Secrecy in sports can turn a story officials and athletes don’t want told into one everyone is dying to hear

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Shortly before she was to join her team in its defence of the Scotties Tournament of Hearts title this weekend, lead Briane Harris was ruled ineligible to compete.

Why? This is Canada. None of your business why.

Harris and her team, led by skip Kerri Einarson, are a big deal in Canadian curling. They’ve won the Scotties four times in a row. This could be their record-setting fifth.

Pulling Harris in this manner is a bit like suspending a starting goalie an hour before puck drop at the Stanley Cup semi-finals. It’s not the Olympics, but it’s close. People are going to be interested.

Curling Canada released a statement for those expecting some sort of statement.

“Curling Canada has been made aware that Briane Harris of Team Canada is ineligible to compete at the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. No further information is available at this time,” it said. “There will be no further comment on this situation from Curling Canada or members of Team Canada.”

This boilerplate leaves us with the impression that Curling Canada is not responsible for suspending a Canadian curler at a Canadian tournament. So who did it? The Russians?

Because they don’t take orders from Curling Canada, reporters in Calgary headed over to seek comment from members of the team.

Einarson attempted a tone somewhere between incredulity at being asked and ‘It’s time to move on from this unfortunate incident.’

First question – what’s going on?

“Sorry, I’m not at liberty to talk about that at this moment,” Einarson said brightly.

Someone asked if Harris had tested positive for a banned substance.

“Sorry, I’m not going to discuss anything further than that.”

Why not?

That one caught Einarson off guard – “Because I don’t have to?”

True. You don’t. No one does. But let’s drop the ‘at-liberty-to-discuss’ nonsense. These aren’t courthouse steps. You aren’t the chief of police. Like all the rest of us, you’re at liberty to discuss whatever you’d like.

Disinformation gets the headlines, but we spend too little time discussing the modern vacuum of actual information. This country doesn’t do much at a world-beating level, but bureaucratic opacity is one of our superpowers. I was once told I couldn’t get a copy of my own X-rays because of privacy concerns.

Somehow, we’ve accepted that not knowing is for the best. ‘Better than being lied to,’ seems to be the Canadian consensus. Sports helped condition us to that bizarro reality.

Not so long ago, sports was fairly breezy about giving out information. The coach would tell you why so-and-so was out that day or who did something dumb and got suspended. There was an understanding that what we’re talking about here is sports. There is almost nothing in it so important that it needs to be kept secret.

At its core, the sports business is about selling stories. The team tells a story and people decide if it’s interesting enough to pay for. It would seem to me that in this scenario, all news is good news. Even the bad news is good news because it’s interesting.

But nobody wants to supply anything but state-sanctioned news any more. Every coach, GM and many of the players talk as if they are addressing a parliamentary subcommittee. How many answers start with, ‘I’d love to talk about that but …’ or ‘it’s not appropriate for me to speak to that issue …’?

Contrary to common belief, the sports media loves a ‘no comment.’ Loooooves it. You held all the power in this story-telling push-pull, but now you’re saying you’d prefer that we tell the story for you. Now the real fun can begin.

Like everybody else who works in entertainment, people in sports confuse sounding serious with being so. Maybe it’s got something to do with money. Back when the athletes made upper-middle-class salaries, they talked like regular people. Now that they get CEO salaries, even the dimmest among them talks as if he’s running NASA.

This infection has spread throughout all of our games, professional and amateur. Even the ones played by kids. Even the fun ones like curling. This is a particularly acute problem in Canada.

You go to an Olympics and the Swedish team members are shooting from all eight hips. Meanwhile, Team Canada over here sounds as if they’re trying to explain brain surgery to a Labrador retriever.

Every action has a reaction and for sports that is conspiracizing. Disinformation thrives in information-free environments. So if you want to know what’s going on with Harris, head over to the internet. It’s got a few theories.

Every time you tell your customers they don’t need to know what’s going on in this high-profile, high-interest industry, people will fill that void.

A couple of months ago, we saw how this can go badly wrong. The Chicago Blackhawks benched veteran star Corey Perry midseason and refused to explain why. An online rumour began to spread – one with a libellous component.

Chicago denied the rumour (without saying what the rumour was) and cut Perry. The rumour trebled in strength. Now everyone’s heard it. A significant portion of them perceive every subsequent denial as further proof that it’s true. It’s possible that rumour will damage Chicago for years to come, and yet no one in any official capacity will ever have discussed it in public.

The more scarce you make information, the more vulnerable people are to the wildest explanations. Add in the relatively new moral-oversight component to a lot of sports journalism and people have been primed to go to the worst possible outcome straight out of the gate.

Wouldn’t it be easier to give some sense of what is going on up front? You don’t have to provide every detail, but mere hinting encourages fabulists. Outright stonewalling is Reddit rocket fuel. Cover-ups – even the stupidest ones – topple regimes.

In the end, Harris’s absence will most likely be down to something boringly average. Something so par for the course that had they just said it, it would not have caused more than a ripple across the day’s news file.

But once again, sports had to pretend that the internal workings of something of no real consequence to most people are matters of national importance. That’s how they turned a story they didn’t want told into one everyone is dying to hear.