@NickBarnett

Early in the year I discovered Packers linebacker Nick Barnett was on twitter. At the time he had about 400 or so followers so I started following him. Nick Barnett tweets a lot, and his tweets provide an interesting insight into the life of a professional football player.

As of this morning Nick Barnett has 18,024 followers.

During yesterday’s game, with the Packers clearly losing momentum, Barnett made a tackle for a loss and went into his “samurai” routine. The crowd was not pleased, what with the poor performance the Packers had put out, and the poor play by the linebackers (particularly Barnett) the celebration seemed a little inappropriate.

But then something else happened: many of Barnett’s twitter followers turned against him. For those of you who do not know about / use twitter, you can tweet somebody direct. Barnett apparently had a lot of criticism waiting for him in his tweet box, and it prompted him to tweet the following to all his followers:

“Oh yea for everyone that had something to say after I celebrated for making a takle for lost KISS MY ASS. . . I was trying to get the defense fired up. . . And so what if I missed the takle before am I suppose to stay in a funk about it!?? Get a life".

Nick’s tweets are usually filled with copious misspellings and grammatical errors, which is a byproduct of that fine education he and Chad Ochocinco received at Oregon. But Nick has correctly pointed out that twitter isn’t a spelling test, so we forgive these transgressions. What struck me about all of this was it occurred to me that because of Twitter, the average fan has an unparalleled level of access to athletes. Not only can we actually reach out to Nick Barnett, we can get under his skin.

Twitter is one of many tools of the overly self important. Blogs, Facebook, all of this stuff is as my wife puts it “a big popularity contest, designed to feed the egos of the egotists”. I think that's why St. Ides and I like to harp on the fact that we only have two readers, by the way. Everything was great for Nick when he was rehabbing his ACL: lots of happy tweets, which I am sure were met with a lot of direct messages offering encouragement and support. But stink up the field on a Sunday and you open yourself up for criticism. Sorry, but that’s just how it works. And it’s fair. Today the press was killing Barnett, not for his samurai showboating, but for his poor play. But that didn’t get under Barnett’s skin. What really frosted his Wheaties was that his adoring followers called him out. Reality caught up to Nick Barnett. Even though it says “followers” on twitter, we’re not really followers: we’re fans, short for fanatics.

A few months ago Nick Barnett asked his followers why everyone was so upset about Favre playing for the Vikings. I decided to reply to him direct and this is what I said: “@NickBarnett Its fan mentality. Favre meant something to us on a deeper level so this feels like a deeper betrayal. Sounds silly, right?” I don’t know if Nick read it, understood it, or simply ignored it but I was trying to explain what it meant to be a fan. If we could turn on Favre, we could turn on anyone.

This morning Nick tweeted the following: “Hey everyone.. I done somethinking and I have decided to stay off Twitter unroll next offseason.. I am a emotional person and sometimes with this Twitter thing I forget that everything is public.. Sometimes I feel I am talking to my freinds and just talk.. So I am going to pull myself away from that.. Thanks to all the people who supported me thru my rehab and tough times and for the haters well god loves u”

That's another thing my wife likes to point out: Everything is public.

So that’s it. Big man, linebacker, thin skinned Nick Barnett won’t be tweeting any more. Not that it really matters. Goddamn @CitizenDino tweets so goddamn much I never see Nick’s posts anyway.