By Rich Tandler
This morning, Mike Freeman of CBSSports.com tells us about Packers tight end Jermichael Finley being the target of some nasty Twitter comments by some Packers “fans” after dropping a couple of passes in Green Bay’s playoff loss to the Giants on Sunday.
Now, you figure that Finely is a grown man who gets paid a lot of money to play a game and that he should be able to handle some nasty tweets. But these fans—Freeman correctly labels them “malicious idiots”—didn’t stop with hounding the player. They went to the timeline of Finley’s wife Courtney and started attacking her. She eventually tweeted "If ure bored tonight & want to see how disgusting people treat other people.. Feel free to go thru my mentions 2 see how heartless ppl r."
I was talking to a Redskins player during the regaular season. He thought it would be fun to try Twitter but he soon stopped looking at his timeline, especially the @ messaged directed at him. There were just too many personal attacks and even death wishes and it soured him on the whole thing.
Twitter can be a great medium for fans to converse with athletes, something the vast majority of them couldn’t do without it. It would be a shame if a few malicious idiots here and there forced most of them off of Twitter.
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