| 28 September 2011
This weekend I had the privilege of attending the fourth official installment of the always-great Blogs with Balls conference. Once again, conference organizers Don Povia, Chris Lucas and Kyle Bunch outdid themselves with great speakers, great venues and an overall great time.
4 Day Trip
- Friday
- Flew from Los Angeles to LaGuardia
- Headed straight to the Kickoff Party at Providence
- Went out with the majority of the original BwB nightlife crew (where the hell was Rey-Rey Moralde?)
- Slept in a $45 Chinatown hotel that was smaller than a prison cell
- Saturday
- Conference at the Bloomberg building
- After Party at Hudson Terrace
- Met former teammate in Times Square
- Slept on floor of Japanese hotel near Times Square after my phone died and I wasn’t able to get in touch of a friend at NYU Law School where I had arranged to stay
- Sunday
- NYU to visit undergrad friend and clean up
- Mets/Phillies game at Citi Field
- Long Island scenic tour and diner dinner
- Spent the night at USC buddy’s place in Long Island
- Monday
- Lunch in Greenwich Village with grad school friend
- Staten Island Ferry
- Crazy illegal “cab” ride with old lady, who was just using her minivan as a taxi. (Keep on your hustle grandma!)
- Flew from JFK to Los Angeles
4 Great Knowledge Nuggets
- “You’ll never make money unless you act like you’re supposed to be making money from it…If you’re doing it for the love, that’s great but don’t be surprised when all you get back is love.” – Bomani Jones (@bomani_jones)
- “You’re comfortable. Quit being fucking comfortable.” – Chris Lucas (@cwlucas) on comfort breeding complacency and therefore, no progress. And words that I desperately needed.
- “Stats aren’t stories. Write stories!” – during the You Can’t Coach Innovation panel. Unfortunately, I don’t remember who on the panel said it.
- “Everyone says quality rises to the top. That’s bullshit. The crappiest stuff rises to the top.” – Philip Van der Vossen (@PVanderVossen) talking about how crap videos, scandal or bikini pictures get more hits and attention than many painstakingly well-written articles
4 Free Things
- Drew Brees signed football – talk about an odd object to try to return home on a flight when you have a lifelong goal of never checking a bag in the continental US. After getting back to LA, I gave the ball away to a friend and his wife, who both attended Purdue with Brees.
- Van Heusen swag bag – Van Heusen sponsored the BwB Kickoff Party Friday night and definitely hooked us up. Everyone received a bag from the Van Heusen Institute of Style, but I was fortunate enough to be given the VIP garment bag (definitely didn’t have one of those). Inside the garment bag were a collared shirt and skinny tie, a sweater and a second collared shirt.
- Ticket to Sunday’s Mets/Phillies game – As a Braves fan, why would I want to go to see Atlanta’s rivals play a meaningless game?
- Free ticket, which ended up being 11 row behind home plate.
- A pretty girl offered me the ticket to join her and her friends.
- First time seeing a game at Citi Field (beautiful place, terrible team).
- Opportunity to watch the mastery of Roy Halladay.
- Captain Morgan, Jose Cuervo, Smirnoff – The conference sponsors (along with Guiness) provided enough alcohol to kill several moose. Free alcohol was provided at Friday night’s Kickoff Party, at the conference Saturday starting at lunch and at Saturday night’s After Party where the Cuervo girls were in full effect with a custom bottle label maker and a quad-tequila shot ski/snowboard for you and your three buddies to effectively get trashed together.
4 Travesties
- Only getting to talk to my man Zack Harper (@talkhoops) for a few seconds.
- Showing up late Saturday morning and not getting to explore the Bloomberg building more.
- Not being able to be in two places at once Saturday night when I got separated from BwB NYC partners-in-crime Jeff Garcia (@sa2ny2004) & John Karalis (@RedsArmy_John).
