Miami Heat President Pat Riley isn't ready to take a page out of Hurricanes Coach Randy Shannon's play book and ban his players from using Twitter, but something about the micro-blogging service just doesn't sit well with him. Apparently he thinks Twitter could play a part in opposing teams' fans and other dubious folks planning attacks on his players, especially when the team heads back to Cleveland.
Riley was a guest on Dan LeBatard's show on 790 The Ticket this morning. LeBatard asked Riley about LeBron's safety when he returned to Cleveland, that's when Ol' Pat showed his fear of a cyber-world in which 'consequences will never be the same.'
"There's been discussion about amping up the security, but it's almost anywhere now. It isn't just Cleveland. Throughout the league and in all sports, with what's going out there in the cyber-world you just don't know who is connecting with you. That's why I have a hard time understanding why players would want to twitter people they don't even know and let people they don't even know know where they're going to be at what time and all this stuff."We checked LeBron's Tweets from the past couple of weeks, and besides talking about being in a city where the team is playing or heading to other Heat events he's not exactly offering up his exact whereabouts. Now, if he started using FourSquare, then we might worry.
If the Heat do have any problems with cyber heckling, Riley sounds like the kind of guy who would angrily yell that he's "backtraced" them and called the cyber police. Unlike this short lived human meme, we might actually stop laughing at Riley and be honestly scared. He can be a mean mother fucker.
