Longing for the good old days

I’ve often admitted to being old school. And some people have accused me of being just plain old.

I still prefer power football to pass-happy attacks. And I prefer a 2-1baseball game that features good pitching and solid fielding.

And, there is a big part of me that longs for the old days when high school football games and coaches were discussed at the local barber shop or diner rather than some impersonal message board where anyone with an opinion can hide behind an alias.

Yes, I miss those days when football fans weighed in on the football coach before church on Sunday morning, and took their shots at the preacher over Sunday dinner.

Back then if you wanted to see your opinion in the local newspaper, you wrote a letter to the editor.

But I don’t have to tell any of you those days are long gone replaced by computers and all the technologies that go with them.

I vividly recall the first time I heard about what we now know as the Internet in the spring of 1977.

I was a freshman at the University of Tennessee taking an introduction to mass communications class. One day the graduate assistant teaching the class told us there would come a time when we would no longer have the daily newspaper delivered to our front door, but we would pull it up on our home computer and read it.

You should have heard the buzz in that classroom as our inquiring young minds tried to comprehend a personal computer. Many of us had received a typewriter with a correction cartridge, and by 1977 standards, that was pretty heady stuff.

To those of us coming of age in the mid-1970s a computer was something at least the size of my Ford Escape and slightly slower than my 77-year old mother. Gulf Power had a computer, as did colleges and universities, but a personal computer still seemed like something in the distant future.

Of course those predictions did come true and it’s hard to imagine life today without computers.
My personal notebook computer -- which I might note cost only slightly more than that old typewriter -- is more powerful and faster than anything Gulf Power had in 1977.

In many ways the computer, and Internet technology that goes with it, is both a blessing and a curse.

As a sports fan and information junkie, I love it. The fan in me likes being able to read and express my opinion about my beloved Tennessee Volunteers on a site devoted to the Vols. I also love the way it allows me to keep up with friends on community sites or e-mails.

As a newspaperman I both love and hate the Internet.

I love the benefit of being able to break stories online when we don’t go to print for two days. I appreciate the interaction the computers all me to have with our readers as well.

But the convenience that goes with modern technology also takes away the personal touch that can make this business so great. And while I understand the concerns that some parents of athletes might have in extreme situations, with putting their name on a letter to the editor or a post on a Web site, I’ve always felt an anonymous comment carries less weight than those that come from someone using their own name.

I know people still talk about high school football at church on Sunday morning and have the preacher for lunch Sunday afternoon, but since the Internet took hold, it just isn’t the same.