Burton Cattleman's Rail Jam

There’s a rail jam here in town on Saturday. I’m not competing, but one of my roommates is. Until you get to the big pro competitions, they’re really structured for entrants, not spectators. I think the rail jams are a bit different; footage and photos I’ve seen of other rail jams look like parties with some snowboarding going on nearby. There was a Gatorade Free Flow Tour event here a couple weeks ago, which is an amateur event for the 21-and-under crowd. Spectators? Feh! Spectators can go f themselves!

When I played “pro” chess, it was the same way. There wasn’t really room for families and friends, and of course no effort made to draw the public in. But chess isn’t much of a spectator sport. But is that because they don’t try? I played in some video-game competitions and they were the same way, even though there was a much larger group of spectators — usually friends and clan-mates of the competitors.

Online coverage of tournaments is mostly the same. Some info for competition entrants, tables of results, but no flavor, no reporting, no hype, no info for spectators or people that just want to follow the sport.

Magazines like to push personalities. This was one of the keys to the success of poker on television: drama. They turned the players into characters (or characatures), then pit them against each other and exaggerated past conflicts, as if there was something personal going on behind the scenes. It worked for the Travel Channel; they were able to make money from it.

Money would be the obvious reason why it’s difficult to be a sport enthusiast. No-one’s figured out how to make money from it. No-one wants to offer me coverage of upcoming snowboarding competitions, competitor profiles, behind-the-scenes looks at training and tournaments, and info for spectators that want to go watch a competition live. As with poker coverage, I think that it’s a Field of Dreams thing: if you build it, they will come.

The “obvious” answer would be to go offer that stuff myself. Sadly, I don’t have the time. Could I outsource it, 4HWW style? Hmm.