By: Jesse Spector
Posted In: Sports
Photo credit: YouTube.com
Chase Daniel had an up-and-down day in Lincoln, Neb.
On the plus side, the Missouri quarterback threw for 244 yards and two touchdowns on Nov. 4, and broke his school’s single-season record for passing yards. But he also threw a pair of interceptions, and his Tigers suffered a 34-20 loss to Nebraska. The real downer, though, came after the game. During the ABC telecast, cameras caught Daniel on the bench for a moment more embarrassing than any interception. Shot from behind, the sophomore signal caller could be seen reaching for his nose, peering at his finger, then bringing his hand to his mouth. Those eight seconds were all it took for Daniel to become the unfortunate star in a video called “Chase Daniel likes boogers,” complete with sound effects. The clip _ and two copycats _ were viewed a combined 80,000 times in their first five days on YouTube, an Internet video site that is changing the landscape of sports highlights by allowing users to upload clips of everything from high school volleyball to obscene on-ice trash talk from the 1991 Stanley Cup Finals. If you don’t believe it, just ask Lamar Thomas, the broadcaster whose inflammatory comments during the Miami-Florida International brawl last month may have blown over had they not popped up on YouTube for the world to see and hear. Instead, there was an uproar that didn’t end until Thomas was fired. The site is also making waves outside of sports. A YouTube video showing a police officer hitting a suspect in the face three months ago in Los Angeles has led to an FBI investigation into the officer’s use of force. YouTube, which was purchased for $1.65 billion last month by Google, has become the place to go on the Internet to see crazy things from the world of sports. The clips are not necessarily easy to find _ you have to know what you’re looking for _ but once something becomes a hit, it spreads to other Web sites, thanks to an interface that allows bloggers to post YouTube videos on their own sites with ease. “One of the funnier things was when Denis Leary showed up in the booth at a Red Sox game and he did a great thing on Kevin Youkilis and Mel Gibson,” says Deadspin.com editor Will Leitch, who posted the YouTube video of it on his site. “If you weren’t a Red Sox fan, if not for YouTube, that would have been lost.” It’s not all laughs and giggles, though: Because the Leary routine took place on a Red Sox broadcast, it is copyrighted material owned by Major League Baseball, which has its own video presence on the Web and aggressively searches YouTube for clips that violate that copyright, and then has the offending clips removed. “We have a relationship with Google, YouTube, Yahoo, where we say that’s our copyright, and they quickly take it down,” says MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman. “We don’t have a philosophical issue about who owns the material, and that’s where these sites are going: user-generated content, not user-stolen content.” That doesn’t mean that YouTube will soon be a site only for homemade highlights. YouTube already has a deal with CBS that has brought classic March Madness highlights to the site, and YouTube VP of content Kevin Donahue says that the company is working on deals with professional leagues to put highlights on the site. “Our goal is to create an environment where people come to YouTube to get the highlights and content (the rightsholders are) providing,” Donahue says. “It’s going to grow with the community looking for that content.” As an example of how popular legitimate content with a league or network brand name behind it can be, Donahue can point to the early success of the CBS deal. There’s probably not a sports fan alive who hasn’t seen Christian Laettner’s game-winning shot against Kentucky in 1992, but in less than a month since CBS posted the clip on YouTube, it has received more than 138,000 views. A video that has received even more views comes from Japanese baseball, where former major leaguer Tony Batista once got hit by a pitch, then took two steps toward the mound as if to charge before the terrified pitcher took off for the outfield. Batista wound up grinning on first base as the pitcher’s teammates and the pitcher himself cracked up laughing. Japanese baseball video is all over YouTube, including plenty of clips of star pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, allowing fans a chance to see him pitch before he comes to the United States. Fans’ ability to see highlights of Matsuzaka beyond the couple of pitches that might make it to television should help create a buzz around him, much the same way that YouTube videos posted last year of a young Reggie Bush helped build his legend. “His highlights from Pop