The holiday weekend didn't go without a mention or two of the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry.
Notably a post on Twitter, the popular social networking site, by Michigan football recruit Logan Tuley-Tillman, in which he included a piece of recruiting mail from Ohio State going up in flames.
https://twitter.com/LoganTillman/status/206478570661482496
Diehard Michigan fans applauded the loyalty of an offensive tackle who verbally committed to the Wolverines earlier this year and, if/when he signs a National Letter of Intent, wouldn't be arriving in Ann Arbor until 2013. National publications further perpetuated the intensity of the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry by reporting on Tuley-Tillman's post and photo.
But some people took Tuley-Tillman's gesture a little too seriously. To the point of disturbing.
Tuesday morning, in addition to many unprintable responses to his tweet, Yahoo! Sports reported that Tuley-Tillman had received death threats from fans in response to Saturday's posted photo.
"And they've been sending my mom messages on Facebook," Tuley-Tillman told Yahoo! Sports. "I just told her you can't listen to it because it's one of the biggest rivalries in sports."
For a young athlete suddenly receiving national attention for an off-the-field incident, that's perspective. Nobody deserves death threats over something that is trivial in the grand scheme of things.
But in the same vein, what led up to this a lesson of sorts: posting something incendiary (literally and figuratively) is going to get plenty of responses - and not necessarily the responses one would expect.
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I was very saddened to learn of the death of Jim Kwiatkowski, a longtime Blade copy editor. I've only been here since March 26 but Jim was one of the first news-side staffers I met at the Blade - because he was a Michigan fan. We talked about the Wolverines from time to time and at the end of every conversation he would tell me, "Just wait until the week leading up to Michigan-Ohio State, it gets crazy around here."
I will think of Jim during that crazy week in November. He will be missed here in the newsroom.
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