The distinctiveness of amateurs
In each successive year of my life, I pay less attention to sports than the one before it. But still, sport–especially professional sports–has to be one of those foundational categories of “content” on the web, accounting for a sizable percentage of all information stored and exchanged. There must be some internet law to the effect that the more there is written about some topic, the more likely that content is to be automatically generated in the future–or to read like it is. In the case of sports the problem is overdetermined; it was plagued by clichés long before the internet. And so it’s exciting to come across an article on sport that doesn’t look like it was written by a bot or a human working from a template–even better if it’s about a “sport” that is near-impossible to professionalize.
I loved this article about a long-distance hiker, Will ‘Akuna’ Robinson, who has dedicated the current phase of his life to hiking–in part because of what he experienced as a veteran in the most recent Iraq War–and who stands out because he is one of a few Black “thru-hikers” on any American trail.
To my knowledge there is no niche on the internet, no website or forum, dedicated exclusively to true amateur sports. And no, I don’t mean “amateur” as in “you haven’t gotten paid yet,” or “if you were good enough you could get paid.” I mean a site dedicated to people who pursue sport for some other reason. I could imagine it drawing in a completely different type of audience, one that had little in common with that for professional sports. Maybe the pressure to cross-subsidize articles like this one, on hiking, with pro sports journalism that makes $$$, is too great. Then again, it’s not like that business model is doing all that well, either.