworn snap.Ryder CupGolfTwitterMarina Hydeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
New Flyers season being marked with ticket giveaways The Philadelphia Flyers began a week-long series of hockey-related events and attractions Monday to mark the start of the National Hockey League season. feeds.bizjournals.com |
Roy Halladay human in Game 1 loss to Giants Roy Halladay vs. Tim Lincecum. You've come to hear all about the 1-2-3 innings and goose eggs, haven't you? Sorry. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Big East gets bigger, adds TCU for 2012 season FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- TCU is getting out of future debates about whether the Horned Frogs deserve to be in a BCS game. They are joining a league with automatic access.... hosted.ap.org |