With deference to one of my good friends...and we took a rough road to become good friends...I noticed something that should have the undivided attention of all professional sports teams in Tulsa. Below is his picture of the local Tulsa sports section from this morning (4/9):
You see documentation of the UCONN women's basketball team winning the NCAA National Championship, OSU, OU, and the start of and op/ed column. All very nice but nothing local...and by local I mean anything that has the word Tulsa in the first half inch of any of those lead stories, (though they would doubtlessly argue anything with OU or OSU counts as "local"). Now they have their reasons...among them that there may be UCONN fans and alumni in the Tulsa area, (who apparently only take the paper and do not watch television), and they might not know that the Huskies won..
Whatever the reason, that bumps the local coverage of professional sports to the BACK section, where they get the lower right corner. Seen below:\
I have had the privilege of working with a few fine professional sports teams during my writing "career", the Oilers, Shock, Talons, Revolution and Defenders. All of whom struggle to put the paying customers in the seats. Some m ore than others due to the very tight money in the local economy. The bad thing is that they would have so many more fans in the stands if they just got a little run by the daily newspaper in town.
Now it has become a sort of infamous legend that Tulsa is very unforgiving indeed with regard to professional teams and while I could go into the reasons why, I won't. It just seems real suspicious to me that the local newspaper, a publication that has been around for better than 100 years in this town, would put the national sports scene first and the local sports scene second.
It makes sense that the Drillers get the most run between March and October due to the sheer numbers of games they play, and I am quite sure, a fat advertising contract with the paper. It would seem that the first amendment would trump commerce in that case but that is sadly the way of things in the money-first, integrity second society we have in this country today. Then things get taken over by a balance of high school football and the on-coming college football season. Meanwhile the professional teams have to suffer because life tends begin and end within the prep and collegiate sports in this town.
If we are to catch Oklahoma City, this has to change. I say that reluctantly because for many years Tulsa has been know as the more sophisticated, worldly city than the Capitol is, but things have changed a lot over the years. We do have two viable major league teams in Tulsa and we are on the cusp of getting a third when the USL's Tulsa Roughnecks soccer team takes to ONEOK Field next year. If I were an outsider or...say a commissioner of a major league sport I would be very unfavorable to the idea of placing a franchise here because of the lack of local coverage, and it all starts with the morning paper.
More focus should be given by the only daily newspaper to focus their readers on local sports than something that has little importance on the ground in Oklahoma...like a UCONN basketball win.
Just a few thoughts...and thinks to Kip for the inspiration to put this on cyber-paper.
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