I have a penchant for procrastination.
Sure, most college students have things they do to avoid doing that homework nonsense.
Like constantly checking their five different e-mail accounts.
Or peeking at Facebook, MySpace and LiveJournal again to see if any of their friends have updated anything or messaged them in the five minutes since they last looked.
Perhaps the most recent Duck game is finally available on OnDemand.
Might CNN.com, Yahoo! News, Google News or Wikipedia have a new story?
How many points did Luke Ridnour score tonight? There’s only one way to find out. Forget
the homework and jump on the Internet.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of college students have similar habits, including me.
I’ll wager that most people don’t spend as much time looking for different takes on the same thing as I do. Specifically sports stories.
I’ll spend hours pouring over everything I find. It’s gotten to the point where it’s now more of an addiction than a tool of procrastination.
Whenever there’s an especially big sports story, be it a game, trade or the latest update about how we still don’t know whether Roger Clemens will play next year, I’ll jump on the Internet and look for articles from every different source I can think of.
Duck games? Well, to start, there’s always an Associated Press story. Depending on the opponent, there may be a more feature-y story as well. Sometimes GoDucks.com will have its own version. The next morning it’s on to the Web sites of the Register Guard, the Oregonian, the Statesman Journal and occasionally the hometown newspaper of the other team (and the Daily Emerald, of course), and I look at every one for their commentaries and descriptions of the events.
The Super Bowl? Talk about oversaturation, but I soaked up as much as I could. ESPN.com, SI.com, Sportsline.com, FOXSports.com and NFL.com all had up-to-the-minute coverage, and those were just the sites that I got to. Heck, I even found coverage on MLB.com. All the newspapers listed above, plus the New York Times, USA Today, both major Seattle papers, a few more Seattle-area papers, a few Pittsburgh papers, a few Detroit papers … I could go on and on. Let me tell you, when you’re looking for regional newspapers, USNPL.com is a major boon.
We could keep going. Did I read several different versions of the same story about The Rose Bowl? Yep. Civil War? Of course. World Series? Don’t even get me started. March Madness?
For sure.
Since baseball is my favorite sport and the Seattle Mariners are my favorite team, I have “wasted” many an hour searching out new articles. Between March and October, the Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer and MLB.com Web sites receive visits from me at least once per day.
My eyes and fingers were very grateful when I found a free, near-daily e-mail newsletter at BaseballLibrary.com that finds articles and sends me the links. Even during the dead of winter, when there are no games, it digs up several stories per week such as “Mets Hire Henderson as a Tutor for Reyes” in the New York Times.
The trick, as all procrastinators know, is being able to balance the procrastination and that “homework” stuff. My method is to actually do both at the same time. Sure, when I have a big paper that I have to write, I will often sequester myself in one of the library computer labs in order to remove as many distractions as possible. But, even there, I still find myself bringing up Internet Explorer and typing in ESPN.com.
Why do I need every sportswriter in America’s view on why the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl? At a basic level, it’s because I love reading about sports. After I’ve read everything one newspaper or Web site has to offer, I still want more.
On a slightly deeper level, I like analyzing why something happened the way it did. This is where reading different people’s views and insights comes in. Maybe some writer in Altoona, Pa., had an amazingly astute observation or got a nugget of information in an interview that no one else did. I want to know it so I can add it to my own knowledge banks.
Is it an addiction? Sure it is. But as long as they haven’t invented a patch for it, I’m happy to feed this one, even if it means spending five extra hours doing homework. I mean, who can worry about something as trivial as homework when the Houston Chronicle might have another article updating the Roger Clemens saga?
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