Horrible Leg Break Leads to Equally Horrible Link Bait
Perhaps you saw the terrible injury yesterday afternoon in the NCAA Elite 8 game between Louisville and Duke. Cardinal role player Kevin Ware suffered a horrendous broken leg many compared to the career-ending injury of Joe Theismann.
It was so bad that CBS chose to not replay it, other media chose not to create a .GIF file…and it reduced some teammates literally to tears.
No need here to replay the injury, or debate the choice to not reshow the video, or create some small video file of it. There is an Outkick The Coverage article today by Clay Travis that does a good job of that.
For now, I’d prefer to focus on the instant nature of today’s always-connected social web. For better, or for worse.
Best pic I’ve seen in a long time. Teammates are brothers. Brothers are family!! Kevin Ware gettin love from family twitter.com/StuartScott/st…
Talk about immediate coverage. After enduring two hours of surgery to set a broken tibia, insert a rod, and repair where the bone had broken through the skin, this photo popped up all over the interwebs:
Assuming all is well with blood flow in the leg, Ware plans to leave the hospital in Indy Tuesday, and make his way to his hometown of Atlanta to be with his teammates for the Final Four.
Kevin Ware has a wild backstory. His recruitment to UCF led, in part, to their probation. The backstory: nytimes.com/2011/04/30/spo…
One person that may now find his assignment to the NCAA Championship a little more uncomfortable will be Sports Illustrated senior reporter Pete Thamel. Though he apologized a couple of hours later, Thamel has been unmercifully skewered on Twitter since doing the unthinkable- choosing the moments immediately after the injury to post a link to his own article in the NY Times about Ware being the central figure in the UCF recruiting scandal. While Thamel no longer works for the Times, and, as Travis points out in his article, “doesn’t get paid by the Tweet”, this incredibly callous choice of timing for link bait merited thousands of reactions like this from the Twitterverse:
And by the way, @sipetethamel showing what a complete prick he is by tweeting about Kevin Ware’s past at a time like this. He is the worst
@sipetethamel stop reporting on Kevin Ware you garbage human being
One enemy UK and UL now have in common? @sipetethamel #tool #nevergotpickedforkickball
@sipetethamel @coachmattobrien @danwetzel How do you still have a job you filthy animal??? What you did to Ware was despicable!!!! ANIMAL!!
You get the idea. Some reactions even included death threats. Twitter has long been the medium of short fuses. Complaints dominate the timeline about everything from bad food to bad service, to in this case, at best, bad form.
But, for better or worse, it IS immediate. Here’s a picture released at 4PM EST Monday by the University of Louisville with Coach Pitino, and former assistant Pitino, visiting Ware, who has his champions hat, shirt, and the regional trophy. Barely 24 hours after the injury, things look a lot better.
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