After reading Rosalyn Pierce’s angry letter, I decided to look up what the word “column” means with my handy-dandy dictionary widget (“Better with insight?” Dec. 6, p. 4). It states: A section of a newspaper or magazine regularly devoted to a particular subject or written by a particular person. Hey! That sounds like Brian Fadem’s column! He has the uncanny ability to write about what he wants in the realm of sports, and in this case it was his weekend of viewing sporting events on Boston University’s campus, ranging from women’s basketball to ice hockey to . . . men’s basketball.
As an avid sports fan, I have read many columns and blogs and see no real problem with the way that Fadem writes his column. In the interest of full disclosure, I know him away from just being a columnist, but I would certainly read his columns on a weekly basis if I didn’t know him. He has a different take than the usual sports columnist, which I find refreshing. I’m reading the Lyons Den, and Chris does a fine job, but if I had to read a week’s worth of “The hockey team needs to play better, with more fire, more heart and less suspensions,” I might lose my mind.
Using his space as a soapbox is the point of having a column in the first place. Fadem wanted to give us a view of a disappointing sports weekend that you wouldn’t read from the box score or The Daily Free Press’s usual post-game wrap up. Focusing on “gameplay errors” isn’t his responsibility per se, nor should he be mandated to do so because of your own stringent definition of what a column should be. If the Free Press was focusing on how to properly criticize columns for using facts and having a more critical look at sports, The Soap Box would have been gone months ago. But, alas . . .
Criticizing fandom from this past Saturday’s game at BC is a relatively moot point, although it was disheartening, especially as someone who so vividly remembers the raucous atmosphere during Jack Parker’s 700th win in the last BU-BC match-up at Walter Brown Arena. The piddling, UNH-like mentality that our student section at times had, only cheering when a goal was scored, is not the issue. If you think a sports column should be a certain way, the FreeP is looking for new columnists, so, please, have at it. Maybe you can even steal Fadem’s column space. That’ll show ’em!
Mike Anton
COM ’08