Warner are pretty unbelievable,” says Mike Ornstein, Bush’s marketing agent. “They tell me in his first game in Pop Warner he had eight touchdowns, and people look at that, maybe it translates to popularity now.” Ornstein hasn’t had any marketing opportunities for Bush directly as a result of his YouTube clips, but companies do recognize the value of the site. “I know that Nike, we’ve spoken in the past, and they’ve told us that they’ve uploaded videos, maybe sometimes under aliases, but I do know that they’ve uploaded videos,” says YouTube’s Donahue. “They’ve been using YouTube to do grassroots marketing for a long time.” Nike’s videos include this summer’s wildly popular “Joga Bonito” campaign from the World Cup. Soccer videos, like Japanese baseball ones, are some of the most popular on YouTube. But what about American sports? A search for “Derek Jeter” will yield some commercials, and some home videos shot from the Yankee Stadium stands. Search for a hero of the past, and there’s virtually nothing _ the only clips of Keith Hernandez on YouTube are a couple of SNY postgame analysis pieces and an appearance with Mookie Wilson singing “Put Down The Duckie” on a 1988 episode of “Sesame Street.” While YouTube is a valuable resource, copyright issues and a hit-or-miss menu of clips mean that fans need other sources to find the video they’re looking for. That’s where the leagues come in with their own Internet ventures. To see clips of Hernandez, for instance, there’s the MLB.tv package, which allows subscribers to watch live out-of-town games all season and provides access to a vast video library. Fans can watch full games from a selection that includes Games 1 and 6 of the 1986 NLCS and Game 6 of the World Series, as well as Tom Seaver’s no-hitter from 1978, in which Hernandez, then with the Cardinals, draws a walk and steals a base. The historical clips are available for paid subscribers only. For a current player such as Jeter, there’s much more available _ for free. MLB.tv has a feature called, simply enough, “Searchable Video”, in which fans can select any player and get specialized clips – as narrowed-down as Jeter’s singles in the first inning of night games at Yankee Stadium in September (there were three), or, for Yankee haters, Alex Rodriguez’s strikeouts in October at Comerica Park. That sort of video might even be useful to players, who could get a look, for instance, at what pitches the Twins’ Johan Santana used to strike out lefthanded hitters this season. But Bowman, the head of MLB’s video program, says it doesn’t receive a lot of traffic right now – though that may change when the Searchable Video section is relaunched with a new interface in February. “I think most people are satisfied with going to the highlights of the day,” Bowman says. “As people get more used to searching video, it’ll be easier to search and for people to see.” However, having video available of full games remains the main draw for MLB.tv. Fans who pay $80 for the season or $15 per month can watch games live, or catch them in their entirety once they’re over, allowing viewers to replay bad calls or catch other details they may have missed. “Access to every game the last couple of years, that is tremendously helpful,” says Paul Lukas, who writes about uniforms for ESPN.com and his own site, uniwatchblog.com, often relying on readers to send along tips. “If someone sees something in a Devil Rays-Royals game, I can see it and freeze it, and bingo, there’s a visual reference, and I can do what every editor tells a writer to do, and show them, not tell them.” Lukas finds MLB.tv more useful than YouTube and what the other professional leagues offer, although they are catching up. The NHL allows fans to see any player’s goals from the past two seasons for free, as well as highlights of every game. The NBA also operates on a free model, and has searchable video of its own. “You can do a Dwyane Wade search and find a lot of videos,” says NBA spokesman Matt Bourne. “But you’re not going to track down every single Dwyane Wade move . . . We’re (working) to digitize our archives to make it possible in the future to say `every Dwyane Wade dunk for the season,’ and get it, and we’re in the process of doing that. I don’t think we’re prepared to put a timetable on it. We’ve got about 60 years of footage.” When the NBA finishes that project, fans will be able to get whatever highlights they desire of 7-7 Manute Bol in all his awkward glory. What they won’t get, though, is the second entry that comes up on a YouTube search for Bol, a clip entitled “Spud Webb dunks over Manute Bol” that, while it’s no quarterback picking his nose, truly needs to be seen to be believe ___ (c) 2006, New York Daily News. 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