John Clay's Sidelines

In our fourth installment of spotlighting UK fans on twitter, we profile Chris Dawahare.

He’s @CMD_77 on twitter.

Tweets as of this moring: 2,753. Followers: 186.

Recent tweet: “World Wide Wes just walked right in front of me. I never believed he was a real person until now. ”

When I asked for a bio, Chris supplied the following:

I was born in Pikeville, KY but I can consider Lexington home. I’ve lived here since 1989 and attended Lexington Catholic High and UK for college. I currently work for Equibase Company as their Manager of e-Business Operations & Development. That’s a long winded way of saying I manage Equibase.com, mobile development, retail sales, etc.

I’ve been a UK fan for as long as I can remember. When I was three years old, I would walk downstairs in the morning and watch Sportscenter hoping to catch UK highlights. When I was seven or eight years old, my family drove up from Pikeville to watch UK play Auburn at Rupp. They had Charles Barkley on their team and I desperately wanted to go, but my dad took my brother instead because he was older. What did I get out of the trip – new bunk beds. I still remind my parents about that trip and how mad I was; I deserved to go to the game because I was the bigger UK fan. I still don’t think it was fair.

When we moved to Lexington in 1989, my dad got 2 season tickets for UK basketball games. I’ve been going to just about every home game ever since, but I will be the first to admit I now take it for granted a little bit. I would never miss a game during the Pitino era, but over the course of the Tubby era I became more and more okay with missing a game or two. My greatest sports moment came in 1996 when I attended the Final Four in New Jersey. First of all, just witnessing UK winning the national title in person was something I’ll never forget, but after the game there was a celebration at the team hotel we were able to attend. It was definitely the greatest sports night of my life.

I’m a huge football fan as well, and that really picked up when Hal Mumme arrived. His tenure corresponded with my college years, and it was just a great time to be at UK. During college, and now post-college, my closest friends will take an annual road trip for one of UK’s away games. We’ve been everywhere in the SEC except for Starkville and Gainseville. It’s a tradition that has forged life long friendships.

I’ve been on Internet message boards since 1990 (I was 13 years old at the time). I was a frequent poster on the Prodigy message boards, and I quickly formed a group of friends that chatted about UK sports on a daily basis. No one had any clue I was just 13 and I conveniently left that piece out of my bio. Over the years I migrated around from service to service, and then eventually to the various message boards (Alliance Sports –> Wildcat Lair –> Cats Pause & Wildcat Faithful). There are a handful of posters I have been communicating with for more than 20 years, and I’ve never met a single one of them. I don’t even know their real names, but I know their online handles.

I’ve been on Twitter for two years or so; I can’t recall the exact timeframe. Within the first two weeks of using TweetDeck, my methods for consuming information changed. I used to go from message board to message board, check my RSS feeds to see what stories were out there, etc. I quickly realized that all news was starting to break on Twitter. For the most part, there is never going to be a piece of information available on a message board, or an article that I’m interested in, that I won’t first hear about via Twitter. I now spend less than 10 minutes per week on message boards and RSS feeds are useless. I don’t tweet all that much, mainly because I have less than 200 followers and most of them probably don’t really care about what I have to say.

When I’m away from my computer, I probably check Twitter on my phone every five minutes. My wife hates it when I say, “Give me a few minutes, I need to get caught up on Twitter”, but it’s what I have to do when I’m away from my phone for a few hours. Okay, let’s be honest, when I’m away from my phone for anything more than thirty minutes. I’ll be the first to admit it – I am addicted.

Previously: @bradcundiff – @WyldcatGirl – @LeeWeatherly