When we clicked the link to watch a recording of Ted Leonsis' LIVE* Owner's Corner with Capitals fans last Thursday, nothing happened. A still frame filled our screen, stayed static. Then froze. We figured viewer demand was high. Turns out the opposite was true as, according to the man himself, "the bad news is that most people didn’t watch it."
And who could blame them? When we finally got the link to the LIVE* recording to work late Friday, we found ourselves drowning in a sea of drone. SEVENTY MINUTES of Caps employee Mike Vogel pitching supposedly re-phrased fan question softballs and Ted talking (at times seemingly endlessly) and spinning little more than sugar, air, and color. You know: Cotton Candy.
At the end of the Mind-Numbing 70 (or MN-70 as we like to call it), we looked at our notes and found... nothing. There were occasional eye brow-raising statements such as when Ted talked about how the Caps spend to the maximum on players and in-game entertainment and then said that Capitals fans "don't care." (This just meant that Caps fans were unconcerned about fiscal detail and wanted, instead, to win.) One could easily take a here-and-there line such as that from the MN-70 stew of words and find themselves stuck in out-of-context land. But, we didn't ever come close to biting, unlike this, which led to this, then this and this, before spinning its way back here -- 1,823 Words From Ted in follow up to 70 Minutes of Ted.
In all of this Ted Talk, there was no substance, no news. 98% of ticket holders renewed. 90% of Ted's email after THIS YEAR'S Capitals playoff collapse was positive and constructive. 10% was mean and wanted a pound of flesh. Ted wasn't going to act fast, wasn't going to do anything drastic. Bruce's employment status was up to George. On and on it went... and all of it we knew before the LIVE* event. Had there been actual news, it would have become the focus of follow-up blogger posts and news reports.
Instead, Ted said nothing -- FOR SEVENTY MINUTES -- but a blogger took some shiny MN-70 bait, a Caps employee defended his boss on a supposed independent third-party blog, then another blogger followed up the fresh-spinning non-story story, and... finally, it all spun back to Ted for a Mind-Numbing 1,823 additional words, which Ted himself said was "like 1,000 tweets." Spin, spin, spin. Cotton Candy for the masses!!
Some might say "no harm, no foul"... we say all this tumbling and back-and-forth is the word-play equivalent of wrestling a fan down the concourse. When we looked closely at Ted's 1,823 words, we we alarmed by the last sentence of this:
"Seventy minutes is a lot of time. One of the reasons to memorialize something like this is to have a record of what was asked and what was said. We also can have a record of what was watched; who watched on an anonymous basis; and for how long. It allows people to time shift and watch when they want and it also allows us to say 'I didn’t say that - go to this minute and second in the transcript.'"
And that, after 70 minutes of video and 1,823 words of blog, is the State of this Team, Caps fans... In the end, being successful pales in comparison to being right - down the "minute and second."
Nobody knows nothing. Be happy, you can do it! Spin, spin, spin.
Tumble. Bumble. Stumble.
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