When Omar Raja watches sports, he sees moments you and I cannot. It's an impressive and hard-earned talent, but occasionally a fickle one, too. So just to be safe, the 24-year-old positions himself in front of two separate flatscreens in his tidy Hell's Kitchen apartment and cranks the volume of NBA games to a near-abusive roar. His 65-inch television's display is arranged in a grid, so that four contests can play simultaneously. A smaller screen, mounted on a nearby wall above a rack of scuffless Lebron 15s, is tuned to yet another broadcast. His laptop is reserved for Miami Heat games, which he is loathe to miss; and his iPhone, retrofitted with a battery add-on that doubles its lifespan, rarely leaves his hands.
As the founder and primary custodian of House of Highlights—an immensely popular Instagram account featuring viral moments from both professional and everyday athletes—Omar is responsible for identifying the day's most important dunks, threes, picks, jukes, blocks, snubs, sneers, cheers, fights, slights, and other miscellaneous oddities. Like sports itself, it is a blink-and-you-miss-it business. At the height of the NBA season, he works late into the night, identifying moments that strike him as impressive or charming or peculiar, then cutting them into clips and broadcasting them to the more than 10.7 million people who follow his page. Speed matters. If something noteworthy occurs right before a commercial break, he challenges himself to get it out before gameplay resumes two minutes later. The days are spent assessing the efficacy of the previous night's work and combing through hundreds of videos submitted by fans—many of whom are professional athletes themselves.
He posts about 12 clips per day, tends to stay up until about 3 a.m., and has not taken a vacation in four-and-a-half years.
Through his account, Omar has achieved the sort of translucent pseudo-fame only today's social media environment is capable of bestowing. He has spent years behind the curtain, speaking to his fans through wry captions and friendly commentary. It has been a comfortable, lukewarm notoriety—perfect for a quiet son of Pakistani immigrants who still has yet to grasp how much he's bent the sports media industry.
But the world has grown impatient with the mystery. Fans of the page flag him down at Knicks games and on the streets of New York. Professional athletes invite him to parties and give him pep talks about work and success. This fall, he'll step in front of the camera to host a House of Highlights talk show, slated to be broadcast on Twitter.
It all points to a question that many of the account's diehard followers have pondered for years, ever since a friend name checked Omar deep in the comments of one video. The inquiry has rippled outward, towards everyone concerned with sports, and how we consume them, and how quickly the relationship between those two things can shift, and what the sports entertainment industry will look like when they do.
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