Sports interviews have spun out of control

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This past week, the NBA began the first stage of prep for its coming season – Media Week.

Under usual circumstances, Media Week would be Media Day. Every player is pushed up onto a podium (or, in 2020, in front of a Zoom camera) to record his thoughts about the next year. Generally speaking, the result is dreary nonsense you could write from memory – “feeling good”; “in great shape”; “everyone can’t wait.”

Every team in every league does some version of this, and they all do it poorly.

But, lo, what’s that light off in the distance …

Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving decided to skip his Media Week appearance. Instead, he issued a proclamation. It’s the sort of thing you’d get if an HR consultant wrote his personal-mission statement immediately after binge-reading Deepak Chopra.

“My goal this season is to let my work on and off the court speak for itself,” Irving wrote, in part. “Life hit differently this year and it requires us, it requires me, to move differently. So, this is the beginning of that change.”

Irving is an odd duck, so most people shrugged this off as another of his temporary quirks. But what if he’s serious? What if he’s never going to speak to the media again? God, how great would that be?

The whole concept of the sports interview has spun out of control. During a seven- or eight-month season, star athletes submit to multiple Q and A’s at least every other day, via multiple mediums. The pros in every sport are now more closely observed than zoo animals.

In basketball and hockey, the players are questioned morning and night. They do interviews about how they’re feeling going into the game, interviews during the game about how the game is going and interviews after the game about how the game went.

Imagine if someone pulled you aside as you walked in the front door of the office: “Hey Suzie, can I just grab you for two seconds. Right, so how are you feeling about that meeting at 11? Feeling good? Because the last time those guys came here for a meeting, it didn’t go so hot.”

The whole time, this person has got a microphone up in your face. Other people are coming over with notebooks. A few are filming on their phones.

That is the essence of the modern sports interview. It is not conducive to eliciting quality information. Actually, it is antithetical to that. The typical sports interview isn’t conversation. It’s interrogation. And, as the human-rights types keep reminding us, interrogations don’t work.

Athletes hate this duty. Most have learned to turn on a sort of mental autopilot. You can actually see this happening in scrums. Their gaze tilts slightly upward. Their arms slacken. Their eyes glaze over. And they begin speaking as though reading from a hostage script.

First, repeat the question back to the questioner. Then, most often, agree with its premise. The clever ones will include the questioner’s name – “Yeah, Ron, we probably should’ve had that one on Thursday.”

Then string a few clichés together into something that sounds like a complete thought. Then power down for a moment and prepare for further torture.

The only interesting people to talk to in any locker room are the least talented players. Not because they’re smarter or have more insight into the game, but because no one ever talks to them. They haven’t been talked out yet. They still have something to say.

When was the last time an athlete said something in a group interview you thought genuinely insightful, or witty, or bucked mainstream thought? It happens, but so seldom these days that it becomes a thing, a la, “Board man gets paid.”

Kawhi Leonard didn’t say that in an interview. He said it to a nobody on his college team – someone no one ever bothered interviewing – who in turn only thought to tell it to an enterprising reporter years later.

It usually works the other way around. It’s the dumb thing that gets remembered. The player’s mask slips for a moment and he makes the mistake of telling everyone how he actually feels. That mistake becomes a hammer and he becomes a man-sized nail. In the worst-case scenario, he gets whacked with it for years.

There is an obvious solution to this problem, one that spares Kyrie Irving, the media who feel the frustrating need to be there to record his every banal utterance, and the paying public who are then subjected to them: do fewer interviews. Far fewer.

Soccer is the biggest sports-media business in the world. Yet the world’s biggest soccer stars are rarely interviewed. Lionel Messi doesn’t scrum. At most, he’ll attend a news conference once every couple of weeks. After an enormous game, he might stop in a hallway to say a few words, or he might not. If he wants to get something off his chest, he goes to Instagram. That’s it.

Reporters do not enter the locker rooms of the English Premier League, the most watched league in the world.

I will never forget the look on the face of Jermain Defoe – a big British star emigrated to the backwaters of Toronto – the first time the local press mob tumbled through the door to talk to him after a game. It was something more than shock. It was horror.

When the shooters began setting up cameras on tripods three feet from him as he sat there in his underwear, Defoe got angry: “You trying to get a shot of me willy or what?”

That strikes me as a pretty sensible response to the situation.

But no North American athlete would think it strange. At most, a major star would tell everyone to wait a minute, then make them suffer through a half-hour moisturizing routine. Then he’d shower them with three minutes of blandishments so unremarkable, they could be repurposed as a sleep-aid.

If the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, et al can bumble along without needing to push every player out for twice-daily soundbites, the NHL, NBA, MLB, et al could do likewise. But they won’t. Not because doing so isn’t a good idea – and it is, operating on the “less is more” premise – but because that’s what people in the industry have got used to.

Maybe what it takes is a player revolt. They’d be doing all of us a favour. Maybe Kyrie is just being Kyrie here. Or maybe he’s the first guy up on the interview barricades. If so, he’s got my (silent, unrecorded and undocumented) support.