SO DID you ever feel like you were born at the wrong time? There’s this friend of mine, his birth certificate insists he was brought into this world in 1966 but if you spend five minutes around him you know: In 1966, he should have been hanging out at Jilly’s and Toots Shor’s and the like, maybe bumming cigarettes off Don Draper and his crew.
Me? I was born in ’67, and always felt I should’ve been born about 15 years before that, early enough to have experienced the Beatles and JFK and the ’69 Mets first-hand, early enough to have seen if I would have rejected disco out of pocket like I certainly hope I would have, early enough to maybe have seen Zeppelin at the Garden once, or Springsteen at the Stone Pony, or the Ramones at CBGB.
Mostly, that’s the way it goes: If we feel misplaced in our own era, it’s because we were born too late, not too soon. Though people always lament the passage of their youth, I almost never hear anyone say, “You know, I wish I was 16 again so I could go through acne, final exams, about 300 rejections from various women in various levels of sobriety over the next 10 or 15 years . . .”
But we do live in a different world, as we are reminded every day. The Internet nearly melted down the other day when Michael Jackson died, and you should have seen the panicked looks and heard the frightened voices of people who not only had to wait a few extra minutes to refresh their news pages, but were unable to access their Facebook and Twitter pages, too, so they could give the world minute-by-minute updates of what they were feeling and why.
If that sounds like a guy who was panicked because of those very things . . . well, I am. I am a Facebooker. I am a Tweeter (@MikeVacc). I have left all pretense for ignoring that stuff behind: I am in, I am all-in, and I am not leaving it any time soon. I don’t know if any of us really understands the usefulness of any of it, but one thing that is obvious is that athletes have embraced it. Shaq has 1.4 million followers on Twitter.
Kevin Love has only about 18,000, but he has become something of a Tweetin’ legend, inadvertently breaking the news about Kevin McHale’s firing and providing the greatest running analysis of the NBA Draft Thursday found anywhere; better still, by Friday, he had turned his Tweets into a one-man recruiting push to convince Ricky Rubio that he should indeed brave Minnesota winters and play for the Timberwolves.
Tweeted Love: “I can have Rubio wanting to join our Olympic team . . . better yet I will have him singing ‘I wish they all could be californiaaaaa girrrrrlls’ “
If any of that was lost on anyone, Love was nice enough to clarify a few seconds later: “Big shout out to my uncle Mike Love of the Beach Boys for the making of ‘California girls’ . . . I am señor amor, I can convince the young Jedi . . .”
It really is a Brave New World out there. I mean, seriously, this was our old friend Eddy Curry weighing in on the draft later that night: “i know it’s late but i slept thru the draft, i do it every year. I sleep thru it just in case i get moved. I’ll know when i get up . . .”
You can’t make this stuff up. But it does make you want to make stuff up, does make you want to figure out what might have been if either some of our more beloved sports teams came around later, or if Twitter/Facebook/MySpace had come along sooner.
I mean, think about what Joe Namath’s Twitter updates would have looked like on Follow Fridays (Twitter users know what I mean, the rest of you will soon enough) back in the day:
@JoeWillie12: My #FFs this week: @RacquelDDD; @JohnnieWalkerRed; @FireWeeb.com; @BlondyBusty; @BachelorsIII
Think about the Status Updates those Bronx Zoo Yankees could have offered the world.
DrinkStraw44: Billy’s benching me today. Get me out of here!
FieryGenius1: Born liar! Born liar! Born liar!
BossIII: Looks like we’re spitting the bit again.
FieryGeniusI: Convicted! Convicted! Convicted!
Captain15: I wish they’d all shut the hell up . . .
And think about some of the Tweets that someone like Phil Jackson might have sent out back in the day, with
140 characters to describe all of his philjacksonness:
“Listening to Dead in one ear and Red in the other and imagining Clyde’s sideburns tie-dyed and, man, could I ever use a bag of chips.”
Yes. It makes me awfully wistful. You?
Mike Vaccaro’s e-mail is michael.vaccaro@nypost.com. For a daily dose of Vac’s Whacks, click on http://www.blogs.nypost.com/sports/Vaccaro.
VAC’S WHACKS
I love when people ask Jerry Manuel now if he’s having fun writing out his lineup now, using all of his Irregulars. And love even more the way Manuel answers the question, with a look and a laugh that say, “I’d rather have my whole team, thank you very much.”
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Awful, awful break in a season full of them for Xavier Nady, one of the genuinely good guys in the game. Want to get a Mets fan really good and riled up? Ask how things might’ve gone differently if Duaner Sanchez had ordered room service . . . and Nady hadn’t gotten traded . . . and Ollie hadn’t been part of that trade . . . and (no need to go on, by now they’re pacing).
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I know you start sounding like the grumpy old man next door yelling at kids to get off his grass when you start going down this road but . . . I am willing to bet my house that boys of my generation had it a lot better in my day with that Farrah poster on our walls than kids do now with . . . who? Britney? LiLo? Paris? Who?
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I appreciate Knicks fans talking themselves into the positives from Thursday night’s draft. But just once, wouldn’t it be nice to have a draft night around here where the results are an emphatic and unanimous celebration? You think we can get that more than every 24 years or so?