'BLO IT RIGHT BY 'EM: World Wide Wonders Abound

As I stand today on the edge of the metaphorical cliff overlooking spring semester, I cannot help but take this space to urge you to consider the glories of modern technology. After an intersession trip to Barcelona with several fellow members of this very newspaper’s Sports Board, I returned to dust off the old laptop and gaze upon the Internet with new, fresh eyes.

As I clicked through, I for the first time marveled at Firefox, a crazy, bizarro version of Internet Explorer that somehow blocks pop-up windows. I appreciated the multitudes of movie trailers played through iTunes. I gasped at how my first semester grades benefited from some kind of invisibility cloak built into the Registrar’s website. Amazing.

And yet, arguably the greatest transformation on the World Wide Web has not taken place in the realm of academics or computer technology, but in college athletics. Today, amateurs are finally catching up to the 21st century by making personal websites, assuring themselves of a 24-hour soapbox with which to communicate with fans, sell merchandise, and make me feel better about myself by making egregious spelling errors.

Yesterday, in fact, ESPN.com prominently mentioned the website of Utah basketball’s Australian center Andrew Bogut, which comes with a blog and an admittedly clever page entitled “The Melbourne Supremacy.” USC quarterback and Heisman winner Matt Leinart runs an entertaining site of his own, an effective online journal where he (or a friend of his) posts stuff like photos of Will Ferrell and Shaquille O’Neal at the Orange Bowl, and answers mailbag questions like, “Matt Leinart, you’re my favorite quarterback ever at USC, but why do you hate cats?”

Even Harvard’s reigning NCAA national champion wrestler Jesse Jantzen ’04 and current assistant wrestling coach and former Oklahoma standout Jared Frayer have gotten into the act. Their respective websites boast extensive articles, photos, schedules, and even merchandise—most notably “Jesse Jantzen” t-shirts and others emblazoned with “Air Frayer.”

But far greater than the sum of those sites, and other ones like them, are two in particular.

Consider, first, ChrisRix.com. Florida States’ oft-maligned quarterback Chris Rix wins the prize for the greatest collegiate personal website I’ve ever seen. The fancy front page alone might be enough to win such an honor, as the tomahawk chop echoes over a greeting punctuated by Rix’s digital signature, which includes football stitches down the “C” in “Chris” and an “i” dotted with the crucifix. The first section of the website is devoted to Rix’s religious faith, and is titled, stunningly unsurprisingly at this point, “Spiritual Playbook.”

But no, the website is not yet done. Explore the photo gallery of Rix’s “friends” and you’ll find what is no less than Earth’s Hall of Fame. No, I’m not talking about the photos of Chris Rix with Coach Bobby Bowden. Instead, Rix is inexplicably featured with the following luminaries: Mark Cuban, Michael Bolton (with a drink conspicuously Photoshopped out of Mr. Bolton’s hand), Burt Reynolds, David Robinson, Carrot Top and Deion Sanders. Wow.

On the other end of stylistic spectrum, however, is the personal website that Notre Dame’s onetime starting quarterback Carlyle Holiday made during his sophomore year of college (www.nd.edu/~choliday/). Displaying little to no command over the web language of HTML, or arguably the human language of English, Holiday features personal photos such as that of his off-campus dorm. It’s better to simply let Holiday describe it in his own words: “This is a picture of my castle. It’s the only dorm off campus, who cares. the ‘Go Irish’ was painted on before the 2000 Nebraska game and was broadcast all over the country. Living here is cool but you have to either beg or pay a girl to come out and see you unless your a stud.”

He follows that up with nothing more than a photo of Triumph, the Insult Comic dog, and the following caption: “This is Triumph from the Conan O’Brien Show. He’s pretty funny, who cares.”

I hear you, Carlyle.

So what I’m getting at, essentially, is this: Ryan Fitzpatrick, never make a personal website.

—Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu.