Gilbert Arenas gained a lot of his popularity by doing outrageous things off the court and interacting with fans online. His legendary tales of playing online poker at halftime (which was actually just a handheld video game) and showering in his uniform during halftime endeared him to the public. So did his blog. While he was a pioneer in these areas no less than three years ago, it seems as if in a short amount of time several other athletes have turned to the online community to interact with fans. Many of them have done so by using Twitter. Shaq has famously become one of the big twitterers in the NBA, and even Washington Huskies player Jon Brockman used it to get back at Washington State fans. But as far as I’ve seen it, nobody’s twittered during a game, until now. Enter Bucks forward Charlie Villanueva who posted the following message at 10:17am yesterday:
In da locker room, snuck to post my twitt. We’re playing the Celtics, tie ball game at da half. Coach wants more toughness. I gotta step up.
10:17 AM Mar 15th from TwitterBerry
Well, the Bucks and Celtics did play a morning game, and Milwaukee did win it 86-77. Villanueva had 19 and 7, so I’m not really sure Scott Skiles would have too many bad things to say about his player giving online updates at halftime. Check that, he probably will say something about it. At least it didn’t produce a bad result this time. And in case you’re doubting whether or not it was really him who made the twitter update, CV31 answered the question. By the way, for a guy who runs a sports website, I’m kind of slow on joining internet waves. I have created a twitter feed twitter.com/lbsports (larrybrownsports was too long) but I haven’t done anything with it yet. Maybe one day I will considering how popular it’s becoming.
