Stu Cowan: Super 70s Sports a cheeky breath of fresh air on Twitter (2024)

If you grew up during the 1970s, like me, and you’re not already following Super 70s Sports on Twitter, you really should.

Twitter can be a cesspool, but Super 70s Sports is outstanding. It makes me laugh and puts a smile on my face every day, no matter how bad some of the other stuff on Twitter might be.

The man behind the account is Ricky Cobb, a 50-year-old college sociology teacher who lives in Chicago. He started the Twitter account at the end of 2013 and it has grown to have almost 500,000 followers. It’s mainly about sports, but it also focuses on pop culture from that decade.

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Did I mention it’s hilarious?

“Believe me, there’s more things that I’m not good at than I’m good at, but for whatever reason I was blessed with a bit of a wit and a sense of humour,” Cobb said during a phone interview Wednesday. “It’s nice that I’ve kind of fallen into this little niche that allows me to do what I love and hopefully entertain people and make people’s days a little bit brighter.

“What I discovered is that I tapped into something,” he added. “I hit a sweet spot for our generation. There’s something communal about it that is beautiful.”

Cobb grew up in Kentucky as a sports fanatic, reading everything he could get his hands on, including newspapers, magazines, the Baseball Encyclopedia and books such as Ball Four by Jim Bouton and Paper Lion by George Plimpton. There was no home team in pro sports for him to cheer for in Kentucky, which Cobb says was a good thing because he fell in love with several teams.

One of them was the Expos after attending a game against the Reds at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati in 1983. Cobb said O Canada was “the most exotic thing I had ever experienced in my sheltered life,” he thought the pinwheel Expos caps were really cool and he loved watching Tim Raines and Andre Dawson play. He calls the Washington Nationals the “Fake Expos.”

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In 2004, Cobb attended an Expos game at Olympic Stadium, which was on his bucket list, and said: “I could feel the aura of Dan Schatzeder.”

Like I said, this guy is really funny.

By the end of 2015, Cobb had made Sports Illustrated’s Twitter 100 list of the top tweeters in sports. Hishome-run tweet was posted on Aug. 19, 2017, including a photo of legendary broadcaster Howard Cosell holding a microphone and standing between O.J. Simpson and Bruce Jenner from Battle of the Network Stars in 1977. The accompanying caption — a pseudo-quote from Cosell — reads: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve looked into the future and you will not believe this s–t.”

That tweet had more than 105,000 likes.

“That’s still the one I’m going to have to try to top eventually, but it’s hard to do,” Cobb said. “You don’t write Hey Jude every day, so that’s my Hey Jude.”

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Some of my personal favourite tweets from Cobb are about the games we had as kids during the 1970s, like electronic football.

“Dude, the ratio of looks like fun to actual fun has never been wider with anything — I’m not even going to limit it to toys — than electronic football,” Cobb said. “When you saw it in the Sears Wish Book it looked like it was going to be the greatest day of your life when you got it. I don’t know if anyone has ever completed a pass in electric football. The thing is, it still looks like fun.”

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Cobb also has funny tweets about the death-wish slides and other equipment at playgrounds during the 1970s and how we somehow managed to survive them.

“As a child there was a certain innocence to growing up in the ’70s,” Cobb said. “There was a lack of self-consciousness that the ’70s had compared to today. I think it was a blessing that we didn’t grow up with social media. I wouldn’t want to give it up now, obviously, but I’m glad we didn’t have it when I was a kid. I think being able to go out in pre-internet days and just play all day and do things that today would be considered really dangerous by a lot of parents and frowned on with the playground equipment we had back then. If we got hurt, mom just fixed us up and sent us back out. I think there was a greater freedom as a kid back then. It was a great era to grow up in.”

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I agree.

“The word I always use is that I stumbled into this,” Cobb said about Super 70s Sports. “I was just a guy looking for something to do just to pass a little time and maybe make a few of my friends laugh. And then I caught lightning in a bottle and here I am bearing down on a half-a-million followers. I pinch myself every day. It’s just such an unexpected thing.”

scowan@postmedia.com

twitter.com/StuCowan1

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