The NBA Needs to Feature Tweets to Keep Them Clean

TJ Ford tweet from July 14th 8:08 AM

I am a huge Indiana Pacers fan, so I’m going to focus on the NBA, but this applies to the NFL, NBL, ABL, NHL and any other three letter combination you can think of. Or for that matter, any famous person or business.

Twitter has changed the way we communicate.

Maybe it started before that with anonymous bulletin boards, MySpace, Facebook and the like. People were talking to their “friends” and no one ever thought any of their comments could become public to strangers. Hello Twitter…

I guess some people feel like their Twitter followers are their friends, so once they become comfortable with Twitter, they pretty much say whatever they want. That’s what you will see from some guys in the NBA and other professional sports leagues.

As a fan of the Indiana Pacers, my favorite example is probably Marquis Daniels, and he won’t be back next year so it doesn’t really tarnish my team’s reputation. He started using Twitter heavily this summer, and not for the good. Bad words, weird comments, no mention of basketball, and grammar that needs a built in “Marquis Daniels translator” plug-in to figure out what he is trying to say. It’s that bad, and makes him look even worse.

Dahntay Jones Tweet

Another Pacers example is one of our newest players Dahntay Jones. Dahntay came from the Denver Nuggets to the Indiana Pacers this summer. The same week, he or supposedly his cousin, posted a long string of rap lyrics including the “n” word. At the end of the racially slurred lyric by Rick Ross, the message said: “the nuggets did me dirty.” When looking for his Twitter link, I noticed his most recent update says, “There’s nothing like 2johnny and cokes some smoke and my wife.” The reference to “smoke” is a little questionable.

Speaking of smoke, who could forget the biggest Twitter idiot of the month, or possibly year? That’s right sports fans, Michael Beasley of the Miami Heat. He just inspired me to finish this post with a picture of a tattoo he recently posted on TwitPic. As many have noted in the comments, if you look near the 7-Up bottle in the background, you will see something that looks very similar to a bag of marijuana. He was already fined $50,000 for using marijuana his rookie season, and now posted a picture on the Internet for all to see.

TwitPic from Michael Beasley

It just seems so weird to me. In front of a camera on live television, these professional athletes would never say the things they do on Twitter. They are speaking publicly on TV, but I guess they don’t realize they are speaking publicly on Twitter. Heck, when Twitter is on your cell phone in your front pocket, it makes it a lot easier to broadcast stupid messages to the world.

This is why the NBA and other professional sports teams should embrace Twitter. Encourage fans to follow the players, and feature a Twitter stream on the home page of the website with tweets from every player on the team. Make professional athletes aware that their Twitter comments are highly visible to the fans, just like when they are being interviewed on TV, and give them a sense of responsibility to represent their team while tweeting. Do it for the kids!