Twitter and Athletes From the Past

(This is a guest article by Milee Karre)

Twitter has become one of the biggest outlets for athletes to express their minds about daily experiences, controlling the media, and to interact with fans. As countless have documented many top athletes aren’t just on twitter, but are somewhat consumed by it. That is all fine and dandy, but what if we could take twitter and take it back in time and see what those athletes would have said during their prime.

Wouldn’t you like to hear from Dennis Rodman during his playing days with tweets like, “I’d like to apologize to the NBA for my actions, the ball slipped down to my foot and somehow went 30 rows up” or, “I just can’t figure out what dress to pick out. If I send a Twit Pic can my followers help?”

What about his teammate the greatest player ever to touch a basketball, we as fans could have been inspired by Michael Jordan not only with his play, but with his tweets. “Even though I missed one tonight I’ll promise you I will make the next one!”, or “There is only mental weakness never physical”.

How about our good friend Mike Tyson, likely the most controversial athlete of all time. What on earth would he say? (With lisp) “I am the greatest ever to grace this pretty little ring”. Everything else I tried to come up with is nothing nearly appropriate for this forum. It involved kids, eating, and fornicating. Yeah, try and put that together.

Lets move on to one of my favorite athletes to ever play basketball, and the trendsetter to fashion and style in the NBA; Pete Maravich. It is possible that he would never had time to send out frequent tweets considering his obsessive practice habits, but we like to speculate anyway. “Just scored 55 tonight. Think I’m going to stay and get more shots up Dad is giving me the look”. Or maybe when his life all changed, “Thank you for the feedback on my contract, I’m not feeling the love elsewhere though.”

The age of blogging has taken over rumor central. Almost to point where anything is believable. Who could of you used Twitter or needed it more then Roger Clemens to possibly prove his innocence. “Just got done working out check the Twit Pic, see nothing looks unfamiliar!”

We will never know what these athletes would have said during the prime of their careers on Twitter, but we do know that it most likely would have given us fans more insight into these controversial athletes lives. The height of their powers could have been strengthened with this powerful social networking tool and maybe saved some image problems. Yes, we will never know what they would have said but it is always fun to imagine.