What others say about what you say is what counts

The First Amendment lets you write anything you feel and think. And if your writing is any… The First Amendment lets you write anything you feel and think. And if your writing is any good, you get really passionate people writing you back, telling you what they think. It doesn’t matter whether they agree or disagree. It just matters that they care about what you’re writing.

In my two years here, I’ve been blessed to have readers who didn’t hesitate to share their opinion. And in all honesty, everything from the dozens of e-mails and responses I get to my friends that constantly remind me of closing lines I’ve used in columns makes me realize how much I’ll miss the feedback more than anything.

Fortunately for me, I worked in the Internet age, and people can write in more easily than ever before. Not only that, it gets the story out to more people. Al Gore’s invention allows other sources to pick up articles we write for The Pitt News or put links to them on other pages, exponentially increasing the number of people who can access my stuff. For instance, Reading fans from across the country replied to my article about that team’s qualification for the English Premier League.

But the Web has also done wonders for expanding readership abroad, as well. In my two years at the paper, I’ve received letters from all over the place. Two angry umpires — one from Canada and one from Washington — were upset about an article I wrote and told me so. Some folks from Canada were furious that I’d dare suggest that St. Todd Bertuzzi was, in fact, a thug. And when I wrote an article about aluminum bats — in which I mentioned scandium — I got an e-mail from a scandium dealer in Lisbon, Portugal.

My favorite response letter ever came from abroad. When Bobby Abreu was named to the National League All-Star Team, I wrote that his work ethic wasn’t one that deserved that kind of honor. A couple of days later, I woke up to an e-mail from a guy in Venezuela who didn’t get it.

He had seen Abreu play winter ball in Venezuela, where the right fielder was a fan favorite who worked hard and gave that extra effort. I couldn’t believe it, so I ended up swapping a couple of e-mails with this guy, both of us trying to get the other’s perspective. The whole time, all I could think was how incredible it was that I’m a college kid, and here I am swapping thoughts with a guy on another side of the globe like we’re old friends.

But by far, the feedback that brought me the most joy — whether the folks who wrote it knew it or not — was from right here, the eight billion or so angry messages that I received for the column I wrote about Pitt and Penn State earlier this year. I liked these not because the authors pleaded their cases in an organized manner, but merely because of the sheer ridiculousness of most of the responses.

For those of you who missed that one, I made the mistake of suggesting that the Pitt-PSU rivalry didn’t mean anything anymore because Penn State really didn’t care. Apparently the prospect that things had changed scared the stupid out of people, because it all ended up in my inbox. They were all mostly meant to be insulting, but they came across as hysterical. There isn’t room to share every one that brought a smile to my face, but I’ll share two of my favorites.

The Reader’s Digest version of the first one: “Brian, who was making fun of you for being a Penn State fan? Was it a cute girl in assistant sports editor class? Brian, we live in a country that allows us to enjoy football on Sunday afternoons, and to have rivalries in major sports. You need to be patriotic. Are you not grateful?”

Sweet land of liberty…

The second was pure gold. “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” That was signed “Chancellor Nordenberg.” I get the impression it wasn’t from the real guy, but that brought the entire Pitt News staff laughs, enough that it still hangs on the office wall.

Still, though, nothing can compare to the response appearing on that beacon of sports knowledge, the Panther Lair, a message board for Pittsburgh sports fans. Now, I’m sure there are plenty of guys at this site with a decent grasp on things — after all, every leper has his healthy patches of skin — but the people leaving feedback on the threads for this column were great.

The classy folks who facilitate this site fortunately didn’t edit out much (if anything), so I got to see all of the insults these guys directed at me. It was glorious. Any expletive you can name, I was called, as is the case when most people disagree with anything you write. I was also called gay more times than I can count. But the people who extrapolated from the column are the ones who make sports writing worthwhile. They were the ones who had our desk rolling.

As with the e-mails, there were so many that I can only pick a few to highlight. But these two were clearly the best ones I got:

“This guy’s a lousy Communist!” wrote one Einstein, a guy who has obviously read my best-selling works on the proletariat and on land reform in major capitalistic societies. The same Neanderthal said I probably thought America got what it deserved on Sept. 11, 2001. I thought about writing him back and letting him know that I’m a firefighter at home, and that I was actually rooting for FDNY. People like this make you feel better about your IQ.

The top one was the guy who wrote, “He’s a bEagles fan!” This clever fellow might have meant “Eagles,” as I mentioned I rooted for that team, but it doesn’t matter. My friends have taken to calling me “Communist, bEagle trash” to get my attention, and cracking up every time they do.

I feel bad, in a way. These guys wanted to put me in my place, and all it did was give a bunch of guys something to laugh at for the whole year. They aimed to kill — instead, they tickled.

But the point isn’t that they were negative about it. They might have failed in their attempt to make me hate myself, but the bottom line is that it’s amazing to see how many people care about what they read. And if they write you about it — or leave angry messages with gross misspellings and wrong capitalizations for your buddy on a site — you’ve done your job right.

So, while I’ll miss seeing my name and, occasionally, my picture in print, the thing I’ll miss most when this job is done is the reader response. Make sure that if you feel strongly about an article you read, you pass those feelings along to the writer.

He’ll be waiting to hear from you.

Brian Weaver is the award-winning assistant sports editor for The Pitt News. E-mail him at bweaves_pittnews@hotmail.com.