- Not meeting every single person at the conference because everyone is so nice and friendly. Really, it’s kind of absurd how easygoing everyone is, whether it is people you’ve seen on TV or people whose work you follow religiously or people who you may have never heard of before. This is the single top reason why Blogs with Balls is the best conference for anyone in the sports industry.
4 Non-Conference Attendees Seen in NYC
- High school basketball teammate
- Undergrad dorm neighbor
- USC school newspaper co-baseball beat writer
- Grad school classmate/South African drinking buddy
4 Great Knowledge Nuggets #2
- “If you are using Twitter solely to drive traffic to your site, you’re doing it all wrong.” – Will Brinson (@willbrinson)
- “It’s a personal experience [for your audience], it should be a personal experience for you.” – Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) on sports writing
- The NFL Players Association realized in 2009 how important Twitter and blogs were in being able to get facts and its side of the story out to the public. – NFLPA’s George Atallah (@GeorgeAtallah)
- Access is dangerous. Too much info can ruin fan experience. Looking behind the curtain is not always beneficial. Also, hard to be brutally honest when you’re going to talk to [athletes] again. – Matthew Cerrone (@matthewcerrone) & Eno Sarris (@enosarris) paraphrasing Maggie Hendricks (@maggiehendricks)
4 Things I Never Expected to Do
- Eat lunch with an eating champion. After downing a gallon of milk in 18 seconds, Kobyashi looked no worse the wear as he sat down and ate lunch with a small group of us. He then proceeded to tell us he can drink three gallons, but he does usually slow down on the third one.
- Take a shot from a ski/snowboard.
- Throw a $100 bill on the table and tell the waitress to “bring a round for the boys.” (I’m naturally a spendthrift, but I found the $100 the day before.)
- Sleep in a hotel room that featured a chicken wire ceiling (only in Chinatown, baby!)
4 Best USMAP Acceptance Speeches
- Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) making an acceptance tweet after tying with Richard Deitsch (@richarddeitsch) for the best sports media tweeter.
- Joe Posnanski (@JPosnanski), best sportswriter, had a prepared speech read by Deitsch & Brinson while Dan Levy mimed with Posnanski’s award muppet.
- Best team or regional sports site Dan Steinberg (@dcsportsbog)
- And then Spencer Hall…just being Spencer Hall (@edsbs) with the PowerPoint presentation he sent of people he wanted to thank:
4 People Who Should Have Been There
- Patrick Crawley (@BasketballFiend)
- All the college football bloggers I interact with on a daily basis (alas BwB was once again on a fall Saturday)
- Rey-Rey Moralde (@TheNoLookPass)
- Representatives from the professional leagues (only MLS sent someone, though the NFL was supposed to participate in a panel but backed out)
4 Knowledge Nuggets #3
- “I think our jobs are curation. We’re trying to provide relevance to an audience.” – Yahoo! Sports managing editor Mark Pesavento (@markpesavento)
- “We’re going to get to a point where a contract will not be a player’s primary source of revenue.” – Atallah
- AJ Daulerio (@AJDaulerio) actually said he regretted publishing some stories on Deadspin, including one about a student having sex in bathroom. Who knew Daulerio even had a conscious?
- Josh Elliot (@JoshElliotABC) confirmed that ESPN purposely dodges crediting scoops by non-ESPN reporters, running “ESPN’s Chris Mortensen confirms…“ on the Bottom Line for a story Jaz Glazer breaks.
4 Places Visited
- Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty
- Washington Square Park
- Times Square
- Chinatown
4 Suggestions for BwB 5
- a minority panel
- list of tips, services, programs, apps, etc. that panelists use to enhance their blogs, podcasts, videos (BwB 1 is where I first learned of TweetDeck)
- hosting the conference in August before the start of college and NFL football
- 20 midgets versus a sumo wrestler (BwB has had a poker tournament and a milk chugging competition…I figure it’s the most logical next step.) FOR CHARITY OF COURSE (That makes anything pretty much ok.)
Shotgun Spratling
