Don't believe hype (including the hype about hype)

One of the first direct conflicts I had with my parents came when I was 10 years old. By then I had already had several years of abject failure at sports and I was starting to get pretty irritated at the way everybody made a big deal about athletics, especially high school basketball (this was a small town in the Midwest, and there weren't many other distractions). One day the local newspaper, the Edwardsville Intelligencer, had a front page story about some high school basketballer.

The sports section was one thing, but the front page? I got so mad I wrote a letter to the editor, saying I was tired of all the attention being shown to sports and that it didn't belong on the front page.

Before sending the carefully handwritten letter, I showed it to my parents. I guess I wanted some compliments about being a ten-year-old with enough gumption (not to mention language skills) to write a letter of protest to a newspaper. But my father, who was in the process of becoming a fearsome grump, handed the letter back to me and forbade me to send it. Didn't explain why, either. But as a pint-sized believer in free speech, I sent the letter anyway -- which they not only printed but answered in the letters column itself. (They explained they just thought it was an important story. Whatever.)

My father was miffed. "Your punishment will be forthcoming," he intoned -- but it wasn't. He never did anything about it, which proved to my ten-year-old mind that he was just a blowhard and that I had been right all along. First in a series of events which taught me the lesson: If you think you're right, then go ahead and do something, and apologize later.

I was reminded of this tender family moment by a story in the Akron Beacon-Journal (link courtesy Romenesko) saying that newspaper readers are sick of front-page stories about basketball phenom LeBron James. As my experience shows, even a 10-year-old can get sick of sports hype; from my adult perspective, I can say, Yes, this adulation of celebrities and obsession with their personalities and personal lives, much less their careers, is a symptom of a sick society. The difference between 1966 and 2003 is only a difference of degree.